I touched a piece of the oldest rock on Earth today. It is 4.6 billion years old and is a piece of the rock used as a standard for radiometric dating.
Is that not crazy? I also held pieces of another planet in my hand, a piece of the meteorite that formed Meteor Crater, and a piece of the core-mantle boundary. The core-mantle boundary was by far my favorite; it was beautiful.
I know I've been subjecting my students to a little more geology than they would like this semester, but this stuff is just as interesting as biology. There's something about rocks that feel like time travel. They are a little piece of an environment long gone. It is from those environments that the world we know today sprang. There were organisms with an ecology similar to, yet alien from what we as biologists study and understand.
Chemistry is a little the same way for me. Since matter is neither created nor destroyed, the very air molecules we breathe in today, the compounds that form our cells, the ground under our feet - these things existed in some fashion over eons. Its like Charlie Brown says to Frieda regarding Pigpen: "Don't think of it as dust. Think of it as maybe the soil of some great past civilization. Maybe the soil of ancient Babylon. It staggers the imagination. He may be carrying soil that was trod upon by Solomon, or even Nebuchudnezzar."
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