For thousands of years, the structure of the universe was explained by various systems of religion and myth. A person’s mythology told him not only how the universe worked, but how he related to it, how she related to society, and how she related to herself. The first question has now been taken over by science. Telescopes tell us how old the universe is and cosmologists calculate how it came to exist. Biologists can explain how humans evolved from a series of prior species into homo sapiens. Geologists can calculate the age of the earth, and describe how its continents float imperceptibly across it on a lake of molten rock. In short, the traditional role of a Creator has been removed by the laws of physics and chemistry.

For many people, the removal of a Creator from the description of the universe has robbed the world of much of its meaning and elegance. The beautiful lovingly-crafted world of a benevolent deity was replaced by a cold desolate world of singularities, genetic mutations and continental drift.

There are ideas in science, however, that can fill the mind with wonder and force us to rethink our relationship to the universe as a whole. There are certainly many ideas in science that do this for various people; I have included five of my own favorites. The next time the universe seems impersonal and uncaring, consider these:

1. We are all made of stardust.

The early universe was almost entirely hydrogen. There were a few stray atoms of helium, lithium and beryllium here or there, but nothing approaching the variety of elements we see on the earth today. Humans, on the other hand, are composed mainly of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, as well as hydrogen. We even have small amounts of heavier elements like iron in our system (in hemoglobin).

Hydrogen is the simplest atom, with one proton and one electron (don’t fall asleep–I’m getting there). Carbon, nitrogen and oxygen have 6, 7 and 8 protons, respectively, and an equal number of neutrons and protons (unless it’s an isotope–but that’s beside the point).

The problem is that protons, being positively charged, repel one another. If there are two elements of hydrogen floating past each other, they will never combine to make helium. In order to make elements with multiple protons, a tremendous amount of force is required to push the protons to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion and bind the two particles together.

Here is where the first generation of stars come in. As clumps of hydrogen began to accumulate in the early universe, they slowly started to acquire significant mass. As the accretion became more massive, it pulled in more of the surrounding hydrogen. When it became large enough, the hydrogen at the center was forced together in nuclear fusion, and a star was born.

The massive forces at the center of early stars crushed the hydrogen and helium atoms together, giving off tremendous energy and forming heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. When the first generation of stars died, they scattered the new elements throughout the galaxy.

As successive generations of stars and planets formed, they incorporated these new elements. At least one of those planets (and hopefully many more) incorporated these elements into biological life.

All the life around us is made of carbon, as are we. The only place where carbon could have been produced in the early universe is in the center of stars. So, human beings are composed of the dust of exploded stars.

We are all made of stardust.

2. All life is interconnected.

When an organism wants to make a protein, it first sends enzymes to unravel the DNA. Once the DNA strand is unwound in the appropriate place, RNA arrives to make a copy of the protein coding section. Proteins are made of various sequences of about 20 different amino acids. Each sequence of three proteins in the RNA strand matches up to a different amino acid. By latching on to the complementary RNA sequence in order, the amino acids line up to build a new protein.

This is how everything in an organism is made. Almost everything in the body is composed of various proteins strung together, twisted, bent and folded, and then stacked up to build physical bodies.

The amazing thing is that this description is true not just for humans, not just for mammals, but for every living thing. The system is the same whether it’s a bacteria making an enzyme to digest some exotic material, a tree spreading its leaves to catch the sun, or a human being regenerating muscle and bone after an injury.

Humans and their nearest relatives, the apes, share over 99% of their genetic code. Even if you find the strangest bacteria, or a fly, or a shrub, you will find that we share sequences of DNA.

All life is connected through DNA. From the largest to the smallest, from the sentient to the slimy, life on earth works the same basic way. So in a way, we share something fundamental not just with all other humans, but with all other creatures.

3. The Interconnectedness of Mathematics

This is not science, since it falls in the realm of pure mathematics, but it is elegant enough that it deserves to be included.

The brilliant mathematician Leonard Euler (pronounced ‘oiler) was born in Switzerland in 1707, lived in Germany and Russia, and died in 1783. He proved that e^πi +1=0, where e is the base of the natural logarithm (a number which frequently appears in nature), pi is the ratio of circumference to diameter of any circle, ‘i’ is the square root of -1, 1 is the first positive integer, and 0 is nothing.

The theorem is a special case of Euler’s Formula: e^iφ= cos φ + i sin φ. If we take φ = π, then e^πi = cos π + isin π. Cosine π = -1, and sin π = 0, leaving us with e^πi +1=0.

What’s the significance of this, you ask? Well, noted physicist Richard Feynman called it ‘the most remarkable formula in mathematics’. This is because it combines the five most important numbers in mathematics and demonstrates a relationship between imaginary numbers and trigonometry. More beautifully, though, it demonstrates a relationship between the abstract (e^πi) and the simple (1,0). This is an incredible level of elegance.

4. Humans have walked on another world

Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear as magic to any sufficiently primitive culture. If a man from 1969 could communicate to the past and tell the ancient Greeks that we had the power to land a man on the moon, they would surely have thought him to be a god (if he told the same story in the middle ages, they would have burned him at the stake).

If you gaze up at the moon in the night sky, it can seem so close you can almost touch it. On other nights, it appears impossibly distant. Despite what our eyes may tell us, we have been to that place. We have walked on it, left our footprints and planted our flag.

The modern world often seems bereft of purpose. For so long, people struggled against the elements and against each other (and a tragic many still do), while modern Americans have the luxury of comfort, security and technology. It makes for an easier life, but some people feel they should be doing more.

In manned space exploration, we have the potential dawning of a new national and human mythos. Space is vast and empty and daunting, and presents an endless opportunity for struggle and reward.

And it all started in 1969 with one small leap.

5. Chaos Theory and the Uncertainty Principle

If you take a single drop of water and drop it into a waterfall, there is no way to predict where it will end up. For a long time, scientists believed that this was only because they did not know the initial conditions precisely enough. They reasoned that if you knew the exact location of the water, the temperature and rate of flow, the topography of the rocks below, etc, you could theoretically predict exactly where the drop of water would end up at the bottom.

It turns out you cannot. Even if you drop the water in the exact same place under the exact same conditions, it will travel a different path to a different location every time. The basic principle of a chaotic system is that small changes in initial conditions lead to big changes in the end result (there are other, more complex criteria, but that’s the basic idea). Further, chaotic systems are impossible to predict accurately, even if you know all the information for initial conditions.

One example of this is the weather. There are supercomputers that chart the wind speed and direction, water temperature, cloud cover, and dozens of other variables, and even they cannot predict which way a hurricane will turn.

On a quantum level, the more closely you try to measure the position of a particle, the less accurately you can know the particle’s momentum, and vice versa. You can have an idea of where it is, but not how fast it’s going; or you can have an idea of how fast it’s going, but not where it is to begin with. This paradox is known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

It is not a failure of measurement, or a case of the observer changing the outcome. It is a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics.

Up until the 20th century, people believed that the universe worked deterministically, that all future actions were directly caused by previous actions in a predictable way. The discoveries of chaos and uncertainty showed the inaccuracy of this belief. Einstein is famous for saying that ‘God does not play dice’. As it turns out, he does, and more often than we can possibly comprehend.

None of these ideas are meant as a replacement for religious thought. They are merely to show that that science, though often dry and technical, is not devoid of those aesthetic elements more commonly associated with art, literature, music and myth. Far from stripping the world of its elegance, science can increase our wonder and fascination with the complexity and beauty of the world around us and within us.