These words describe the essence of the ancient Greek view of the creation. They are, of course, much more than faint echos of creation myths from all over the world. I have always liked the ancient Greek description because it anticipates and antedates our modern scientific concept of the beginning of the universe, the essential evolution of both physical and the biological order out of chaos. Note too the role played by darkness and its evolution into light.
Now scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, using some of the fastest computers in the world, have developed a computer program, the Illustris Simulation, that models. The model inputs the fundamental laws of physics and outputs a simulated image of what the universe looked like at each stage of the thirteen billion years of cosmic evolution. Be sure to watch some of the videos on the Illustris site. We watch the emergence of both light and matter out of bands of dark matter. What is quite remarkable is the success of Illustris in predicting, for instance, the forms of galaxies and a direct side-by-side comparison of what the universe should now look like and Hubble images of what it does look like. In this image the left hand side is from Hubble, the right hand side from Illustris. You have to look hard to see the split. Such is the fidelity of the prediction.
We have spoken before about how computers can generate images that never really existed – of imagined worlds. Placed in this scientific construction the split between reality and the imagined blurs. What is real becomes imagined. What is imagined becomes real.