A Vision of A Universe

“What these pages [in the National Geographic Atlas of the World] opened to me was the vision of a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence. Billions, upon billions, literally, of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other. Each thermonuclear furnace being a star and our sun among them. Many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces, littering the outermost reaches of space with dust and gas out of which new stars with circling planets are being born right now. And then from still more remote distances beyond all these there come murmurs, microwaves which are echoes of the greatest cataclysmic explosion of all, namely the Big Bang of creation which according to recent reckonings must have occurred some 18 billion years ago” (Program 5, track 13).