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Screen capture from video uploaded by Ascend UK

Have You Ever Wanted to Walk Through the Universe? Here’s How!

This park is complete with models of black holes, the Milky Way galaxy, the Sun, and more. 

| 2 min read

This park is complete with models of black holes, the Milky Way galaxy, the Sun, and more. 

A once abandoned industrial coal mine has been transformed into a Universe-themed park, complete with models of black holes, the Milky Way galaxy and the Sun (image above) — just to name a few!  It is called the Crawick (pronounced “Croyck”) Multiverse and it is located 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Glasgow, Scotland, in the countryside of Dumfries and Galloway.  

With over 55 acres, the park is being called a modern take on Neolithic monuments such as Stonehenge, which paid tribute to the movements of the Solar System.  This park, on the other hand, focuses on the latest advancements in physics, including chaos theory and the idea of parallel universes.

Charles Jencks, a landscape architect who created the park, was given the land by Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry after the mine shut down because they did not know what else to do with it — nothing would grow.

SEE ALSO: Our Mirror Universe: Where Time Moves Backwards

However, once excavation began, thousands of boulders were revealed, and Jencks decided to turn them into massive statues inspired by objects found in the universe.

“One theory of pre-history is that stone circles frame the far hills and key points, and while I wanted to capture today's cosmology, not yesterday's, I was aware of this long landscape tradition,” Jencks told BBC Earth.

And Jencks is no stranger to building these sorts of grand monuments.  His house near Dumfries sits along the Garden of Cosmic Speculation: a landscape of terraces and sculptures which all represent some sort of scientific idea.

The Crawick landscape explores the idea of parallel universes, which has been suggested by several physical models.  To represent this, a mound of mudstones trace a spiral path up to the top — representing the multiverse — but along the way, some slabs are carved out to symbolize other potential universes where different physical laws apply.

universe representation

photo credit: Screen capture from video uploaded by Ascend UK

Meanwhile, two corkscrew like mounds represent the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, both of which belong to a cluster called the Local Group.  People are able to walk along the mounds in an attempt to grasp the enormous scale of them.

Universe representation

photo credit: Screen capture from video uploaded by Ascend UK

Jencks said that he hopes the park will “confront the basic question which so many cosmologists raise: why is our universe so well-balanced, and in so many ways? What does [this] apparent fine-tuning mean? How can we express it, make it comprehensible, palpable?”

This is not the first time science has been turned into art, and it is definitely a more aesthetically pleasing way to inform the public about the wondrous nature that is our universe.
You can watch this short aerial video capturing some of the beautiful structures at Crawick:

 

You might also like: Our Universe is a Hologram, According to Some Physicists

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