We Are Living Through A Remarkably Privileged

One Of The Wonders Of Science Is That It Is Completely Universal. It Crosses National Boundaries With Total Ease.

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.

I've Seen Children's Eyes Light Up When I Tell Them About Black Holes And The Big Bang.

The Revelation We've Come To Is That We Can Trust Our Memories Of A Past With Lower, Not Higher, Entropy Only If The Big Bang - The Process, Event, Or Happening That Brought The Universe Into Existence - Started Off The Universe In An Extraordinarily Special, Highly Ordered State Of Low Entropy.

Black Holes Provide Theoreticians With An Important Theoretical Laboratory To Test Ideas. Conditions Within A Black Hole Are So Extreme, That By Analyzing Aspects Of Black Holes We See Space And Time In An Exotic Environment, One That Has Shed Important, And Sometimes Perplexing, New Light On Their Fundamental Nature.