If one were to create a dime-sized hole between thumb and forefinger and hold it out at arm’s length, in that small region the largest telescopes today, like those in Chile or Hawaii, could discern literally hundreds of thousands of other galaxies like our own Milky Way.

An NYRB article that I not only found humbling, but made me think we do not invest enough tim and money as a society in physics and astronomy.

…Since Edwin Hubble’s groundbreaking discovery in 1929 that the universe is expanding, we have recognized that the entire observable universe, all 100 billion or so galaxies, each containing 100 billion or so stars, was, some 13.8 billion years ago, confined to a region that was perhaps smaller than a single atom today. If this is the case, then the initial conditions that determined the origin, makeup, and nature of the largest cosmic objects today were determined on subatomic scales. So to understand the universe on its largest scales we ultimately must push forward our understanding of the fundamental structure of matter and forces on the smallest scales.