Your Place in the Universe - The Illusion of Knowledge and Understanding

"Our universe was born in mystery, but that doesn't mean that puzzling specters don't still haunt the modern days cosmos. By 1960s we had firmly established both the big bang and beginnings of the standard model. We knew the universe both inside and out. That would be the last time we would feel so assured in our knowledge." p 118 " 'Center' doesn't have any meaning in an expanding universe." "The uiverse has no center. The big bang didn't happen somewhere over there. It happened everywhere. It happened in the room you are sitting in, in the distant galaxies, and in all the voids between...The big bang wasn't an explosion in" space, it was an explosion of space." "it [the universe] has no center, it has no edge...by definition the universe is all the things." p.120 "There is simply no such thing as an outside to the universe." p. 122 "...the whole observable universe ...a sphere about 93 billion light-year across....But there is much more universe that we can't see --more galaxies, stars, solar systems....completely inaccessible to us...." pp 122-123 "How old is the universe? 13,799,000,000 years plus or minus 21 million years 'since' the big bang." p.123 "...time is relative in special relativity. But the game of cosmology is played with general relativity, which is,...more general. Due to the way the cosmic microwave background was emitted (across the entire universe at about the same time in about the same way), you can use that to find the heart of the cosmological clock....once you measure the CMB, you can compute a frame of reference that is, at rest, relative to the universe. Once you know that, you can measure the universally common time (called the conformal time) since the big bang." p. 124 "The modern picture of our universe, as painted by hundreds of observations and experiments independently searching for answers and cross-checking each other, from the cosmic microwave background to distant supernovae to the weights of clusters of galaxies, is cold and bleak:13.8 billion years old, composed of less than 5% normal (light-loving) matter. One-quarter dark matter and three-quarters dark energy. It's geometrically flat, but the expansion is accelerating, for reason we don't fathom. We call it 'concordance cosmology,' as it's the result of many different lines of research that all point to the same bleak conclusions. It's a completely different universe from the one explored hundreds of years ago. That universe was complicated and messy, but small and hot. Cozy and alive. The universe revealed in the modern age is old and slow, well past its prime and dominated by mysteries piled on mysteries. It turns out that the efforts of generations of scientists over the course of centuries have barely even scraped the cosmological surface." pp. 187-188 Your Place in the Universe - Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence Paul M. Sutter (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2018) ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "Despite the chances being so incredibly low, accidents happen every single day.".... "Accidents find a way, and life is an accident waiting to happen." A Game of Chance p.236 Dark Energy Currently, regular matter makes up 5% of the energy budget of the universe, 25% goes to dark matter, and 70% is in the form of dark energy...In the distant past, when evrything was crammed together, it was more than 99% matter. In the future, as our cosmic butter gets spread too far out, it will be more than 99% dark energy. pp.241-243