Cosmos

Believers are calling 7/7/07 The Magnificent Seven because it could quite possibly be the luckiest day of the century. Wedding chapels and casinos are bracing for an onslaught of fortune-seekers. Thousands of couples - twice, even three times the average for a summer Saturday - plan to be married in a state of seventh heaven. And, for what it's worth, you can expect a critical mass of people sending out positive vibes. But with Mercury in retrograde, astrologers say, the sevens won't be universally lucky.

Believers are calling 7/7/07 The Magnificent Seven because it could quite possibly be the luckiest day of the century. Wedding chapels and casinos are bracing for an onslaught of fortune-seekers. Thousands of couples - twice, even three times the average for a summer Saturday - plan to be married in a state of seventh heaven. And, for what it's worth, you can expect a critical mass of people sending out positive vibes. But with Mercury in retrograde, astrologers say, the sevens won't be universally lucky.

It once had the reputation of being a girlish kind of art - too "pretty," not serious - and there's still a lot of schlock out there. But classic botanical illustration bears no resemblance to those flower pictures you see on powder-room walls. The real stuff is pure, exquisitely natural, and true to life, pulling you deep inside the ruffly petals of a pink parrot tulip or the velvety throat of a plum-colored foxglove. "It's a fine art, and it's beautiful," says Louisa Rawle Tin?, who teaches botanical illustration at the New York Botanical Garden and at Chanticleer in Wayne.

At 1:02 a.m. - plus exactly three seconds - tomorrow, in the fourth month of the year, on the fifth day of that month in the sixth year of the decade, an event that may be simultaneously spectacular and randomly mundane will occur. At that moment, in the linear human concept we call time, the numbers 01-02-03-04-05-06 will align in perfect sequence. And depending on whether you are pathologically superstitious or logically mathematical, this once-in-a-lifetime moment means something.

Last week, researchers announced that data collected by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001, show that just a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the "big bang," the universe suddenly expanded from the size of a marble to its present immeasurable size. The WMAP measures minute variations in the density of the cosmic microwave background, a leftover heat signature of the big bang found all over the sky. The minute variations in the background's density are thought to be directly responsible for the current structure of the universe.

The ancients began it, reaching up and out with the warm arms of myth, naming their stars: Aldebaran, Bellatrix, Arcturus, Rastaban, Rigel. Characters in constellations, related, familiar. On a winter night in the mountains, by a still lake, the sky vaults weightless, vast and black. A man stands on the shore, looks up, and feels himself a thing insignificant, flinging small words that absorb into the dark and vanish there. And now we have built a better telescope, lifting the cosmic veil like a curtain from a window in a strange house on a dark night.

In the next couple of weeks, do a simple, invigorating thing for yourself and your species. Go outside at night and look up and see Mars. Really see it. There will never be a better time. Mars is now closer to Earth than it has been in 60,000 years. Recorded history is only 6,000 years old. So in a way, what is happening right now is something that has never happened in human memory. You can really see Mars right now. It looks great: beacon-bright, basketball-red. As of tomorrow, it will be "full Mars," the rosy, round face of the planet nice and close.

Call it the baby picture of the universe. Or call it God's fingerprint. At first glance, this green oval splashed with red, yellow and blue resembles a cross between a Tiffany lamp shade and a Jackson Pollock painting. Pretty. Pretty cosmically amazing. For this is the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) full-sky map of all the cosmic microwave radiation in the universe. The WMAP project, done in a partnership between Princeton University and NASA, was released Wednesday; it's named in honor of David Wilkinson, an eminent cosmologist and team member who died last year.

Just when you thought that daily life couldn't possibly get more nerve-racking, scientists at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey announced that the universe is going kaput much faster than previously believed. Their brand-spanking-new theory contradicts the old assumption that the cosmos would slowly degrade into an all-encompassing static state of nothingness, much like the summer TV season. Now they've determined that material in the cosmos is actually speeding up as it explodes into the dark and dismal void.

Bantam Books will soon reissue its updated - illustrated - edition of Stephen Hawking's wildly popular A Brief History of Time. Beware. As part-time scientific food-taster for my readers, I can report that, having devoured Hawking's original book not once but twice, it leaves no trace. That is because it is entirely incomprehensible. Illustrating the book seems to me akin to tarting up hieroglyphics with Etruscan annotation. Want an invigorating scientific experience? I have a better idea: the new Hayden Planetarium in New York.