What makes the dark universe brighter—at least in certain places—is the light of the stars. But they were not present from the beginning. Once, there must have been a time when not a single star shone in the universe. Later lots of stars formed in many galaxies. And after that, old stars have gone out or exploded, and new stars have emerged. But what does this cycle look like long-term and on a cosmic average? Do the stars become fewer and fewer over time?
It turns out there is a formula that can show physicists the broad picture of star formation rate over time.
How I prepare my breakfast is very much influenced by my bicultural upbringing in the 1980s and ’90s in the Pacific Northwest and Southern California. My mom was born in 1956 to a Mexican American household and came up in the San Fernando Valley. By all accounts, her parents were very much concerned with fitting in with the Joneses, pressured to raise the all-American family and downplay their Mexican roots. From what I understand, my dad had a somewhat rural upbringing in western Washington and Hood River, Oregon, by way of Oakdale, California — about a 30-minute drive northeast of Modesto and deep in the heart of the state’s San Joaquin Valley. Just recently, as I’ve begun to unpack my family history, I learned that his birthplace goes by the moniker “Cowboy Capital of the World.” When I was little, dad told me that his family was a part of the massive wave of poverty-stricken Southwest Americans known as Okies who traversed to California for a better life.
If Caledonian Road is a throwback to the vast social canvasses that novelists used to paint on, it is simultaneously an acknowledgment of the social novel’s importance, something that O’Hagan says is increasingly getting lost in our modern era. “I worry sometimes that the novel has lost its position as the chief moral device artistically in everyday society, the little bit of art that almost everybody can afford,” he says. “We’re not looking to the novel to pose the big questions the way we have in the past. I believe that could be revived. You just need the novels.”
Twilley takes readers from an ice house in Maine to a bioarchaeology museum in London to the hills of Rwanda. This deeply reported, vividly rendered book lives up to its subtitle and aptly explains why the United Kingdom’s Royal Society called refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food.