It seems that a great cluster of galaxies that is halfway towards the edge of the observable universe, is moving in a different direction from the general stretching of space-time. It's like a little boat caught in an eddy.
Cosmologists theorise that there may be massive, unobservable structures hundreds of billions of light years away, pulling these galaxies in their direction. They imagine that the universe beyond what we can see (c. 17 billion light-years) may be very different from ours.
And some of us laugh at mediaeval theological speculation. How foolish those people were, building elaborate worlds of internally-consistent ideas, applying nothing but logic to extend their understanding beyond the few things they were certain that they did know, attempting to move from the seen to the unseen.
And now we lift our gaze from the CERN to the unCERN.
I wonder what Ben Jonson would have made of it all?
May I prevail on you all for charitable contributions to fund a new chair of Marmite Studies?
