Word: cosmos
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...saying this is a definitive answer, but insofar as there are resources regarding the Jewish picture of the relation between human beings, God and the cosmos, it is restraint, dignity, strength and limits,” he added...
Cosmology is sometimes pooh-poohed as more philosophy than science. It asks deep questions about nature but provides unsatisfyingly vague answers. The cosmos may be 12 billion years old, but it could be as much as 15 billion. The stars began to shine 100 million years after the Big Bang, or maybe it's a billion. "Our ideas," acknowledges Max Tegmark of the University of Pennsylvania, "have been kind of wobbly...
What the satellite found, says Princeton University's David Spergel, a theorist on the WMAP team, "is that the universe can be explained with five numbers." First, the cosmos is 13.7 billion years old, give or take a negligible couple of hundred million years. Second, the first stars turned on just 200 million years after the Big Bang. Finally, the universe is made of three things in the following proportions: 4% ordinary atoms; 23% "dark matter," whose nature is still unknown; and 73% "dark energy," the equally mysterious force whose antigravity effect is speeding up the cosmic expansion. "This," says...
WMAP also confirmed what earlier experiments had suggested about a basic characteristic of the universe: the geometry of space-time, in the Einsteinian sense, is flat. That's consistent with a theory called inflation, which posits that the cosmos underwent a period of turbocharged expansion before it was a second old. "I have to admit," says Bahcall, "that I was skeptical of the picture theorists had put together. Inflation, dark matter, dark energy--it's all pretty implausible. But this implausible, crazy universe has now been confirmed with exquisite detail...
...about whether Job can go a mile and a quarter on a muddy track. In Bush's usage, evil has the perverse prestige of Milton's defiant Lucifer. Evil emanates, implicitly, from a devilish intelligence with horns and a tail, an absolutely malevolent personality, God's rival in the cosmos, condemned to lose the fight (eventually) but powerful in the world...