A Quick Inventory of Modern Science. Part 1 - The Universe

Before embarking on the journey of logging my evaluations of the Vedas, I am inclined to take stock of some fundamentals of modern science so that I may refer back to them in future log entries.

The underpinnings of modern science are hypothesis (based on gathering observable and measurable evidence), test, observation and analysis to compare observation with hypothesis.
The evidence must be subject to logical/mathematical reasoning.

Based on these principles some of the established beliefs and boundaries of modern science are as follows.

On the Universe and its Creation:

- The Universe as we know it was created with a Big Bang about 13.7 +/- 0.2 billion years ago.
- It is unknown what the state of the universe or matter was there before this creation time.
- The age of the earth is 4.55 billion years (plus or minus about 1%).
- The span of the Universe is increasing, in fact the expansion is accelerating.
- Modern science does not know what the universe is expanding into or what the known universe is contained in.

- The acceleration of the universe actually came as a shock to scientists in 1998 because the believers in the Big Bang theory assumed that the gravitation inherent in the mass of the universe would slow its expansion down. This has led to a postulation that there is a "Dark Energy" (not to be confused with Dark Matter) which is believed to pervade the vacuum of space but the source or logic of its existence cannot be explained. Hence the adjective of "Dark".

- All bets are off today about the prediction of the duration of existence the universe. It was hoped that the lifespan of the universe would be possible to deduce if the universe were slowing in its expansion - so that the deceleration (and subsequent contraction) owed to gravitation could be used to time the duration to return to initial state just before the Big Bang. The accelerating expansion has killed the application of this logic.

- Gravitation is the dominant force at the macro scale of the Universe, so much so that this dominance allows black holes to pull in even light.

- Modern Science does not explain why the Big Bang happened or how ALL matter could exist at 'one point' before the Big Bang.