Thursday 8 March 2018

The big universe

A few days ago I was again wondering about "all that is" (i.e the Universe), and the possibility  that the "flaring forth" which created "our" universe, could in itself create infinite universes. Douglas Adams, in  "A hitchhiker's guide to the universe" warns us: the universe: "The universe is big! I mean really big. If you think that walking to get your daily papers from the news-agent and back again is  long, it's absolutely nothing to the universe"  (I quote from memory!). Probably the first of those who realized that things were a lot bigger than reached by a very long camel ride was, perhaps, the Greek thinker Eratosthenes, who released that the earth curved, and measured quite a good shot its size. And it took until to 1653 for Huygens to estimate our distance from the Sun. Now we reach out with distances whose very means of measurement have repeatedly been recreated (see wikipedia.org/wikei/Universe). But where remains the question "why is there something, not nothing?".

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