Older, No Wiser

We, however, with the news the last few days coming out of CERN and the Planck agency have even more reason than ever to feel ourselves infinitesimally incidental. We are far less than a speck within the universe, even taken collectively by numerical presence and weight. Our intelligence and our accomplishments, are without meaning in the larger perspective of the immensity of the universe.

All the more so with the hints of the universe we inhabit as an insignificant presence within its unknowable space, may be merely one universe among many.

This universe, of which scientists and physicists and astronomers are increasingly becoming more knowledgeable while at the same time declaring themselves to be in possession of a minuscule amount of information about where we are and how we are and the existence of an imponderable universe -- barely cognizant of what it all represents.

We exist, and this is about the extent of our certainty. We think. There are so many permutations and possibilities and theories and intuitions; which to accept? That we exist side by side and unknowingly with a reality unknown to us, but paralleling our own?

We know what our senses, our faculties inform us of. What we see, what we hear, what we discuss between ourselves, and what emotions and our sense of touch tells us is there. Are there more elevated senses that we cannot make use of because we are not in possession of them? Who knows, certainly not us.

"We've uncovered a fundamental truth of the universe. There's less stuff that we don't understand by a tiny amount", according to George Efstathiou, director of the Kavil Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge who had announced the Planck satellite mapping result in Paris.

Informing that new observations from the European Space Agency's $900-million Planck space probe reinforced predictions decades old on the basis of mathematical concepts. Surely that speaks volumes for the potential of the human mind to visualize what it cannot see, cannot prove, but simply intuits.

Hazarding predictions that later prove to be solidly real because they are proven through technical instruments giving unassailable results.  "It's a big pat on the back for our understanding of the universe. In terms of describing the current universe, I think we have a right to say we're on the right track", exulted California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll.

The Big Bang, the physical event that created the universe as we imagine it, was an event that occurred inconceivably, mysteriously, to create something out of nothing. There was space and nothing else visible, nothing to be seen, simply deep, dark space. And what is space?

It is nothing. Out of that nothing in the matter of a split second - and compare that element of time to the reality of limitless years - say for example 13.81-billion, a single atom exploded, cooled, then expanded instantly to become the universe. This is what scientists inform us occurred and which we are to take on trust.

Does it matter if we do or if we don't?

Looking at the afterglow of the Big Bang is how the Planck space probe deciphered the event, and assessed the time frame. The telescope has spent fifteen months mapping the sky, its "light" fossils and sound echoes from the Big Bang through background radiation inhabiting the cosmos.

It tells us - or the cosmologist-physicists tell the world - that the cosmos is steadily expanding, but slower than thought, it has a little less of dark energy, a substance little understood and recently 'discovered' to exist, and a little more 'normal' matter.

Whatever it all means.

Our world and its place in the vastness of the universe, so vast that we can scarcely understand all the possibilities and details of what is tentatively described and understood by the elevated cerebrums of this world, is allowing itself to be made more clear to those minds.

CERN's announcement last week of the discovery and confirmation of the fabled Higgs boson particle explaining the universe's mass, was the first radical hint of a change in the way scientists view physics.

"You can get very, very strange answers to problems when you start thinking about what different observers might see in different universes", said Mr. Efstanthiou, with the acknowledgement that the Planck results may introduce entirely new fields of physics, and that we can anticipate peculiarities difficult to resolve in attempting to explain the cosmos to ourselves.

If we can, ultimately.

Fascinating, but what does it all signify?

We are born, we die, others take our place, and the world continues. We think. We hope. With the universe steadily expanding, and Earth moving incrementally away from the sun, what does the future hold?

Suspense. In the inconceivable future.