We should think of the cosmos as more like an animal than a machine
It is hard to come to terms with the sheer scale of space: hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and, at a minimum, trillions of galaxies in the universe. But to a cosmologist there is something even more intriguing than the boggling numbers themselves, which is the question of how all these stars and galaxies were created over a period of 13.8 billion years. It’s the ultimate prehistoric adventure. Life cannot evolve without a planet, planets do not form without stars, stars must be cradled within galaxies, and galaxies would not exist without a richly structured universe to support them. Our origins are written in the sky, and we are just learning how to read them.
It once seemed that, for all its immensity, the cosmos could be understood through the application of a small number of rigid physical laws. Newton encapsulated this idea, showing how apples falling from trees and planetary orbits around our sun arise from the same force, gravity. This kind of radical unification of earthly and heavenly phenomena survives in modern teaching: all the innumerable molecules, atoms and subatomic particles in the universe are expected to obey the same set of laws. Most of the evidence suggests that this assumption holds true, so it should follow that perfecting our understanding of these laws will resolve any remaining questions about cosmic history.
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