ENERGY!

Energy is `THE` most important ingredient in the recipe for the Universe, for all of life, and the complexities of our natural world and that of human nature. That one single ingredient that binds us all together, is the most talked about and most studied subject in science, in today`s modern world. Humans have been asking the same questions for as long as we have been able to talk to each other, and we are getting tantalizingly closer to those answers with each new generation!

In the last 200 years or so, we have made giant leaps in getting to grips with that knowledge because we are putting in the resources needed to get us nearer to those all important answers! We are investing billions of pounds into the sciences which in turn will secure our future and that of the world as we know it. The more we find out about the Universe, the more questions we have for it, so the more we invest in the sciences, the closer we are getting to finding those all important answers. For every question we think of, there is an answer! We just have to work hard, and together, we will find those answers, they are there just waiting for us to find them.

SO WHAT DO WE KNOW SO FAR?!

We know that at 13.7 billion years old, 45 billion light years across and filled with a 100 billion galaxies - each containing hundreds of billions of stars - the Universe as revealed by modern science is truly humbling in scale and dazzling in beauty. But paradoxically, as our knowledge of the Universe has expanded, so the division between us and the cosmos has melted away. The Universe may turn out to be infinite in extent and full of alien worlds beyond imagination, but current scientific thinking suggests that we need it all in order to exist.

Without the stars, there would be no ingredients to build `US` Without the Universes great age, there would be no time for the stars to perform their alchemy! The Universe cannot be old without being vast; there may be no waste or redundancy in this potentially infinite arena if there are to be observers present to gaze upon its wonders. The story of the Universe is therefore `our` story and it is getting longer and more detailed with every chapter that we write, with each question that we find the answer to; tracing our origins back beyond the dawn of man, beyond the origin of life on Earth, and even beyond the formation of Earth itself; back to events - perhaps inevitable! perhaps pure chance! that occurred less than a billionth of a second after the Universe began, that very first spark of energy, the energy that has made you and I and the Universe that we exist in.

Without energy we are nothing, with energy the Universe is infinite. Energy is the beginning of everything and therefore energy is infinite. What a wonderful and beautiful Universe we have at our fingertips and the fascinating thing is, it continues to expand and all because of that one single ingredient!

ENERGY!

G xx