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

another view Other wisdom seekers through the ages have seen the beginning in a softer, fluid, always unfolding flower metaphor. Their story contains eggs and lotuses and magic, and in it all matter is born from waves and nurtured in a field of comprehensive creativity that some people call Nature and some people call God or God's mind. If they are right, that means God is everywhere, always. Everything floats in a mysterious field that is commonly called space, but it is not empty space, and it is sometimes called the Quantum Vacuum, but it is not a vacuum. It is also called the Zero Point...

the machine view The mainstream Creation Story of the Universe is called The Big Bang and in science it’s largely about mathematics. In this story, enormous explosions blow more or less discrete bits and pieces adrift in space at great speed and they come together with some violence to form Everything. In philosophy, this view is said to be mechanistic and reductionist, supporting a view that the Universe is without purpose. Philosophy is not attracted to purposelessness, but science doesn't care. Science is attracted to this story, perhaps because it is helpful in the search for a beautiful...

Cosmos The so-called Universe is said to have started in an instant (a measure of Time, which itself did not exist just before that instant). From an infinitesimally small singularity, science argues, everything erupted more or less at once in relative Time terms. It expanded by a factor of a million trillion trillion times in a fraction of a second. As the story goes, the Universe continued to unfold for 13.798± 0.037 billion years to the present moment, and is still unfolding. No one knows what preceded that original instant. Stephen Hawking says nothing did. We know a lot about what...

about Science is largely unclear about what the Cosmos is and how it works. There is particularly mystery at the interface of the vast and the tiny. But the old paradigm of a clockwork universe of organized parts is fading behind an emergent story in which a seamless web of energy and information stitches waves and particles together to form matter and life, including humans. The seamless web is thought by many to be driven by some sort of consciousness, which is also pervasive, that is to say, everywhere, always. The idea of the individual is fading too, as the concept that all is one seeps...

EVERYTHING (parts of) Nothing is certain, but a field of energy and information pervades the Universe and everything in it. NEXT