Gardener's Guide to the Universe

The fifth of July always leaves me shell-shocked along with the animals that live in the adjacent park. A doe and two very small spotted fawns took refuge in my yard. I guess smaller animals just hunkered down and waited out the fire-storm.
This year was worse than usual because it seemed like everyone was shooting off three times more fireworks than usual. They started before dark and lasted until after one. I could not even guess how many tens of thousands of dollars people spent to make fleeting flashes of light and a lot of noise that left the air heavy with smoke.
I don't know why I always feel the need to double check this stuff. Even though I knew before I looked that the pow in gunpowder began as a bit of light striking a chlorophyl molecule in a lovely green plant that turned it into chemical energy commonly called sugar. Eventually after countless other reactions it (the energy) ended up stored as a piece of charcoal. From there it was made into gunpowder. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
I saw an interesting show on PBS the other night that talked about the composition of diamonds which showed several odd things that carbon can do. Synthetic diamonds might some day replace silicon chips in computers as well as a lot of other things. But I'm off track again.
Carbon does a lot of interesting things from explosions to diamond crystals to that little chemical reaction we call life. So while contemplating these things I began to wonder how astro-physicists intend to discover a unified theory of the universe without taking carbon forms into the equation. While I'm pretty sure unifying attempts include the nuclear reactors of stars- turning light into chemicals, I've never noticed any physicist mention the significance of plants turning light energy into chemical energy. With much less to-do than those flashy stars, too.
Astro-physicists work very hard on understanding the large phenomena in the universe and on small fragments of atoms, but why do they skip over what those odd little atoms of carbon are doing? If I wanted to understand everything, I would start there.
Nancy Sherer