Excerpt

Reconstruction of the past is an interdisciplinary activity that involves physicists, chemists, geologists, and paleontologists, among others. It is of interest to a wide public and there have been spectacular developments recently. At the same time, such studies do not have a home in any traditional academic department. They are carried on, and to a certain extent, effectively, in various disciplinary departments: geology, physics, chemistry, and archaeology. Each of these tends to have a particular slant governed by its disciplinary environment. Thus, providing a home that does not have such biases is a fruitful area to explore for the Santa Fe Institute. Although some previous talks have touched on this area, the present remarks should not unduly overlap those. Two of the examples that will be covered will be from the physical world; the last examples will be from archaeology.

The past has extended over such a long time, that only infinitesimally small parts can be studied in any detail. Only a year after the start of our universe in the Big Bang, when electrons started to recombine with protons, alpha particles and a smattering of heavier elements, chemical reactions began. Possibly some of the few hydrogen molecules formed at that time have survived to this day. Some of the more complicated molecules in interstellar space are certainly older than our solar system. Thus, radioastronomers studying such molecules are doing a chemical reconstruction of the past as they address questions of the formation processes leading to these molecules.

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