QUITE A BIG YEAR: 1963
The pulsar's most vital function seems to be to serve as an empyreal enzyme inside the quasar, which in turn must ultimately...nourish the cell-plasm of the greatest celestial outburst ever dreamed: that of the whole exploding universe. Since the 1960s astronomy has developed so fast that thousands of quasars are known and ten million are estimated...all of life seems to have passed at some stage through the cauldron of the stars. The Baha'i Faith, too, has seen a remarkable development since the 1960s.
-Ron Price with thanks to Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life, Houghton Mifflin, 1978, Boston, pp.396-402
We came from the stars
by some vast and circuitous route
of exploded stellar material,
super-nova, some extraordinary
sequence of events for atom-rich
molecules. So the astro-physicists
tell us and the molecular astronomers
as they study star dust, ice crystals
and tiny diamonds by the quadrillions
in the 200 billion star families in this Milky Way.
As if in some giant maternity ward
stars are born, celestial swaddling stars,
have growing pains and childhood diseases
and in some exploding brilliance
they shoot out whole worlds
at 100,000 miles a second
in crucibles of brewing life,
mystic sanctums of the universe
and exploding galaxies, a thousand supernovas
blowing up in one great chain-reaction
which were called quasars in 1963:
the most astounding astronomical development
since Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter.
Ron Price
16 March 1996
