Doomed Stars, Doomed Body

The physicist Alan Lightman, walking around his small island in Maine, wrote:

The material of the doomed stars and the material of my doomed body are actually the same material. Literally the same atoms… It is astonishing but true that if I could attach a small tag to each of the atoms of my body and travel with them backward in time, I would find that those atoms originated in particular stars in the sky. Those exact atoms.

Close your eyes, breathe, and absorb that. A little tag on every atom in your body. Traced backward, each one leads to a star. Not starstuff in general. Particular stars. Those exact atoms.

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