Science among the stars

How universal is the chemistry we know? For that matter, how universal is chemistry? The physicists, with an assist from the cosmologists and astronomers, have a legitimate claim to discovering basic scientific truths that reach as far as we can detect. No matter where we look around the solar system, our own galaxy or into other distant galaxies entirely, everything seems to follow the framework laid out by relativity for gravity and motion. The quantum-mechanical behavior of light (and other electromagnetic waves) remains the same as well. That covers a lot of ground. I’ll leave aside the pesky little – well, pesky big – problem of dark matter, which apparently means that the great bulk of matter in the universe is in a form that we can’t detect except through its gravitational effects. At least that’s also the same everywhere we look, whatever it is!