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Blackboard by Martin Rees.

Sir Martin Rees

Astronomer Royal

‘Some of us suspect that there is more to physical reality than what we’ve traditionally called ‘our universe’ -- the aftermath of ‘our big bang’. Moreover, other big bangs could give rise to cosmoses that behave very differently -- with more structure or less; with galaxies that are bigger, smaller, or nonexistent. These diagrams consider what the aftermath of the big bang would have been like if two particular parameters were different from the values in our actual big bang: the quantity Q that measures how smooth the universe is, and Einstein’s cosmological constant ‘Lambda’. The shading delineates regions where galaxies could form.’
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