Mind Bending Facts About The Universe That Will Mesmerize You (12 pics)

Mind bending? Mesmerizing? No. Old, simple, but at least true. For something a little above 3rd-grade level, read Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, or Lawrence Krauss, to name a few.

Or Stephen Jay Gould, on how Pikaia Gracilens was, until recently, the earliest known chordate, and therefore a necessary ancestor to every vertebrate; that is to say, us and everything with a spine.

To paraphrase Gould: Rewind the tape of time. If Pikaia does not survive the Burgess Shale decimation, we are, all of us, wiped out, from fish to whale to bird to dinosaur to cow to human to horse and so on. Not a single vertebrate species will spawn until another chordate arises, which could be millions or hundreds of millions of years.

That, my 3rd-grade, caption-writing friends at Acid Cow, is mesmerizing.

#1 Actually, a hydrogen atom is 99.9999999999996% empty space,

#7 This just isn't true. We can see bright stars and globular clusters that are far outside that circle, and the Andromeda galaxy is over 2 billion light years away and well outside of our galaxy.

Recycled facts huh?