 Just how the universe evolved from small-scale matter deviations at the time of decoupling, to filaments of superclusters and vast voids can be explained by a physical process called caustics. Originally developed to explain light behavior, it works just as well for protons and dark matter. I see this phenomena in my own backyard. The lines at the bottom of a swimming pool are examples of caustics caused by small waves on the surface of the water. And when we extend this to three dimensions, we get curved surfaces with increased density that intersect along lines that intersect at points. This is the web-like pattern we see in the large-scale universe. By collecting distances to thousands of galaxies in a narrow strip of the sky, it is possible to produce a slice of the universe, like this one from the 2DF Galaxy Redshift Survey. In 2003, this survey looked out into the universe to 3.5 billion light-years. Between 2000 and 2008, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey conducted one of the most ambitious and influential surveys in the history of cosmology. Over eight years of operations, it obtained deep, multi-color images covering more than a quarter of the sky and created a three-dimensional map containing more than one million galaxies. These are the color-enhanced slices through the survey's three-dimensional map of the distribution of galaxies. Earth is at the center, and each point represents a galaxy. Galaxies are colored according to the age of their stars, with the redder, more strongly clustered points showing galaxies that are made of older stars. The outer circle is at a distance of two billion light-years. The region between the wedges was not mapped by the survey because dust in our own galaxy obscures the view of the distant universe in these directions. Even with the Virgo consortium of scientists from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the survey put every data point into a supercomputer and produced the largest 3D image ever created. Here we are zooming into and panning across that image. Here you cannot see individual galaxies or even galaxy clusters. What we see are superclusters linked together in filaments or walls in a gigantic cosmic web. In this view of the cosmos, the great Virgo supercluster is just a dot. There are more stars in the universe, and there are grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. This is the big picture of our universe as we understand it today.