Dan Levitt’s ‘What’s Gotten Into You’ Follows The Long Journey Of Atoms From The Big Bang To The Human Body

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In its violent early years, Earth was a molten hellscape that knocked out the moon after a fiery collision with another protoplanet, scientists now suspect. It later turned from a watery expanse into a giant snowball that wiped out almost all existing life.

Then hyper hurricanes with waves as high as 300 feet ravaged the newly thawed ocean. But that is nothing compared to the celestial turmoil and fireworks in the 9 billion years before the birth of our planet.

Science and history documentary filmmaker Dan Levitt’s upcoming book, “What’s Inside You: The Story of Your Body’s Atoms, From the Big Bang to Last Night’s Dinnerevokes a series of striking and often powerful images of how our cells, elements, atoms and subatomic particles all made their way into our brains, bones and bodies. The book comes out on January 24.

“Now we know that the origin of the universe, the making of elements in stars, the creation of the solar system and the Earth, and the early history of our planet was incredibly tumultuous,” Levitt told CNN.

However, the almost incomprehensible explosions, collisions and temperatures were essential to life.

A disturbance in Jupiter’s orbit, for example, may have sent a shower of asteroids toward Earth, dousing the planet with water. And the molten iron that formed the Earth’s core a magnetic field that protects us from cosmic rays.

“So many things happened that could have turned out differently,” Levitt said, “in which case we wouldn’t be here.”

Reconstructing the epic step-by-step journey of our atoms over billions of years, he said, has filled him with awe and gratitude.

“Sometimes when I look at people I think, ‘Wow, you are such incredible organisms and our atoms all share the same deep history going back to the Big Bang,'” he said. He hopes readers will see “that even the simplest cell is incredibly complex and deserves great respect. And so are all people.”

Our body contains About 60 elements, including the deluge of hydrogen released after the Big Bang and the calcium forged by dying stars known as red giants. As Levitt collected evidence for how they and more complex organic molecules made their way to us, he weaved together the tumultuous history of the scientific process itself.

It wasn’t his initial intention to parallel the turbulence in the universe with upheavals in the scientific world, but it certainly came with the territory. “Since our great-grandparents were alive, so many scientific certainties have been toppled,” he said. “That’s part of the fun of the book.”

After Levitt finished his first draft, he was surprised to realize that part of the scientific turmoil was due to various kinds of recurring bias. “I wanted to get into the minds of scientists who have made great discoveries — to see their advances as they did and understand how they were received at the time,” he said. “I was surprised that the first reaction to breakthrough theories was almost always skepticism and rejection.”

Throughout the book, he pointed to six recurring mental traps that have blinded even brilliant minds, such as the view that it’s “too weird to be true” or that “if our current tools haven’t discovered it, it doesn’t exist.” ”

Albert Einstein initially disliked the strange idea of, say, an expanding universe, and over time had to be convinced by it George Lemaitrea little-known but persistent Belgian priest and cosmologist. Stanley Miller, the “father of prebiotic chemistry” who ingeniously simulated early Earth conditions in glass flasks, was a notoriously vehement opponent of the hypothesis that life could have evolved in the deep ocean fueled by mineral-rich enzymes and superheated vents. And so on.

“The history of science is littered with grandiose statements by elder statesmen about certainties soon to be reversed,” writes Levitt in his book. Lucky for us, the history of science is also full of radicals and freethinkers who loved poking holes in those statements.

Levitt described how many of the leaps forward were made by researchers who were never given credit for their contributions. “I’m drawn to unsung heroes with dramatic stories that people haven’t heard before,” he said. “So I was pleased that many of the most poignant stories in the book turned out to be about people I didn’t know.”

They are scientists like an Austrian researcher Marietta Blue, which helped physicists see some of the first signs of subatomic particles; Dutch physician and philosopher Jan Ingenhousz, who discovered that sunlit leaves can create oxygen through photosynthesis; and chemist Rosalind Franklinwhich played an important role in working out the three-dimensional structure of DNA.

Wonders of the Universe

The lightning spark of new ideas often struck independently around the world. To his surprise, Levitt found that multiple scientists worked out plausible scenarios for how the building blocks of life might have begun to assemble.

“Our universe is awash with organic molecules — many of them are precursors to the molecules we’re made of,” he said. “So I alternate between thinking that beings like us are so unlikely to exist, and thinking that life must exist in many places in the universe.”

Nothing about our own journey from the Big Bang has been easy, though.

“If you try to imagine how life evolved from the first organic molecules, it must have been a choppy process, full of twisted paths and failures,” Levitt said. “Most of them must have gone nowhere. But evolution has a way of creating winners from countless experiments over a long period of time.”

Nature also has a way of recycling the building blocks to create new life. Called a nuclear physicist Paul Abersold found that “every one to two months we swap half of our carbon atoms, and we replace 98 percent of all our atoms each year,” Levitt writes.

Like a house under constant renovation, we are constantly changing, replacing old parts with new ones: our water, our proteins, and even our cells, most of which we apparently replace every decade.

Eventually, our own cells will become silent, but their parts will reassemble into other life forms. “While we may die, our atoms do not,” writes Levitt. “They spin through life, soil, oceans and air in a chemical merry-go-round.”

In other words, like the death of stars, our own destruction opens up another remarkable world of possibilities.