Everything has a beginning, or perhaps everything has existed forever. The Big Bang, let there be light, a quantum fluctuation, a chance occurrence – do we even have the words to describe reality, even less the capacity to understand what the words mean? In any case, here we are, here is life, here is the universe, welcome.

Where did matter come from? Where energy? Perhaps, when we sum everything carefully together, the universe’s accounts balance: we are created from nothingness. Perhaps the cosmos is just one form of emptiness, a random bubble among endless others in an infinite multiverse. We can only guess: our theories and our observations do not reach the beginning of the universe.

Everything has its laws, or perhaps law arises by itself out of chaos. The young universe, pocket-sized, follows the law it has received or created, and begins to expand. Another law tells it to cool down, and the obedient quark porridge bubbles into protons, neutrons, electrons, photons and a pinch of spices.

”Love thy neighbour”, says a third law, the mighty law of gravity, and the atoms seek each other more and more eagerly. Everything has wrinkles, says a fourth law, and therefore from the very beginning some places have more particles than others. They tempt also others to their embrace. Gas clouds grow, collapse and heat up as the atoms dance ever wilder around each other. A flash. Now there is light in the cosmos, the first star is born.

The first children of the universe, the stars, start to produce energy by joining atoms together. Hydrogen fuses into helium, helium into carbon, carbon into nitrogen, oxygen and so on up to iron. A hundred million years from the beginning, and twelve particles find each other in the furnace of a giant star. The long journey of the newborn carbon atom has begun. It is almost eternal, indestructible: only a star could create it, and only another star can destroy it.

The music of the cosmos grows more and more beautiful, more fascinating and more surprising. Something strange is going on.