You Are Made of Stardust and That Is Not a Metaphor - The Physics and Vedanta of Your Atomic Ancestry

In 1876, Edward Alexander Bouchet became the first African American to earn a PhD in physics from an American university. His dissertation at Yale examined the refractive indices of substances - the...

In 1876, Edward Alexander Bouchet became the first African American to earn a PhD in physics from an American university.

His dissertation at Yale examined the refractive indices of substances - the way matter bends light, the way physical form interacts with the electromagnetic spectrum that illuminates it.

Bouchet studied how the universe reveals itself through the behavior of light passing through matter.

He could not have known that his inquiry would become the foundation for the spectroscopic revolution that would prove, within decades, the most amazing fact in the history of human self-knowledge: you are made of stars.