Our Universe
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.
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"One hundred years from this day
Will the people still feel this way?
Still say the things that they're saying right now"
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"One hundred years from this time
Would anybody change their minds?
And find out one thing or two about life"
[You just know I had to intro music given the "opening."]
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I won't explain Big Bang it but point you in the right direction. My CCNY ROTC fraternity brother and partner, Arno Penzias is mentioned in the following discussion:
Big Bang Theory - Evidence for the Theory
What are the major evidences which support the Big Bang theory?
First of all, we are reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning.
Second, galaxies appear to be moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance. This is called "Hubble's Law," named after Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who discovered this phenomenon in 1929. This observation supports the expansion of the universe and suggests that the universe was once compacted.
Third, if the universe was initially very, very hot as the Big Bang suggests, we should be able to find some remnant of this heat. In 1965, Radioastronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a 2.725 degree Kelvin (-454.765 degree Fahrenheit, -270.425 degree Celsius) Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) which pervades the observable universe. This is thought to be the remnant which scientists were looking for. Penzias and Wilson shared in the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery.
Finally, the abundance of the "light elements" Hydrogen and Helium found in the observable universe are thought to support the Big Bang model of origins. Want more? go here:
http://www.big-bang-theory.com/
Friarly, Michael Appell
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