ABSTRACT
Cosmologists tell us that our universe began in a primal density in which all the structures and differentiations we take for granted were collapsed in on one another. The constituents of future atoms and molecules were all there, but they were packed together tightly. Our world, the world as we know it, has evolved into atoms and molecules, stars and galaxies, and planets, animals and people, and spaces, vast spaces. The explosive force that powered all that development into differentiated and bounded entities is called the “Big Bang.” But perhaps the greatest mystery of modern astronomy is that the extraordinary centrifugal rush into differentiated structures and boundaries and spaces seems to be balanced by an opposite, centripetal force that keeps all those structures from flying apart, that brakes the force of the Big Bang, that connects the seemingly separate and autonomous elements of our universe, and that may eventually draw them all back together again into yet another cataclysmic rebirth. There is something else, “hidden matter” in the seeming vacancy of all that space, that generates enough gravity to tie together even galaxies rushing apart across mind-numbing distances into a single force field.
