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laws as they do elsewhere in the universe."
    A molecule of water beaded on a forehead at Yale University would be indistinguishable from a molecule of water skating through space aboard Comet Kohoutek. Ashes to ashes, stardust to our dust. As I'll describe later in detail, the elements of our bodies, and of the earth, and of
a painted Grandma's holiday apron, were all forged in the bellies of long-dead suns.
    To say that there is an objective reality, and that it exists and can be understood, is one of those plain-truth poems of science that is nearly bottomless in its beauty. It is easy to forget that there is an objective, concrete universe, an outerverse measured in light years, a microverse trading in angstroms, the currency of atoms; we've succeeded so well in shaping daily reality to reflect the very narrow parameters and needs of
Homo sapiens.
We the subjects become we the objects, and we forget that the moon shows up each night for the graveyard shift, and we often haven't a clue as to where we might find it in the sky. We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album? "Most of the time, when people walk outside at night and see the stars, it's a big, pretty background, and it's not quite real," said the Caltech planetary scientist Michael Brown. "It doesn't occur to them that the pattern they see in the sky repeats itself once a year, or to appreciate why that's true."
    Star light, star bright, Brown wishes you'd try this trick at night: Pay attention to the moon. Go outside a few evenings in any given month, and see what time the moon rises, and what phase it's in, and when it sets, and then see if you can explain why. "Just doing this makes you realize that the sun and moon are both out there," he said, "and that the sun is actually shining on the moon, and the moon is going around the Earth, and that it's not all a Hollywood special effect." Brown knows first-eye how powerful such simple observations can be. It was the summer after he'd graduated from college, and he was biking across Europe and sleeping outside each night. In accordance with his status as young, footloose, and overseas, he wore no wristwatch, so he sought to keep time by the phases of the moon. "I realized that I had never noticed before that the full moon rises when the sun sets," he said. "I thought, Hey, you know, this makes sense. I suppose I should have been embarrassed not to have noticed it before, but I wasn't. Instead, it was just an amazing feeling. The whole physical world is really out there, and things are really happening. It's so easy to isolate yourself from most of the world, to say nothing of the rest of the universe."
    The last spring of my father's life, before he died unexpectedly of a fast-growing tumor, he told me that it was the first time he had stopped, during his walks through Central Park in New York, and paid attention to the details of the plants in bloom: the bulging out of a bud from a Lenten rose, the uncurling of a buttery magnolia blossom, the sprays of narcissus, Siberian bugloss, and bleeding heart. I was so impressed by
this that, ever since, I have tried to do likewise, attending anew to the world in rebirth. Each spring I ask a specific question about what I'm seeing and so feel as though I am lighting a candle in his memory, a small focused flame against the void of self-absorption, the blindness of I.
    Another fail-safe way to change the way you see the world is to invest in a microscope. Not one of those toy microscopes sold in most Science 'n' Discovery chain stores, which, as Tom Eisner, a professor of chemical ecology at Cornell, has observed, are unwrapped on Christmas morning and in the closet before Boxing Day. Not the microscopes that magnify specimens up to hundreds of times and make everything look like a satellite image of an Iowa cornfield. Rather, you should buy a dissecting microscope, also known as a stereo microscope. Admittedly, such microscopes are not