Page 64 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

Marc Erdrich

there and each galaxy contains billions of stars. But we can
only see a few hundred of them. I don’t know about you, but
I’m a skeptic.

Let me tell you about something I did on my computer a
while back. I have one of those neat astronomy apps that lets
you view the visible night sky for any date and time and from
any position on earth. It also lets you do a lot of other interest-
ing things, like viewing the orbit of comets and identifying the
names of distant stars. One of the fascinating features of the
program is that it lets you increase the intensity, or magnitude,
of the night sky on the screen so that you can see the position
of many of the stars that are not visible to the naked eye. Each
time you increase the magnitude, the computer takes more
and more time to redraw the screen because there are so many
stars. At magnitude 10, there are so many stars, the screen is
completely white. All you can see is white light. Not a single
star is visible. Made me think.
But back to ruthenium.

My wife is named Ruth, hence my initial interest in this
most unlikely element.

Get this: in all of the universe, there are only four ten-thou-
sandth parts of ruthenium per million. That’s a fact. Look it
up in a dictionary. Check the Internet. Anywhere you look, it
says the same thing: four ten-thousandth parts ruthenium per
million in the universe. Per million parts of what, is what I
want to know? The universal ether?

I always love discussions about the universe. While I was
researching this piece on the Internet (yes, I actually did do
research on this), I was, for some reason, directed to the Walt

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