The Feast of the Holy Trinity
One of the things that fascinates me about the history of science and physics is the way we keep pulling back layers of our universe. There was a time when a rock was just a rock. What’s that rock made of? It’s made of rock. You could smash up the rock, and you’d just have smaller rocks. Then we figured out that rocks are made up of smaller minerals and elements. Modern chemistry was born when we discovered that everything’s made up of a number of elements. It was like peeling back a layer of existence: where we once saw rocks and wood and water and air, now we detected nitrogen and oxygen and carbon and hydrogen. It seemed we’d found the constituent bits of the universe, out of which everything is made.