Over the course of this year I will share with you a new “Mind Blowing” piece of information each week. Before we begin pause and have a good look around you. Chances are, things seem relatively sedate, your surroundings calm. There'll be no sense at all that you’re actually on the surface of a giant spherical rock that's rotating at 1600 km/hour as it hurtles at 110,000 km/hour through near infinite space, circling a giant sphere of burning plasma. Or that our giant spherical rock - along with others of its ilk and several humongous balls of gas - is part of a solar system that's moving at an average speed of 828,000 km/hour as it travels around the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.
It isn't only these speeds that are astonishing, it's the volumes too. Our solar system is just one of possibly 400 billion such systems in our galaxy. What's more, our galaxy is just one of possibly 500 billion galaxies in the observable universe. As your brain attempts to process these colossal cosmic numbers, it will use its 100 billion neurons to do so. Give or take a few billion.
This collection of facts has been carefully curated with accompanying illustrations that aim to demonstrate just how spectacularly strange the universe around US is.
From quantum mechanics and general relativity to immortal jellyfish and mathematical insects, this series will take you from the origins of the universe and life here on Earth, to everywhere in between.
Whilst every effort has been made to ensure all the mind-blowing facts are as up to date as possible, such is the wonderfully changeable nature of our universe, that some things may have altered slightly in the mean time.
As the eminent British-Indian scientist J.B.S. Haldane famously declared in his essay collection Possible Worlds (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1928): 'My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. He was dead right too. | 
