Out of Hoyle’s numerous accomplishments, I want to concentrate here on only a few of his contributions to one particular topic: nuclear astrophysics. Hoyle’s work in this area has become one of the main pillars on which our modern understanding of stars and their evolution rests. Along the way, he solved the puzzle of how the atoms of carbon, the anchor of complexity and life as we know it, formed in the universe. To fully appreciate the significance of Hoyle’s achievement, however, we first need to understand the background against which he produced his masterwork.

On one of the walls of almost every science classroom in the United States, you can find a chart of the periodic table of the elements (figure 19). Just as our language consists of words constructed from the letters of the alphabet, all ordinary matter in the cosmos is composed of these elements. Elements are those substances that cannot be further broken down or modified by simple chemical means. Dmitry Mendeleyev, a Russian chemist, is generally credited with having noticed (in the mid–nineteenth century) the periodic regularities that are the basis of the periodic table, and with having the foresight to predict the characteristics of elements that had yet to be discovered to complete the table. In many ways, the periodic table is a symbolic representation of the progress achieved since Empedocles’ and Plato’s famous fire, air, water, and earth as the basic constituents of matter. As an amazing aside, the smallest reproduction of the periodic table was engraved in 2011 onto a human hair belonging to chemist Martyn Poliakoff of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. The engraving was done at the university’s nanotechnology center. (The hair was then returned to Poliakoff as a birthday gift.)

Figure 19

The periodic table currently consists of 118 elements (the latest, ununoctium, was identified in 2002), of which 94 occur naturally on Earth. If you think about it for a moment, this is a fairly large number of primary building blocks, and consequently, it was only a matter of time before someone would ask, Where did all of these chemical elements come from? Or: Could these rather complex entities have simpler origins?