I suffer from Compulsive Cosmology. The condition often manifests itself on clear summer nights when I’m out looking for the dog. For no good reason something in the sky catches my attention and the next thing I know I am standing with my head bent backward, slack-jawed, contemplating the scope and ultimate fate of the universe.

It is a cruel disease indeed that forces a middling intellect such as mine into this position. I was, after all, an English Major. The last science course I had was 12th grade Physics and my clearest memory of that was the teacher’s profoundly active case of dandruff. I never understood it. At age 17 even I had heard of treatment shampoo. That brief moment of intellectual superiority may be at the root of my Compulsive Cosmology. It left me with the unshakable delusion that I get the Big Picture.

Then as now what intrigues me about the universe is the utter impossibility of its scale. You cannot force your brain big enough to hold it and it is said to be expanding faster than you can think. Still, when I stare up at it and summer flies coast in and out of my mouth I feel as if I am on the verge of getting it. I see its shape, I feel its speed and know its age. And then the dog shows up and I go inside.

Dark Matter, Big Bangs, Big Crunches, Big Rips and Singularities have all contributed to the intellectual vertigo caused by Compulsive Cosmology. It can happen as easily as reading a little article in the morning paper, say, about something the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe recently discovered. If you’re wondering whether you suffer from CC, try this one on.

The probe has provided evidence supporting a theory that the universe went through something called “inflation” in the moments just following the Big Bang. In fact, it shows that the universe went from something the size of a grape to a volume larger than the entire observable universe of today in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

Think about this. If something right before your eyes went from the size of a grape to even the size of a watermelon in that amount of time – which is no time at all -- you would wet yourself. Thankfully no one had to suffer that embarrassment as this all happened about 14 billion years ago.

But if you felt your jaw relax after reading that news, then you certainly know the shame of Compulsive Cosmology. If you are right now trying to understand how a universe that is supposed to have a speed limit of 186,000 miles per second could move that fast, you have it. If you own a calculator that can actually do the math, you have it bad.

Why do we bother? I do not know. People with million dollar science grants and four times the mind I’m saddled with continue to puzzle over these things. Yet, there we are – eyes raised to the heavens, frozen in place as if under a spell. Could this irresistible urge be nature’s mechanism to shake loose the next Copernicus or Hawking? Give enough monkeys enough telescopes and you’ll find another Galileo? I doubt it. Chances are leaving us transfixed in the dark looking at the stars is simply the world’s well-worn way of allowing our dogs to find us again.

As heard on The Bob Edwards Show on XM/Sirius Radio July, 24, 2006