Cast Iron, God, and science.

A well-reasoned skillet.

I love a cast-iron skillet. It’s a bit sentimental, but they’re also one of the most versatile tools in the kitchen. And, of course, you can use them for self-defense.

However, there’s another reason I love an iron skillet. We are all astrophysical objects, and an iron skillet brings the mundane and the cosmological together in a way that might surprise you. If you’re up for a little stellar nucleosynthesis — and, hey, who isn’t? — I’ll tell you about the surprising history of the original non-stick cookware.

Let’s start at the beginning, and I mean the beginning of everything. George Lemaître was a Catholic priest and a theoretical physicist who argued that the universe was expanding, and thus would have been in a dense and hot state a long time ago. An astronomer named Fred Hoyle was not impressed and jokingly called it a “big bang.” The only person who seemed to like the theory was Pope Pius XII, who saw it as a scientific validation of faith in Creation. Lemaître very delicately rebuffed his boss:

“As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being… For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God… It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe.”

A hundred years later, we have found so much evidence for it, and so little evidence against it, that I’m going to boldly assert some things here which seem ridiculous. They are absolutely absurd, in fact, but we know them as well as we know that viruses cause colds, or the temperature at which to bake a potato.

About three minutes into the life of our universe, it cooled enough to form protons and neutrons, and a single proton is the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. In the next seventeen minutes, about 60% of the atoms in your body were created. It would take about one hundred million years for enormous clouds of those first atoms to collapse under gravity, forming stars and galaxies.

The matter in the universe was almost entirely hydrogen, with a tiny bit of helium and lithium. As stars began to burn under the intense pressure of gravity, hydrogen nuclei were crushed into more helium. When these enormous stars, much larger than our sun, ran out of hydrogen, they fused helium into carbon and oxygen. Fusing these elements doesn’t produce as much energy, so the outward pressure that kept the star from collapsing weakened, and gravity crushed everything even more. The inner elements fused into neon and silicon. The star would begin to collapse, and the shock of the collapse would form even heavier elements.

Until iron.

Iron is the most stable element, and it takes energy to make it. When a star begins to fuse its core into iron, it has about a second to live. Without internal energy to resist the force of gravity, the star’s outer layers begin to rush inward. New elements even heavier than iron can be formed in the crush and chaos. When this wave hits the core, the shock rebounds and travels outward again, tearing the star to pieces and flinging it into space at unimaginable speeds. If a supernova of this type happened within 150 light years of Earth? Well, nothing lasts forever.

But a cast-iron skillet comes close.

George Lemaître and Pope Pius XII believed in God. Maybe you believe in God. The point Lemaître made, and the point I’d like to make, is: science is not religion, but it is beautiful and mysterious. And anyone can believe in it.

The next time you’re making breakfast, rubbing the sleepless night out of your eyes, wondering if you did the right thing with your life, hoping you’ve loved everyone enough and made a positive difference, pondering whether free will even exists? Just remember:

You’re cooking scrambled eggs on the heart of a dead star.

Your fan,

Jonathan Byrd