How do you take the measure of the universe?

Let's all dig in and celebrate that wonderful question that here we are, little humans who just learned how to write only a few thousand years ago on a random little

ball of dirt and orbiting a random old star that you wouldn't be able to pick out from a crowd

and we're sitting here discussing measuring the universe. Whenever I need a reminder of just

how awesome science is and why I love this stuff, I think

of questions like that. And it's easy enough to measure, say, the width of the universe, which

we talked about last episode. And while this episode isn't exactly a sequel, you can think of it as

a spiritual successor, where we're asking not the size of the universe, but its structure, its arrangement,

its contents, and we've covered the large-scale structure of the universe before, but this

is going to go in a very different direction. It's going to go in a fractal dimension.

You see, back in ye olden times, like, you know, 40 years ago, we didn't really know all that

much about the structure of the universe.

We had some survey, some rudimentary survey, some maps of the universe around us.

And from those very, very rudimentary maps, we knew of galaxies and we knew of clusters of galaxies.

And that was pretty much it.

So either you had clusters, which were these massive cities, a million light years across,

containing a thousand

or more galaxies, or you just had galaxies scattered around randomly, something we called

field galaxies.

So you had cluster galaxies and field galaxies, and that was it.

We didn't even have any hints of anything larger, anything bigger.

I mean, yeah, way far away, we had the quasars, these objects that at first we thought

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