Dr. Richard Berendzen is professor of physics at American University in Washington, D.C.

With astounding speed new revelations about the size, shape and nature of the universe are coming forth in the concluding years of the 20th Century. What is now being discovered rests upon the pioneering enterprise of astronomers and philosophers over the past two millennia. Richard Berendzen opens a special two-part series on the history of the heavens with a scientifically accurate, poetically lyrical description of the Big Bang. The birth and death of stars and the role of comets as bringers of life.