There was big news this week, if you get excitied about the origin of the cosmos.  It even came with a picture on the front page of the New York Times, what the universe looked like when it was a baby, only a few hunderd thousand years old.

They also tell us that the universe is 80 million years older than we thought.  All those universe birthdays we missed.

I am a bit confused though.  If you measure a year by how long it takes the earth to orbit the sun, and there was no earth or sun, then how do they know how to measure a year?  I may be on to something.

At the time of the Big Bang, the "visible" portion of the universe was smaller than an atom.  Not very visible - I can barely read fine print, much less see something that small.  At just thousandths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded millions and millions of times, and according to the article was the size of a grapefruit.  A grapefruit sized universe.  It would have taken no time to get to Cleveland!

What will science say about all of this a hundred years from now?  In the olden days they were convinced the world was flat and anyone who thought otherwise was a heretic and ridiculed.  The sun orbited the earth. Patients who were sick were bled, sometimes unwittingly to death.  The scientists were as certain of those beliefs back then as we are of the Higgs Boson today.

I wonder what of that will hold up.  If a hundred years from now will they laugh at our theory of gravity, or someone will propose the theory of unrelativity.  Only our universe really knows for sure.