On Thursday, May 31, I will have the opportunity of introducing and participating in an evening with the World Science Festival presenting one of the most remarkable observations in all of science: a baby picture of the Universe. In 1965, in New Jersey of all places, two young scientists who had no idea what they were looking for, observed some unexpected noise in an antenna at the then Bell Laboratories. The noise turned out to be the afterglow of the Big Bang itself. In spite of the fact that we now realize that perhaps 1 percent of the static observed on a television screen exists even when the set is disconnected from cable and tuned to a channel with no broadcasts, this harbinger of our past remained hidden until relatively recently. The significance of this signal, called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, or CMBR, is so great that not one, but two different Nobel Prizes were awarded for observations of its nature. The most recent came from a ‘photograph’ that recorded the tiny “anisotropies” in the otherwise smooth background radiation. These small fluctuations—hotspots and coldspots deviating from the mean by less than 1 part in 10,000—reflect the primordial ‘lumps’ of …

Brian Greene continues the WSF Live Forum all month long. Each day, he’ll answer one of your questions for this ongoing series that delves into the fundamental nature of space, time, and reality as we may or may not know it. Today, Brian Greene considers two related questions: If the universe is expanding, is it theoretically not infinite? In other words, if the universe is infinite, how can it be a discrete thing that is expanding? And if it is not infinite, is space infinite? Or does “space” only exist inside the universe, and not beyond? —Michael Pick, New York, NY It is a truly awesome concept that the universe is expanding. But what is it expanding into? Into what “space” is it expanding and what happens to that “space” when the universe contracts/has contracted? —Andrea We don’t know whether the universe is finite or infinite. But in either case, the concept of “space expanding” raises basic questions: (a) what’s the universe expanding “into”? and (b) if the universe is in fact infinite, how can it expand as it seemingly can’t grow larger than the infinite size it already has? Let me address both. (a) When we speak of space …

Science communication is difficult. It can be crippled by the complexity of its own subject matter. It can be steeped in jargon, too dense for its readership, or, conversely, too simplistic to satisfy its critics in the scientific community. It can lack warmth, or be too paranoid about its empirical rigor to engage in the metaphoric flights—the quick shifts from microcosm to macrocosm—that cue readers to an emotional engagement in any subject. The problem may lie in an inescapable tautology: to fully understand a scientific, taxonomic, objective conception of the natural world is to be so steeped in scientific idiom that poetics become impossible. And yet, there are those who are capable of communicating the invisible phenomena of science to the public. These people are essentially bilingual. The Sagans, the deGrasse Tysons, the E.O Wilsons; Angier, Attenborough, Carson and Greene; the radio producers, writers, filmmakers, documentarians, and public speakers; these are our human bridges, our storytellers, fluent in both big and small. It’s a specific skill, to be a gifted science communicator—that rare person who can straddle two divergent worlds without slipping into the valley between the so-called “Two Cultures,” someone with hard facts in their mind and literary gems …