But take it from someone who grew up in Venezuela, surrounded by a fictional universe of Chávez's making: These interpretations are all wrong. For one, they assume that the scientific understanding of the world is somehow the natural route-the obvious one, the longstanding one-when in fact, blind faith was until very recently the unvarying constant of civilization.

"The anatomic description that had been laid down over 100 years of anatomy was incorrect. This organ is far from fragmented and complex. It is simply one continuous structure," Professor Coffey explained.

In physics we're not supposed to talk about how we feel. We are a hard-nosed, quantitative, and empirical science. But even the best of our dispassionate analysis begins only after we have decided which avenue to pursue. When a field is nascent, there tend to be a range of options to consider, all of which have some merit, and often we are just instinctively drawn to one. This choice is guided by an emotional reasoning that transcends logic

The movement of the Milky Way is dominated by the gravitational attraction of the galaxies around it. If galaxies were scattered randomly through space, the pull would be the same in every direction. But galaxies are not evenly spread out in the universe. As a result, patches of space that are dense in galaxies draw others towards them, while regions that are emptier than normal literally fail to pull their weight: they effectively push objects away from them.

What is the holographic universe idea? It's not exactly that we are living in some kind of Star Trekky computer simulation. Rather the idea, first proposed in the 1990s by Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft, says that all the information in our 3-dimensional reality may actually be included in the 2-dimensional surface of its boundaries. It's like watching a 3D show on a 2D television.

According to standard quantum theory, particles have no definite states, only relative probabilities of being one thing or another-at least, until they are measured, when they seem to suddenly roll the dice and jump into formation.