Chapter 1
The Cup of Tea
It is late, and you are holding something warm.
Steam is lifting off the surface of the tea in thin ribbons, curling and vanishing into the cool air of the kitchen. Outside the window the sky has gone properly dark, the kind of dark that lets a few stars through even in a town. You are not thinking about anything in particular. You are just standing there, a little tired, holding the mug in both hands because it is pleasant to be warm.
I want to tell you what you are actually holding.
The water in your cup is made of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is almost as old as time, it was made in the first few minutes after the universe began, nearly fourteen billion years ago, when there were no stars yet, no galaxies, no planets, nothing but a thinning fire cooling into the dark. That hydrogen has been hydrogen ever since. It waited through the entire history of everything to end up in your kettle tonight.
The oxygen is younger, but only by a little, and its story is stranger. Every atom of oxygen in your tea was manufactured inside a star, cooked in the core of something huge and luminous, then flung out across the galaxy when that star died. It drifted for a long time as part of a cold, dark cloud. Then it was gathered up into a new sun, our Sun, and the leftovers became the Earth, and some of it became an ocean, and a cloud, and a raindrop, and a reservoir, and your tap, and now it is warming your hands.
