I would have called this chapter “Cosmic” or something, but I guess Firmament is more poetic? Ancient? Religious?

The entire chapter is about how and where in the universe Carbon could possibly have been created and a brief account of the scientist, Fred Hoyle, who first hypothesized about it and the ones who validated it.

Essentially, stars are the birthplace of all higher elements, as they burn hydrogen atoms, fusing them together to create the next element Helium, and so on, all the while releasing huge amounts of energy. But all along, as lighter elements fuse to create the next heavier one, we are gradually reducing the amount of energy being generated… till we get to Iron. From this point on, we are no longer releasing energy but consuming it, and apparently, within a quarter of a second, the star explodes into a supernova, spilling its guts of all kinds of heavy elements all over the universe.

A problem with this hypothesis of fusing ever heavier elements was that after Helium, the very next element, Beryllium, is an extremely unstable one that reverts back to Helium in a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. The star (pun intended) of this chapter, Fred Hoyle proposed that during that incredibly brief period, if another alpha particle (He) collided with the Be atom, it could create Carbon. Most other scientists considered this absurd. Finally one of the skeptics, Willy Fowler, assembled a team to see if they could create energized carbon. And they succeeded.

It is puzzling to comprehend how, despite carbon being created very very sparingly within a star, carbon is “prolific” on the earth – in the mantle, in the atmosphere, in the soil and in plants.

Hoyle’s discovery made him a believer in a “super-intellect that has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology…”