Word: cosmically
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...About 300,000 years after the instant of the Big Bang, the entire visible universe would have been a cloud of hot, incredibly dense gas, not much bigger than the Milky Way is now, glowing white hot like a blast furnace or the surface of a star. Because this cosmic glow had no place to go, it must still be there, albeit so attenuated that it took the form of feeble microwaves. Penzias and Wilson later won the Nobel Prize for the accidental discovery of this radio hiss from the dawn of time...
...discovery of the cosmic-microwave background radiation convinced scientists that the universe really had sprung from an initial Big Bang some 15 billion years ago. They immediately set out to learn more. For one thing, they began trying to probe this cosmic afterglow for subtle variations in intensity. It's clear through ordinary telescopes that matter isn't spread evenly throughout the modern universe. Galaxies tend to huddle relatively close to one another, dozens or even hundreds of them in clumps known as clusters and superclusters. In between, there is essentially nothing...
...astrophysicists tried another approach: determine whether the expansion was slowing down, and by how much. That's what Brian Schmidt, a young astronomer at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia, set out to do in 1995. Along with a team of colleagues, he wanted to measure the cosmic slowdown, known formally as the "deceleration parameter." The idea was straightforward: look at the nearby universe and measure how fast it is expanding. Then do the same for the distant universe, whose light is just now reaching us, having been emitted when the cosmos was young. Then compare...
...both teams knew something very weird was happening. The cosmic expansion should have been slowing down a lot or a little, depending on whether it contained a lot of matter or a little--an effect that should have shown up as distant supernovas, looking brighter than you would expect compared with closer ones. But, in fact, they were dimmer--as if the expansion was speeding up. "I kept running the numbers through the computer," recalls Adam Riess, a Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer analyzing the data from Schmidt's group, "and the answers made no sense. I was sure there...
...There is a third method of dealing with examination questions—that is by the use of an overpowering assumption, an assumption so cosmic that it is sometimes accepted. For example, we wrote that is was pretty obvious that the vague generality was the key device in any discussion of examination writing. Why is it obvious? As a matter of fact, it wasn’t obvious at all, but just an arbitrary point form which to start. This is an example of an unwarranted assumption...