By Ron Cowen
To see the light, you sometimes have to journey through darkness. That aphorism, it seems, applies not only to journeys of the heart but also to excursions through the history of the universe. In the largest and most detailed computer simulation of this cosmic saga, something utterly dark shapes the universe as it unfolds over some 13.7 billion years.
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That new simulation traces the fate of the universe’s original stocks of energy and matter from just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang to the present.