The Universe. It’s the only home we’ve ever known. Thanks to its intrinsic physical laws, the known constants of nature, and the heavy-metal-spewing fireballs known as supernovae we are little tiny beings held fast to a spinning ball of rock in a distant corner of space and time.
Doesn’t it seem a little rude not to know much about the Universe itself? For instance, if we could look at it from outside, what would we see? A vast blackness? A sea of bubbles? Snow globe? Rat maze? A marble in the hands of a larger-dimensional aliens or some other prog rock album cover?
As it turns out, the answer is both simpler and weirder than all those options. What does the Universe look like is a question we love to guess at as a species and make up all kinds of nonsense.
Hindu texts describe the Universe as a cosmic egg, the Jains believed it was human-shaped. The Greek Stoics saw the Universe as a single island floating in an otherwise infinite void, while Aristotle believed it was made up of a finite series of concentric spheres, or perhaps it’s simply “turtles all the way down”.
Thanks to the mathematical genius of Einstein, cosmologists can actually test out the validity of various models that describe the Universe’s shape, turtles, mazes, and otherwise.
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