In the universe's own image

Lynn Margulis,
mother of her co-author,
science writer Dorion Sagan,
the son of Carl Sagan 

I've found reading harder and harder of late, not sure why.Visually, it's a bit challenging. I get fidgety trying to sit still. There's so much more I'd rather be doing, even trying to sit still enough at my computer to do my "daily blog."
    But what a difference to pick up a book that compels me to read it. Such is Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's book Microcosmos, which I introduced yesterday. From Chapter 1, here's a paragraph that begins below a simplified table labeled "Geological Time Scale," which names the aeons, eras, periods and epochs from 4,500 millions of years ago (when Planet Earth was formed) to 0 millions of years ago (an interesting way to characterize "now"):

Over the first million years of expansion after the Big Bang, the universe cooled from 100 billion degrees Kelvin, as estimated by physicist Steven Weinberg, to about 3,000 degrees K, the point at which a single electron and proton could join to create hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe. Hydrogen coalesced into supernovae—enormous clouds that over billions of years contracted from cosmic to submicrocosmic densities. Under the sheer force of gravity, the cores of the supernnovae became so hot that thermonuclear reactions were fired, creating from hydrogen and various disparate subatomic particles all the heavier elements in the universe that we know today. The richness of hydrogen is in our bodies still—we contain more hydrogen than any other kind—primarily in water. Our bodies of hydrogen mirror a universe of hydrogen. [emphasis mine; pp. 40-41]

That image reminds me of the haunting final paragraph of Lewis Thomas's foreword to Microcosmos, a meditation on language, with which his 1974 book, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, was well supplied:

Perhaps we have had a shared hunch about our real origin longer than we think. It is there like a linguistic fossil, buried in the ancient root from which we take our species' name. The word for earth, at the beginning of the Indoeuropean language thousands of years ago (no one knows for sure how long ago) was dhghem. From this word, meaning simply earth, came our word humus, the handiwork of soil bacteria. Also, to teach us a lesson, humble, human, and humane. There is the outline of a philosophical parable here; some of the details are filled in by this book. [p. 12]

    I would enjoy reading The Lives of a Cell again.