A Time-Travel Adventure with Nonfiction Science

The Race to the Big Bang illustrated science adventure book is the sequel to The Stardust Mystery. It received the Purple Dragonfly Best STEM Book Award. The story takes place during the pandemic. So, in addition to what learn and present about the Big Bang and the Universe, the young characters have information about the Coronavirus and the mRNA Vaccines. They create videos to tell other kids what they learned.

As the story opens, the Cosmic Kids had just returned from a wonderful trip to the moon as a reward for their second-place finish in the Science and the Future Contest. But then their lives were altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. They find relief by inventing new pandemic pastimes. Then they discover the best pastime of all. It’s a new contest called The Race to the Big Bang. The grand prize is $1 million in cash and $1 million in college scholarships. The four Cosmic Kids and coach Grandpa form a new team, the Cosmic Explorers, with two new coaches and their friends and last year’s contest winners Jackson and Johari. Neddy invites her friend Richie to join them too. They are going to compete in a new series of Virtual World adventures. They believe that their team’s previous success in using the Virtual World will give them a huge advantage.
They are time traveling to the Big Bang. Along the way, they discover unusual things on earth, in the solar system and in the universe. They meet with their teammates and coaches in internet meetings to plan their activities. They help prove the Big Bang theory by measuring the distance to a nearby galaxy. They prove Albert Einstein’s Twin Paradox with Lizzy’s long solo round trip voyage to our closest star. She returns, after four years of travel, to discover that her younger sister Neddy, who stayed behind, is now her older sister. Neddy loves that.
They turn a planet that they have found 7 billion years ago into their space station by adding the events that made Planet Earth habitable. They add water by redirecting comets to hit their planet, they create an oxygen atmosphere using cyanobacteria brought from Earth, and they plant vegetation for food from seeds also from earth. Their brilliant idea has some unintended consequences that are wonderful, awful, and then wonderful again. They have accidentally provided a dramatic example of the Survival of the Fittest principal of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The Cosmic Kids end their adventure by using the Virtual World to create videos to help other kids understand how we can become infected by the Covid-19 virus, and how a vaccine can keep us safe. With this new project, they learn some interesting biology about how our body’s cells are factories that can fabricate substances based on pieces of genetic codes.