Word: cosmos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...together the universe's past have two major pieces of evidence with which to work. The first is that the whole thing began with a Big Bang, an explosion of unimaginable heat and power, between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago. The second is that the modern-day cosmos is made up of galaxies. Gravity presumably played a role in the process, but the details are unknown...
...hypothesis to survive this crisis would take such complicated physics that the cosmos would have to operate like a Rube Goldberg machine. For the most part, though, nature follows simple rules. So while cold dark matter may exist, astronomers are beginning to search elsewhere to solve the mystery of how the galaxies were born...
...still another reason to be worried. Consider this: We're on the home stretch to the millennium.The end of a century, let alone a millennium, tends to bring forth bursts of energy and confusion. Even in 1990, as the Hubble space telescope peers deeply (sometimes fuzzily) into the cosmos, sliding toward the 20th century's close feels a little like sailing off the edge of the world. No one knows what is beyond...
...that make up its body. Here was an absolutely ordered society whose chief religious rite was human sacrifice -- penitential rituals, on an appalling scale, whose aim was nothing less than to keep reality in motion. The Mesoamericans believed that the world could stop at any moment, that the very cosmos was always on the brink of dissolution, its cycles maintained only by sacrifice. The sun would not rise in the morning over the lakes of Tenochtitlan if it were not refreshed by streams of blood...
LIGO will be 100 to 1,000 times as sensitive as existing gravity-wave detectors. That should be enough not only to confirm relativity but also to probe deeply into the most violent processes in the cosmos, including ) exploding supernovas, collisions between black holes, and "starquakes" on the semisolid surfaces of neutron stars. All of these phenomena are believed to send out characteristic bursts of gravity waves. Says Rochus Vogt, the Caltech physics professor who heads the joint M.I.T.-Caltech team that will build LIGO: "We are going to look at a whole new force as a transmitter of signals...