Ghosts of Vesuvius A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall, and Other Strange Connections Chapter One In the Beginning And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that were in the camp trembled. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount. And Mount Si'nai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD had descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. -- EXODUS 19:16-18 (ca. 1630 B.C.) Let none be deceived by the fictions poets tell That Aetna is the home of a god. -- THE VOLCANO AETNA (from a poem by Lucius Junior, as referenced by Seneca, A.D. 63-79) Volcanoes. Call them Alpha and Omega. The beginning and the end. Somewhere very far back in my ancestry, and in yours, they were the source of water and ice, the creators of proteins and porphyrin molecules. Somewhere near 4 billion B.C. , volcanoes became the cause of every breath we take. They are the foundations of life, the fountains of Eden. The rocks tell us so. By the measure of human life spans, our civilization is very old, but the water and the carbon that run in our veins are the exhalations and regurgitations of Earth itself; and our Earth is older than life itself. And our universe -- most certainly nothing more (or less) than the most recent episode in an infinite and possibly identical series of "Big Bangs" and "Cosmic Crunches" -- is older still ... far, far older than Earth itself. Even before the first atom of silicon existed, long before the most basic components of lava and volcanic dust were born, our universe was a fascinatingly violent and beautiful womb. And most of all, when we come to think about our beginnings at all, even the dust teaches us that our universe was a strange womb, as viewed from the perspective of anything larger than a proton. When the wizards of CERN and Fermilab smash protons and antiprotons together, they are working the same sort of magic on atomic nuclei that a child might inflict upon a watch: smashing it open with a hammer to learn from its pieces what makes the watch work. Seen up close, a proton is nothing more (or less) than forces -- gyrating, interconnected bends in space-time called, for human convenience, quarks and gluons. The very basis of matter arose from defects in what would otherwise have been perfectly flat space-time geometry; as if the substance of our existence burst forth from mere geometric flaws, from submicroscopic cracks in the universe; as if all matter is in fact as close to nothing as anything can be and still manage to think of itself as being something -- which, in fact, it is. From this discovery, from this simple observation, scientists have begun to pen a new story of Genesis -- (And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep) -- And when we peer into the darkness and the void, when we peer as deeply as our primitive tools allow, we descend into a realm of the "jiffy" -- which defines the travel time of light across the diameter of a proton, or one billion-trillionth of a second. Within this space, far below the realm of everyday human experience, invisible lines of force -- lines of interconnected quarks and gluons -- stretch out of nothingness, con-tracting, gyrating, and creating the spherical field of an equally transparent proton. If one is permitted to imagine a single proton in a single atom of silicon, containing fourteen each of protons and neutrons, and if we then allow ourselves to pull back the view ever so slightly, we behold a bundle of twenty-eight colorless spheres with gyrating interiors -- the nucleus of the most abundant element on this planet. Pull back farther still, and the silicon nucleus recedes completely from view, through an expanse of space so vast that by the time we retreat to the outermost electron shell, the nucleus is, when scaled against that spherical, ghostly shell, no larger than a New York City bus scaled against the sphere of Earth. And this, too, is a ghostly and empty, yet forceful realm. To continue drawing backward reveals the outermost shells of atoms interlinked by electrons -- which manifest, self-contradictorily and simultaneously and almost everywhere at once, as waves and particles ... Bound electron shell to electron shell, silicon and oxygen form an array of molecules arranged in rows -- silicon bound to oxygen ... silicon and oxygen ... silicon and oxygen, row after parallel row -- a crystalline array in a chip of volcanic rock. And as our retreat from the proton propels us from the quantum universe into the universe of the very large, we can no longer see individual molecules. With increasing distance, the first hints of color begin to enter the world. The wavelengths of visible light are far smaller than a grain of sand or a fleck of crystalline basalt and far larger than the diameter of an atom of silicon or oxygen -- so only now do we begin to see the brownish black hue of a nugget of once-molten rock collected by my daughter, Amber, not far from midtown Manhattan. All is exactly as the Greek naturalist Democritus and his student Epicurus had said it would be, nearly 2,400 years ago. Scientists of the future, they predicted, would come inevitably to believe in nothing, for nothing existed in this universe except atoms and empty space -- (And the earth was without form, and void ...) And perhaps nothing itself really is everywhere in that ten-to-theeightieth power of protons spread throughout the visible universe, but only because our understanding of nothing is everything -- Ghosts of Vesuvius A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall, and Other Strange Connections . Copyright © by Charles Pellegrino. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Ghosts of Vesuvius: A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall, and Other Strange Connections by Charles R. Pellegrino All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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