What is the Universe Made Of? A Journey Through the Seen and Unseen

Opening Note:

This entry is an invitation to contemplate the invisible threads that hold the universe—and perhaps even the self—together. What lies behind the stars, the atoms, the silence? What we see is only a sliver of what is.

If 95% of the universe is invisible and unknown… what else am I not seeing?

The composition of the universe as understood by modern physics:

1.       Dark Energy (~68–70%)

A mysterious force causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. It works against gravity, pushing galaxies apart. Einstein once imagined it as a mathematical fix—now it's central to our cosmological models.

Important: Space is expanding, not galaxies speeding through it. This allows distant galaxies to recede faster than light without violating relativity.

2.       Dark Matter (~27%)

It doesn’t interact with light and can’t be seen, but it reveals itself gravitationally.

It binds galaxies. Without it, they would fly apart.

What is it made of? No one knows.

3.       Ordinary Matter (~3-5%)

Everything we see—stars, planets, people—is less than 5%.

And within that, less than 0.5% is stars and planets.

Most is interstellar gas and dust—hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang.

Galaxies, Stars, and Planets The James Webb Space Telescope and other surveys suggest there may be 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. These may contain hundreds of trillions of stars and an even larger number of planets.

Estimates suggest that the Milky Way could have up to 60 billion potentially habitable planets (rocky planets in the habitable zone of their stars).

 Quantum Mechanics and "Nothingness" In quantum mechanics, particles behave as waves when not observed, and collapse into a specific state when measured—this is called the wavefunction collapse. These wavefunctions exist in Hilbert space, an abstract mathematical space that describes the probabilities of a particle’s properties. This leads to strange implications about the nature of matter and reality.

This understanding changes everything.

The “real world” we experience is just a tiny ripple in a vast, dark ocean.

What we call "solid matter" is mostly empty space.

Atoms are 99.9999% void. The particles within them behave like waves until we observe them—then they "collapse" into something we call real.

But what is “real”?

Are we perceiving particles? Probabilities? Equations?

Is the universe more mathematical than material?

Just like the mind.

Isn’t it striking? That both the outer cosmos and inner self are made mostly of what we don’t know?

What we observe is only the tip of the iceberg—both in the universe and within ourselves.

Dark matter holds galaxies together.

Could something invisible hold our consciousness together too?

What if the 95% we don’t understand about the universe mirrors the 95% of the self we’ve yet to meet?