Tuesday, February 11, 2003

It intrigues me so
In a nutshell, the universe is 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus one percent . . . By weight it is 4 percent atoms, 23 percent dark matter — presumably undiscovered elementary particles left over from the Big Bang — and 73 percent dark energy. And it is geometrically "flat," meaning that parallel lines will not meet over cosmic scales.

The result, the astronomers said, is a seamless and consistent history of the universe, from its first few seconds, when it was a sizzling soup of particles and energy, to the modern day and a sky beribboned with chains of pearly galaxies inhabited by at least one race of puzzled and ambitious bipeds.


Still twisting my imagination to grasp what a "flat" universe is.