Greetings to all! With this page I formally inaugurate my new blog, "We are All the Stuff of Stars." The title is a loosely paraphrased quote from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, which I sincerely recommend to anybody remotely interested in the mysteries and grandeur of the universe. I slightly adjusted the wording for trochaic purposes, but the idea and truth of the statement is unchanged. Literally every element in and of our bodies is a product of the lives and deaths of stars from the far-flung past. And we can know that, because those stars and this universe have produced beings capable not only of contemplating, but of discovering their origins. That thought always gives me pause.
Nothing instills in me quite so much awe as when I gaze and gape at a night sky unfettered by light pollution, lit up only by the incomprehensible multitude of stars. That awe is why I wanted to be an astronomer or astrophysicist when I grew up. I am only sort of grown up now, but I know I am going to be neither of those things (amateur astronomer, maybe). I love reading about new astronomical discoveries, and I can appreciate the theoretical physics from a distance, but I am not smart enough to really comprehend and really contribute to that field. But I hope my younger self will find some consolation in my current pursuits, how my cosmological fascination has turned from outward to inward, from the very large to the very small. As the stars still transfix me, so now does the complexity of life.
It is my intent, then, that this blog document the however-many-years it takes for me to earn a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Colorado at Boulder. It may turn into something else or several different things along the way, but it starts here, with this.
So.
Hello!
