Pi in the Sky Read online

  We are in the universe, and the universe is in us.

  —Neil deGrasse Tyson, astronomer

  Yes, even the Author’s Note gets a quote at the beginning! Dr. Tyson’s words sum up one of the underlying themes of Pi in the Sky. We live in the universe; that’s something we take for granted. Of course we live in it. But it lives in us just as much. Our very atoms are a part of the fabric of the cosmos, cooked inside stars that exploded billions of years ago. We are the universe made conscious. This is something I never truly grasped until I started doing research for this book and began to truly understand how we, and all living things, fit into the larger picture.

  Building a fictional story around the latest discoveries in science was a challenging and rewarding experience. Technology continues to offer unprecedented access into the universe, and people working in fields like astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, and astrobiology are discovering new and incredible things every day. How can you find out more? Check out space.com or nasa.gov, and get a daily e-mail about the most exciting discoveries of the day by signing up at dailygalaxy.com. Two books I love, both geared for young readers, are The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins (also an awesome app) and A Really Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I also recommend interactive science apps like Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe, Star Walk, and The Elements: A Visual Exploration from Theodore Gray. So much information at our fingertips. It is an exciting time to be alive.

  I want to thank the brilliant scientists and writers whose insights open each chapter of Pi in the Sky and give the book its shape and structure. The plotline was originally inspired by a class of sixth graders at Park Middle School in New Jersey. They had read my book Every Soul a Star and put together a bunch of quotes they thought I would like. One of them, from Carl Sagan, grabbed me at once: “To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” I knew what he was saying, about how the elements inside the pie—and inside everything—came from the birth of the universe, but I kept thinking of other ways to interpret it. What if I turned it around? What if there was someone out there actually using a pie to create the universe? And what would happen if someone on Earth found out?

  As I began my research, two quotes jumped out at me. The first was from physicist Paul Davies: “Dark matter holds the key to the universe.” The second was from mathematical physicist Edward Witten: “We don’t know what the dark matter is made of, but there is a very interesting theory that it consists of exotic elementary particles that are part of the cosmic rays.” Together, these statements gave me the idea to set the story “inside” dark matter, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t actually HAVE an inside. At least not with people living in it. But hey, you never know. Personally, I think we’ve only started to glimpse the supreme weirdness of the universe. Or multiverse. Or whatever this wacky place we call home actually is.

  And thus, the idea for Pi in the Sky was born.

  Funny story about the title. When I first started working on the story, a few young readers suggested I title it Pie in the Sky, which I thought was a clever play on words, both because there really WAS a pie in the sky in the story, and also because the phrase means “an idea or scheme that is utterly impractical or unlikely,” which applied so nicely to the task that lay ahead for the main characters in the story. Anyway, I was telling my father-in-law the plotline, and when I got to the title, he couldn’t hear me very well and asked, “P-i-e like the kind you eat, or p-i like the math equation?” And suddenly I knew it had to be pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Something that you can’t measure the planets, or the distances between them, or their orbits, without.

  Okay, so maybe that story wasn’t fall-on-the-floor funny, or maybe you just had to be there (on a curb at a noisy street fair). Anyway, thanks, Steve!

  I am very grateful to the young readers who gave me advice on the first draft and to the scientists (many—but not all—from my own family!) who answered my questions along the way and who double-checked my facts afterward: Jeremy Kahn, mathematician; Jennifer Mass, chemist; Steven Brawer, physicist; Adam Finnefrock, physicist; and Elan Grossman, astronomer and neuroscientist, who gets bonus points for answering e-mails at three a.m., no matter how ridiculous my questions were. Thank you to astronomer and astrophysicist Gregory Laughlin for allowing me to paraphrase his words in the fictional Carl Sagan’s speech at the end of chapter 15. A special thank-you to my editor, Alvina Ling, and her always insightful partner in crime Bethany Strout for never pointing out that if I spent less time watching television documentaries about the universe and more time writing, this book would have been done a lot sooner.

  The world lost one of its brightest literary lights as this book was nearing completion. I want to pay homage to the masterful Ray Bradbury, whose imagination, wisdom, humor, and sense of wonder and joy shone through every line he wrote. I hope he found something really cool on the other side.

  The best writing makes you look at the world differently. It celebrates life, and the miracle of it. Bradbury’s stories do that. The following passages do that, too, by opening a window to a new way of looking at our existence.

  Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back billions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a hundred or a thousand or even a million.

  —Daniel C. Dennett, philosopher, Freedom Evolves

  After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

  —Richard Dawkins, biologist, Unweaving the Rainbow

  Last but not least, here’s a neat trick if you have nothing to do after school one day. Disconnect your cable TV and scan for a channel you can’t receive. That static you see hopping and jumping on the screen? A small percentage of it is the afterglow from the big bang. How can you be bored watching the birth of the universe?

  Thank you so much for reading. Please remember, you are stronger than you think. You are made of the same stuff as stars, and you shine just as bright. Many blessings upon your head.

  Peace,

  Wendy

  P.S. You haven’t tried bagels with cream cheese and Red Hots? Soooo good.

  Contents

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  What You Need to Know

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Wendy Mass

  Interior illustrations copyright © 2013 by Lauren Gentry/Jelly London

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