Universal truths

In Douglas Adams’s fictional romp through space, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the galactic computer Deep Thought took 7.5m years to work out the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything. It should just have asked scientists at the European Space Agency who, after four years, are close to their own answer. It is much more intriguing – and encouraging – than Deep Thought’s 42.

The Planck space telescope, launched in 2009, has sent back the first baby pictures of our universe. By mapping the radiation echoes left behind by the Big Bang, we can now look at the very beginnings of the cosmos and the signs for our future are better than we thought. For a start we need no longer fear hyperinflation – at least the cosmological kind. Without it, there would be no universe. Planck shows how the universe expanded exponentially in a nanosecond after the Big Bang. There will be those who spot parallels with the Big Bang that brought deregulation to the City of London and launched exponential growth in high finance. But while the universe will carry on expanding, the financial world is under pressure as never before. The Big Crunch theory, where the universe snaps back in on itself, may have been discredited in cosmology. It is, however, being applied with vigour to the galaxy of finance.

We also now know that there is more dark matter and less dark energy out there than we expected to find. That means the forces that are holding the universe together are stronger than many believed in the battle against those trying to pull it apart. The only problem is that scientists still do not know just what these forces are made of. We can only infer their properties from the influence they have on other objects – a bit like quantitative easing.