<chirp, chirp> “Moire here.”

“Um, Uncle Sy?”

“Hi, Teena! I didn’t know you knew my phone number. It’s past your bedtime. How are you? Is everything OK?”

“I’m fine. Mommie dialed you for me. I had a question she said you could answer better than her and that would be my bedtime story.”

“Your Mommie’s a very smart person in several ways. What’s your question?”

“Where’s the edge of the Universe?”

“Whoa! Where’d that question come from?”

“Well, I was lying on my bed and I thought, the edge of me is my skin and the edge of my room is the walls and the edge of our block is the street but I don’t know what any of the bigger edges are so I asked Mommie and she said to ask you. She’s writing something.”

“Of course she is. One answer is you’re smack on an edge, but some people think that’s a wrong answer so let’s talk about all the edges, OK?”

“On an edge??!? I’m in the middle of my bed.”

“Hey, I heard you sit up. Lie back down, this is supposed to be a bedtime story so we’re supposed to be calm, OK? All right, now. Once upon a time —”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Now hush and let me start. Once upon a time, people thought that the sky was a solid bowl or maybe a curtain that came down all the way to meet the Earth just over the horizon, and that was the edge of the Universe. But then people started traveling and they realized that the horizon moved when they did.”

“Like rainbows.”

“Exactly like rainbows. Eventually they’d traveled everywhere they could walk. As they went they made maps. According to the maps, the world they knew about was surrounded by ocean so the edge of the Universe was the ocean.”

“Except for Moana’s people that crossed the ocean.”

“Right, but even they only went from island to island. Their version of a map was as flat as the paper maps the European and Chinese explorers used.”

“But the world is really round like my world ball.”

“Yes, it is. It took humans a long time to accept that, because it meant their world couldn’t be all there is. A round world would have to float in space. Think about this — what’s the edge of our world?”

“Umm … the air?”

“Very good, sweetie. Way up, 60 miles high, the air gets so thin that we call that height the Edge of Space.”

“That’s the inside edge of space. Where’s the outside edge of space?”

“It’s moved outward as our astronomers have gotten better at looking far away. For a long time they thought that the outermost stars in our Milky Way galaxy marked the edge of the Universe. Then an astronomer named Edwin Hubble—”

“Oh, like the Hubble Space Telescope that made the pretty pictures in my ‘Stronomy book!”

“Mm-hm, the Hubble was named for him because he did such important work. Anyway, he showed that what people thought were stardust clouds inside the Milky Way were actually other galaxies like ours but far, far away. With the Hubble and other telescopes we’ve pushed out our known Universe to … I don’t even know the name of such a big number.”

“So that’s the edge?”

“We don’t think so, but we don’t know. Maybe space and galaxies go on forever, maybe galaxies peter out but space goes on, maybe something weird. But there’s a special ‘direction’ that we think does have an edge, maybe two.”

<yawn> “What’s that?”

“Time. One edge was the Big Bang, fourteen billion years ago. We’re pretty sure of that one. The scientists and philosophers argue about whether there’s another edge.”

“Wouldn’t jus’ be f’rever?”

“Mr Einstein thought it would. In fact, he thought that the future is as solidly real as the past is and we’re just watching from the windows of a train rolling along the time tracks.”

“Don’ like that, wanna do diffren’ things.”

“Me, too, sweetie. I prefer the idea that the future doesn’t exist yet; we’re on the front edge of time, building as we go. Dream about that, OK?”

“Okayy_yyyy“

~~ Rich Olcott