Word: cosmoses
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...magnificence of the visible stars, astronomers know they are only the first shimmering veil in a cosmos vast beyond imagination. Armed with ever more powerful telescopes, these explorers of time and space have learned that the Milky Way is a huge, whirling pinwheel made of 100 billion or more stars; that tens of billions of other galaxies lie beyond its edges; and, most astonishing of all, that these galaxies are rushing headlong away from one another in the aftermath of an explosive cataclysm known as the Big Bang...
...broadest outlines, since the 1960s. But in more than a third of a century, the best minds in astronomy have failed to solve the mystery of what happens at the other end of time. Will the galaxies continue to fly apart forever, their glow fading until the cosmos is cold and dark? Or will the expansion slow to a halt, reverse direction and send the stars crashing back together in a final, apocalyptic Big Crunch? Despite decades of observations with the most powerful telescopes at their disposal, astronomers simply haven't been able to decide...
Things seemed a lot simpler back in 1965 when two astronomers at Bell Labs in Holmdel, N.J., provided a resounding confirmation of the Big Bang theory, at the time merely one of several ideas floating around on how the cosmos began. The discovery happened purely by accident: Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were trying to get an annoying hiss out of a communications antenna, and after ruling out every other explanation--including the residue of bird droppings--they decided the hiss was coming from outer space...
...child in the Bronx, Byron, now 42, was kept indoors much of the time by a near crippling asthma. But confinement married him to music, a music perceived not as a continent divided into separate principalities but as a unified cosmos. "A lot of the [music] that I've investigated in my life," Byron says, he first encountered "within the walls of my bedroom in my parents' house"--which is to say, within the infinite walls of imagination...
...child in the Bronx, Byron, now 42, was kept indoors much of the time by a near crippling asthma. But confinement married him to music, a music perceived not as a continent divided into separate principalities but as a unified cosmos. "A lot of the [music] that I've investigated in my life," Byron says, he first encountered "within the walls of my bedroom in my parents' house" - which is to say, within the infinite walls of imagination...