“What Is The Nature Of This Reality”

Consider the following: in the known universe, there could be up to one million million galaxies, each containing one million million stars, which itself might constitute 4% of a much larger unseen universe (if theories of dark matter and dark energy are true), the totality of which might have any number of dimensions -- between 4 and 57, depending on which theory is invoked. According to current theory, this universe came into existence in a Big Bang 14 thousand million years ago at what is taken to be the beginning of time, and it may be one of an infinite number of universes. From the smallest scales (microscopic aspects) of our universe which confront us with quarks as fundamental building blocks of matter (as we know it at the moment), to the possible existence of the Higgs Boson (the ‘God’ particle), to notions of quantum foam and virtual particles in a quantum vacuum, to the large-scale structure of the cosmos which presents us with exotic objects such as black holes, the reality which we call the cosmos provokes wonder and leads to fundamental questions which affect every human being: “What is the nature of this reality”, “what does it all mean”, “what is my place in this cosmos”, “what is the origin and fate of what I behold”, “what is the meaning of life”, and, simply, “why”. 

Link (here) to the full essay by Fr. David Brown, S.J. at The New Jesuit Review