About

Eighteen months ago someone asked me at a party if early man had lived on dinosaur steak, or if it was the dinosaurs who dined on people.  I said with 65 million years between them, neither had devoured the other.   Someone else asked if earth had been created with the the Big Bang, and when we humans had started to make music. When someone else said it was impossible to keep track of so much time, I had accepted the challenge of writing a book about all time that non-scientists could understand.  That’s how my book, The Big Bang to Now:  A Time Line, began. 

I am a cognitive psychologist,I knew from the beginning of the project that more than thirteen billion years, which is how old the universe probably is, is simply too vast for most people to understand first off.  Millions, billions, trillions, or thousands of years mesh together into a cloud of incomprehensibility. But it doesn’t have to be so impossibly hard to understand.  There are ways that perfectly normal people can learn to grasp these huge numbers and make sense of them.  This blog is a continuation of the dialogue that began at that party eighteen month ago.  Writing the book opened up a fascinating world, and I keep learning.  Sometimes from journals, from the internet, from colleagues.  Most of all from my readers. I hope you will keep on telling me what you think. 

Terry Herman Sissons, Ph.D.

.     On my desk I keep Victor Weisskopf’s comment that “When life is very bad, two things make life worth living – Mozart and quantum mechanics.”  I first thought quantum mechanics was closely related to making cars and trains run, but it is now, along with music, the doorway I use to step into a universe that is a mystery that gets bigger and deeper everytime I look at it.  It’s a place where, along with Mozart’s music, I find unfathomable hope even in the blackest confusion when nothing seems to make any sense at all.