Out of the white-hot heat of the Big Bang arose everything that exists in the universe today. The long road that leads from this u Out of the white-hot heat of the Big Bang arose everything that exists in the universe today. The long road that leads from this ultra-dense soup of elementary particles and radiation to atoms, stars, planets, and life becomes one of the central paths in cosmologistsí efforts to understand how the universe is put together. Ironically, the physicists who unraveled the structure of the atom paved the way for those who ultimately figured out how the atoms themselves came to be.