The wheel is a disc of stone, and it has been turning in this courtyard, or one very like it, for five thousand years. The potter sets it going with a stick, squats, and drops a wet grey lump at its centre. For a moment the lump is nothing in particular. It wobbles, off-centre, formless, a handful of river mud that could become anything or nothing. Then his hands close on it.
What happens next takes less than a minute. The lump rises into a column, collapses, rises again, and then opens, and there is a vessel where there was none. The potter has added nothing and taken nothing away. What has entered is form.
Four and a half thousand miles away, under farmland on the border of France and Switzerland, a ring of superconducting magnets twenty-seven kilometres around takes protons, accelerates them to within a hair of the speed of light, and slams them together hard enough to melt them back into the stuff they are made of. For a few millionths of a second matter stops being matter. Then it cools. And the same shock of unfairness: out of the formless, form.
The first book of this series stood at the absolute beginning and asked what was there before there was anything. This book asks the question that comes next, and it is a more answerable one. Granted that something began, how did it become things — stuff with weight and edges, stuff a potter can put on a wheel? Where did matter come from?
The Rigveda answers with its second great creation hymn, the Hiranyagarbha Sukta, the Hymn of the Golden Womb. Modern physics answers with the first three minutes, when the cooling universe froze out quarks, then protons and neutrons, then the first nuclei — three quarters hydrogen, one quarter helium. Both accounts agree on something strange: matter is not the beginning of the story. It is a late arrival.
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