the Mystery Some think we will gradually understand Everything and others think it is impossible more or less by definition to understand Everything. In any event, most Everything is still a mystery. There are clues but not much evidence. Imagination is much faster than Science, so the scientific evidence lag is getting pretty substantial. We aren't really talking about science any more. The Big Mystery is what came before the Big Bang. Millions of humans believe there is a mind at work, and some call that the Mind of God. Scientists tend to believe as an article of faith that there is no God,...

Cosmos big This Cosmos thing is pretty big, and so far has been proven to be bigger than any human’s brain. There is disagreement about whether “Cosmos” is a container for “Universe” or vice versa. The words are used more or less synonymously, but some scientists and philosophers believe there are multiple universes, not just the one we know, and so it’s a little clumsy to refer to Everything as The Universe. Cosmos is conceivably less confusing, implying a sense of Allness, or Oneness. Which, in the current discussion, is increasingly The Point. In these posts, for the moment, we'll...

solar system Near the edge of this whirling mass is a middle-sized star we call the Sun, and around the Sun whirl a number of planets in a group we call the Solar System. One of those planets is called Earth, and on Earth life formed and grew. Earth seems like a lonely planet because while there is evidence that life could exist on other planets there is no evidence that it does. NEXT

stars A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity. Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter, the others being solid, liquid, and gas. Stars are constantly coming and going. When they go, they throw off metals and other matter. That stardust is the matter we are familiar with, especially the living matter. Physicists like to say we are made of stardust. NEXT

mother cluster When work on this book was started, it was said that our Milky Way Galaxy is in The Virgo Supercluster but as the book has moved along, so has the Milky Way’s home. It’s now said to be in a supercluster named Laniakea, which is one of millions of superclusters in the observable Universe. Laniakea is Hawaiian for "immeasurable heaven.” It looks sort of like the image above without all the fanciful lines and colors. Those lines are flows of movement of galaxies, most of them moving toward the Great Attractor at the center of Liniakea. This is another visualization of Laniakea....

billions and billions In these galaxies, stars and their solar systems whirl around at high speed, slowly coming together toward the galaxy’s central Black Hole. The number of stars in your average galaxy is about 100 billion. The galaxy where we live is called the Milky Way. It contains 200–400 billion stars and may contain at least as many planets, which whirl around those stars. Scientists tell us that this vast galaxy is moving through space at a velocity of 343 to 391 km per second, depending on the relative frame of reference. It is estimated to be about 13.7 billion years old,...

lightspeed As the space telescope named Hubble has peered out into the Universe through the clarity of the quantum vacuum, humans have seen back in time to nearly the Big Bang. We can do that because light has a constant speed and it’s taken nearly 14 billion years for the earliest light to reach us just now. And still it unfolds. NEXT

vastness discovered Not long ago scientists didn't understand about the existence of galaxies. They just saw fuzzy spots everywhere. They thought there was just one galaxy - ours. But Edwin Hubble, looking through an earth-bound telescope, realized these spots were very far away and moving further away, he realized there might be a lot more going on out there than we’d been thinking about. The concept of many galaxies was born and so was the idea that ours was just one small one among billions. The rest of the universe was born to us as a concept unlike previous concepts. NEXT

filaments Some see the physical cosmos as a collection of giant bubble-like voids separated by sheets and filaments of galaxies of stars, with superclusters of galaxies appearing as occasional relatively dense nodes. The bright spots in this picture are not individual stars; they are superclusters of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars. This Universe is a big thing. NEXT

emanating Whatever the metaphor one chooses, the basic story is that suddenly everything started all at once and moved very fast. Some researchers believe the early Universe was a liquid. Waves of energy and information struck out across nothing, and some of the waves came together into particles, and then into atoms and molecules and cells and so on. Dinosaurs, Cleopatra, the oceans, the Moon; the whole Universe slowly came into being and it is what it is today, and it is still unfolding. NEXT