A Wrinkle in Time

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From the book

From the New Introduction
A Stardust Journey with A Wrinkle in Time
By Lisa Sonne

A Wrinkle in Time was written before any human had walked on the moon or sent rovers to Mars. It was a time before cell phones and personal computers, before digital cameras, CDs, and DVDs, before the fiction of Star Trek, Star Wars, and The Matrix, and before the realities of the space shuttle, the Mir space station, and the International Space Station. Science has changed dramatically as generations of children and adults have read the book since it was first published in 1962. Those scientific advances make Madeleine L'Engle's story even more compelling.
The author of A Wrinkle in Time is a tall woman who sometimes wears a purple cape. She will tell you that she is completely made of stardust and always has been. No kidding. "You are made of stardust, too," she will add with a twinkle in her eye.
This is not the wild imagination of a creative writer's mind. We are all made of stardust. Our little molecules are the leftovers of big stars that exploded eons ago. Mrs. Whatsit may be a fanciful character who gave up her life as a star to fight the darkness, but we are real creatures who really are made of the cosmic dust of supernovas. When giant stars explode, they send their matter out into the universe and enrich all the yet-to-be-born stars and planets with the chemical ingredients that make up life as we know it. Astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson says, "It's a profound, underappreciated truth."
Stardust is just one way that Madeleine L'Engle mixes fact and fantasy to inspire you to want to know more about science. With knowledge come more questions. With imagination comes more curiosity. With searching comes more truth. That blend is a specialty of L'Engle's.
Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin visit different planets outside our solar system. When A Wrinkle in Time was first printed in 1962, scientists could confirm the existence of only nine planets--all of them orbiting our sun. Since 1995, astronomers have been finding planets at an average rate of one a month--all outside our solar system.
Throughout A Wrinkle in Time, the universe is in a struggle with the Black Thing. L'Engle wrote of the Black Thing before astronomers found black holes, which suck up everything around them, and long before scientists announced that almost all of our universe is composed of invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy," which science knows almost nothing about.
In the thin atmosphere of Uriel, Meg has to breathe from a flower to stay alive. In reality, we all breathe plants to stay alive. NASA conducts experiments to see how plants could help keep astronauts alive when they travel in space and live on other planets.
In A Wrinkle in Time, we meet thinking aliens in outer space, including Aunt Beast, the Man with Red Eyes, and Mrs. Who. Since 1962, explorers have gone to remote spots on our planet, studying "extremophile" life to learn more about what life out there in space might really be like.
Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin travel through multiple dimensions. When A Wrinkle in Time first appeared, science recognized only four dimensions--three of space and one of time. Now mathematicians claim that at least nine spatial dimensions are needed to explain our physical world--maybe ten. Maybe more.
Just looking at how technology and science have...