SCIENCE21 - Primer on the Universe and its Mysteries
I have long wanted to better understand the universe , so following my primary objective in choosing blog topics - to learn something - this blog will be about the universe - what we know about it, and what we don’t know. I will start out by defining the universe , and then talk about how it began, and how it operates, followed by noting the key remaining mysteries (major unknowns) about the universe. Then I will talk about each of these mysteries. I will list my principal sources at the end. I will be talking a lot about theories, and computer models that try to simulate or represent the complex actions and interactions of elements of the universe - many of which cannot be observed. We can learn a lot by observing various phenomena, but models are useful to test theories against observations, fill in the gaps, and predict and extrapolate results. But models are only as good as our understanding of the physics involved, and as we shall see, there are a l...