The following poem was presented at the memorial service for Van Rensselaer Potter, author of this book,  held on November 7, 2001. It was writen by his grandson, Josh Simon.

To Save the Earth
Save the Earth
We must First Love
Respecting Life
and each other
now in the Present
We Exist
for the Future
generations of Humanity
We must care
We shall
Live on this Earth
We Should Survive

Ever since Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity burst upon the world in 1915 some of the most brilliant minds of our century have sought to decipher the mysteries bequeathed by that theory, a legacy so unthinkable in some respects that even Einstein himself rejected them. Which of these bizarre phenomena, if any, can really exist in our universe? Black holes, down which anything can fall but from which nothing can return; wormholes, short spacewarps connecting regions of the cosmos; singularities, where space and time are so violently warped that time ceases to exist and space becomes a kind of foam; gravitational waves, which carry symphonic accounts of collisions of black holes billions of years ago.............