Multi-millionaire Felix Dennis has a great line about feeling like he's nothing more than 'a miserable worm on an insignificant planet, circling an enormous universe'. He's trying to say that we're all pretty small fry, really, whether we're unemployed labourers, busy salaried professionals or wealthy entrepreneurs like him. In the grand scheme of things, every one of us isn't much more than a worm, he says, and we should never forget that, no matter how marvellous we might be tempted to think we are, looking back over our grand careers or serial money-making schemes.

Actually, it's worse than that. Most of us have heard of The Big Bang theory. It's a picture of how the universe came about, and involves imagining that everything started from a small dot, billions of years ago. So, the theory goes that there was a huge burst of energy and when that started to cool, it turned into stars, and those stars gathered into galaxies. Some of the matter coalesced into planets, and, after an unimaginable long time, life happened to start on this one, were we are now. If you believe that, then you must be feeling a little humble already. You look up into the night sky and you see millions of other stars, more or less like our sun, and each of those is in its own galaxy, and we now know that there are millions of those. They drift off into the distance as far as the eye can see. Well, that's far. The problem for us dreamers, which modern science has now brought forward for us to think about, is actually that there's more. Much more. There's other stuff, way beyond 'what the eye can see'. It goes out further, they say. Much further.

If you thought you were insignificant, think again. You're actually far less important than that. You see, scientists have been worried for a few years about the fact that they came up with this Big Bang idea, but when they ran the numbers, they couldn't find all the fall-out. There must be more, they said, looking at the formulas in front of them. There should be lots of other matter, more stars maybe, more galaxies, like millions of times more. One explanation might be that there is more stuff around us, but we can't see it. Perhaps that space between the stars is full of muck, but it isn't visible. It was a good idea, they called the stuff Dark Matter, and astronomers went back to their telescopes to look for it. They haven't found it yet, and their new theory simplifies and gets rid of that problem. It isn't there, they say, not exactly in that place, anyway. That doesn't mean that there isn't more stuff, like they said at first, it just isn't within our seeing distance. Imagine all the universe that we're looking at, all the stars and galaxies, and imagine that that whole thing is about the size of a grapefruit. Now try and picture that grapefruit sitting in the middle of a football field. Maybe that's more like it, say the modern theoreticians. There isn't any Dark Matter, not within our bit of the universe, but there is a load of other stuff, yes. It's just far, far away. I mean, really far away. You thought Star Wars was 'far, far away'. It's beyond that. Way beyond it.

Hey, that's a pretty big concept. No, it's worse than that. Another theory, tying in with that last one, is that our football field isn't the only one. There could be more, lots more. Have you got a fish tank in your house? I used to have a few goldfish and we had a pump that bubbled water up the side, to oxygenate the water for them. Can you picture that? Imagine all those bubbles sliding up the side of the glass. Now, imagine that the Big Bang didn't just cause one huge explosion that's expanding out and into the vacuum. Think about it this way: the Big Bang caused a series of bubbles, and our bit is just one of them. All of it, all this stuff we've got, our galaxies, our football field, is just one of a series of bubbles, and there could be millions of them out there, we just can't see them. Wow, that's pretty big, isn't it? We haven't even started to picture what the 'whole thing' looks like, but it isn't just what we see, that's the point. It's like we're a small fish, circling the bottom of a large pond. We can see the weeds and stones around us, we just can't even begin to imagine that there's a thing called 'the ocean', down at the end of our river.

You think that's the end? Nope. If the Big Bang idea is right, then it might also mean that when the universe cools down a bit and stops expanding, it could all start collapsing in on itself, and the big stuff might all get squashed back up into a little point again. Then it would go 'bang' and start booming outwards, one more time, all over again. That would happen in the future, billions of years away, far beyond our comprehension. But what is really scary, for a non-scientist like me, is the new idea that the cycle we're talking about, the expansion and contraction, could have happened before, as well as being about to happen again. It could have happened lots of times, hundreds or even millions of times. How long would that take? Quite a long number of years, far beyond anything we can picture in our imaginations right now.

Now if that doesn't make you feel small, just a little tiny cog in the wheel of life, then you aren't really thinking at all. But it could be useful. Most of us are so bound up in the next business deal, or the next promotion, or the next pay rise, it could be good to sit back, kick off our shoes and try and picture the universe. It might just give us the sense of perspective we need. All our hopes, our dreams, our dreads, our fears, are pretty small compared to 'the bigger picture', aren't they. Because, after all, it's big, isn't it? Very big.