Dark matter in the universe.

When I first started to read and learn about our universe, something struck me as odd: that all those massive stars and planets could just exist out there in nothing but empty space. Granted, they were supposedly moving around at high speeds, but it still seemed odd to me that they could be doing it all in air that was lighter than any we know on earth. In space, air has
no consistency at all. It's nothing. If they were moving about in absolute nothingness, wouldn't their speeds be infinite? But they weren't.

It occurred to me that there must be something holding them all up, slowing them down. I'm not a scientist, but it just seemed logical to me that the empty space we envisioned must be firmer than that, more solid. Sort of like a cosmic Jell-O. I didn't say anything about it to anyone for fear of being ridiculed, but it made sense to me. How could all those cosmic bodies be supported in nothing but air that had no density? Yes, gravity might account for some of it, but something was missing.

In short, I always thought that there must be some kind of substance that permeated the universe that held up all those stars and planets and asteroids and comets and whatever and still let them travel as they had to. I just didn't have a name for it.

Astronomers now say it's dark matter, something they can't explain but that they think may make up most of the known universe.

I love the idea of dark matter, this kind of gelatin material -- probably not what is out there at all but that provides a reasonable analogy for what really is out there -- that provides a base for all that we can see and can't see. It's the background stuff that holds everything else in place while still allowing the celestial bodies to move around in space. It's there, providing stability.

I do realize that I may be way off-base, just fantasizing, but the fact that scientists are starting to recognize its existence -- even if, like me, they don't know what it is -- gives me some hope that eventually we'll be able to analyze and understand it. On the other hand, maybe we won't. Maybe we'll be as baffled by this universal phenomenon a hundred years from now as we are right now.

And I'm cool with that. Who would want to live in a universe you understood? Who would want to know what goes on at a sub-atomic level where particles can't even be detected? Down where you and I are hatched and become us? Where everything becomes what it is? Shouldn't there always be some mystery? As a friend once said to me, Would you want to believe in a god you understood?

I love the idea of dark matter -- and also dark energy, which is somehow related but which I can't begin to understand, much less explain. To my way of thinking, the very facts of you and me defy explanation, not to mention the stars and all that other stuff.

So much of life can be explained and accounted for by biology and chemistry and psychology and all the other sciences. Isn't it kind of cool that some of it can't be?

I love thinking about the imponderables in our existence and not coming up with answers. Don't you?

Live life the best you can, but embrace the mystery.