"Oh no you don't," grinned our small observor, "You were hoping I would forget. You promised to explain why the earth is hotter on the inside."

"Yes I did," complained the storyteller, "but we're getting pretty far away from a story about the Blue Whale."

The earth is hot on the inside because the nucleus inside some of the atoms that make up the earth is unstable. Some of the particles that make up the nucleus fly off, bump into other atoms and escape. When this happens , the atoms move faster, they heat up, and the earth gets hotter. The unstable elements, such as thorium, are called radioactive.

"So my young friend," said the storyteller, "now you have the whole story. If you wanted to,I guess you could say the Blue Whale is the biggest because some of Earth's elements are radioactive."

"Why?"

"Oh come on...you really don't want to go any farther. If I were to explain where radioctivity came from we would have to go back 4.5 billion years to the making of the solar system. We would have to go back even farther, to the birth of stars and atoms, and to the creation of galaxies. We would have to go all the way back to the Big Bang. I'm sure you must have heard of the Big Bang."

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