| | Understanding our Cosmic Environment | The preeminent mystery is why anything exists at all. What breathes life into the equations of physics, and actualized them in a real cosmos? Such questions lie beyond science, however: they are the province of philosophers and theologians. For science, the overarching problem is to understand how a genesis event so simple that it can be described by a short recipe seems to have led, 13 billion years later, to the complex cosmos of which we are a part. Was the outcome "natural," or should we be surprised at what happened? Could there be other universes? Scientists are now addressing such questions, which had formerly been in the realm of speculation. Cosmology has a history that stretches back for millennia, but the conceptual excitement has never been more intense than it is at the start of the twenty-first century. The Sun and the firmament are part of our environment—our cosmic habitat. Artistic and mystical geniuses share this perception with scientists. D. H. Lawrence wrote, "I am part of the Sun as my eye is part of me." Van Gogh's "Starry Night" was painted in the same spirit as his pictures of cornfields and sunflowers. One can find numerous other such examples in the arts. Science deepens our sense of intimacy with the nonterrestrial. We are ourselves poised between cosmos and microworld. It would take as many human bodies to make up the Sun's mass as there are atoms in each of us. Our existence depends on the propensity of atoms to stick together and to assemble into the complex molecules in all living tissues. But the atoms of oxygen and carbon in our bodies were themselves made in faraway stars that lived and died billions of years ago. Technical advances during the twentieth century, especially its later decades, have enriched our perspective on our cosmic habitat. Space probes have beamed back pictures from all the planets of our solar system: new technology enables a worldwide public to share this vicarious cosmic exploration. Pictures of a comet crashing into Jupiter, made with the Hubble Space Telescope, were viewed almost in real time by more than a million people on the Internet. During this first decade of the twenty-first century, probes will trundle across the surface of Mars and even fly over it; they will land on Titan, Saturn's giant moon; and samples of Martian soil may be collected and brought back to Earth. Our universe extends millions of times beyond the remotest stars we can see—out to galaxies so far away that their light has taken 10 billion years to reach us. Bizarre cosmic objects—quasars, black holes, and neutron stars—have entered the general vocabulary, if not the common understanding. We have learned that most of the stuff in the universe is not at all in the form of ordinary atoms: it consists of mysterious dark particles, or energy that is latent in space. We now envision our Earth in an evolutionary context stretching back before the birth of our solar system—right back, indeed, to the primordial event that set out entire cosmos expanding from some entity of microscopic size. Deeper insight into the nature of space and time may enlarge our conception of the cosmos to embrace other universes beyond our own. These may manifest extra spatial dimensions and other concepts so far from our intuition that we shall grasp them with difficulty, if at all. … Our universe could have turned out to be an anarchic place, where atoms and the forces governing them are bafflingly different elsewhere in the cosmos from those we can study locally. But atoms in the most distant galaxies seem identical to those in our laboratories. Without this simplifying feature, we would have made far less progress in understanding our cosmic environment. | — Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat | Indexes/11 | 
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Arts and mysterious genius share this view and scientists. DH Lawrence wrote: "I am the sun, because my eyes are part of me." Van Gogh's "Star Night" is painted in the same spirit, because of his photos, corn and sunflower.
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