From the Big Bang to you
13.8 billion years on one board: nine chapters, over fifty capsules, and the questions still open at every step. Follow the threads from the first instant to the first cities.
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Read it left to right, top to bottom. Each chapter rests on capsules you can open, and the colours show how settled each step is: the early universe is Proven or Theory, the start of life is still Hypothesis.
Why is there more matter than antimatter? Without that small imbalance, nothing on this board would exist.
The iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were made inside stars that lived and died before the Sun was born.
Why does the only planet we know with life sit in this system, at this distance from this star?
How did the young Earth stay warm when the Sun shone about 30 percent dimmer than today?
Did life start in a warm pond, at a deep sea vent, or somewhere else entirely?
Birds are living dinosaurs: the one line that came through the asteroid strike 66 million years ago.
We shared the planet with other kinds of humans for most of our history. Why are we the only ones left?
Writing was invented more than once, in Mesopotamia, in China and in Mesoamerica, apparently independently.
Scale: squeeze all 13.8 billion years into one calendar year. Our species appears about 11 minutes before midnight on 31 December, and all of written history fits in the last 12 seconds.
If the universe is so big and so old, where is everybody?