So Many Galaxies, So Many Planets Out

In Essence, We String Theorists Have Been Trying To Work Out The Score Of The Universe, The Harmonies Of The Universe, The Mathematical Vibrations That The Strings Would Play. So Musical Metaphors Have Been With Us In Science Since The Beginning.

Science Is Very Good At Answering The 'how' Questions. 'how Did The Universe Evolve To The Form That We See?' But It Is Woefully Inadequate In Addressing The 'why' Questions. 'why Is There A Universe At All?' These Are The Meaning Questions, Which Many People Think Religion Is Particularly Good At Dealing With.

I Love It When Real Science Finds A Home In A Fictional Setting, Where You Take Some Real Core Idea Of Science And Weave It Through A Fictional Narrative In Order To Bring It To Life, The Way Stories Can. That's My Favorite Thing.

The Pinpoints Of Starlight We See With The Naked Eye Are Photons That Have Been Streaming Toward Us For A Few Years Or A Few Thousand.

That Is, You Can Have Nothingness, Absolute Nothingness For Maybe A Tiny Fraction Of A Second, If A Second Can Be Defined In That Arena, But Then It Falls Apart Into A Something And An Anti-something. And That Something Is Then What We Call The Universe. But Can We Really Understand That Or Put Rigorous Mathematics Or Testable Experiments Against That? Not Yet. So One Of The Big Holy Grail Of Physics Is To Understand Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.