SIX-YEAR-OLD MATTHEW BAILES waits on the edge of Adelaide’s Glynburn Road for a gap in the busy traffic. He sees an oncoming car and wonders why he can see it. Later he asks his parents, “Why can we see cars? Why can we see anything?” – deceptively simple questions that his parents’ high-school education hadn’t equipped them to answer. “It just made me wonder how the universe worked,” he now explains simply.
About a billion years before that suburban Adelaide scene, in a galaxy far, far away, a cataclysmic event occurs, releasing an unimaginably powerful burst of energy. It’s gone in the blink of an eye, but sends a blast of radiation that ripples out through the vast, cold vacuum of space. At some point in its billions-of-light-years journey, this wave washes over a small blue planet in one arm of a spiral galaxy, and its radio shriek is picked up by
