Universe to astronomers: I am stranger than you imagine
4 December 2025
Kurzgesagt making sense of a non-sensical universe:
For decades, we’ve had a beautiful theory of the cosmos. One that explained how the universe began, what it’s made of, and how it’s supposed to behave. It matched our observations astonishingly well and made us feel like we’d almost deciphered the cosmic code. But in the last few years, as our telescopes got better and our data sharper, cracks started to appear. Strange mismatches between what the theory predicted and what we actually saw.
British astronomer Arthur Eddington wrote in a book published in 1927, saying: “not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” He was riffing on the words of compatriot scientist J. B. S. Haldane, who wrote, also in 1927: “now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
Stranger. Queerer. Take your pick.
These people nailed the nature of the universe one hundred years ago, with a fraction of the knowledge we have today. And what we know now will likely only represent a mere fraction what we’ll know in another one-hundred years. I think it’s a little too soon to say we’ve figured out the universe.
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