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How Big Was the Universe When It Was First Born?
StartsWithABang writes: Looking out at the distant stars, galaxies and radiation in the Universe today, we've been able to determine not only what it's made out of, but how long it's been since the Big Bang: 13.8 billion years. Put all that information together, and you can also figure out how large the observable part of that Universe is today. From our point of view, it appears to extend for 46.1 billion light years in all directions. So what if you extrapolate backwards, to the very end of inflation and the start of the hot, dense state we identify with the Big Bang, and ask how large that 46.1 billion light year "size" was back then? How big would it be? Depending on the particulars of when inflation came to an end, the answer is somewhere between the size of a soccer ball and the size of a city block, no smaller and no larger.
Can't read TFA. Does anyone got a link to an article that isn't behind an anti-adblock page?
IInformation wants to be free. It's part of cosmic entropy.
I find the evidence supporting this theory to be severely lacking. Whoever published it must have quite a pair of brass balls.
you're no better or more accurate than religious beliefs.
They definitely are.
Is the common wisdom passed down from the ages.
Note that this is only talking about the portion of the original the universe that became today's observable universe. There's absolutely no reason to believe that the size of the observable universe is the size of the total universe (and we happen to be at the very dead center of it.)
There is good reason to believe that the universe is far far larger than the observable universe, and it may even extend infinitely in all directions, for all we know. Measurements on the curvature of the universe make that a plausibility.
Please slashdot, please let us block posts by submitter not just by editor. PLEASE. This shit is becoming unbearable.
Very cool, but got me wondering... So how come the gravitational force didn't collapse it into a black hole?
Looking out at the distant stars, galaxies and radiation in the Universe today, we've been able to determine not only what it's made out of, but how long it's been since the Big Bang: 13.8 billion years.
Umm, not so much.
Might want to check out other theories like ones that incorporate quantum theories.
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-b...
"(Phys.org) - The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.
The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a "Big Bang" did the universe officially begin.
Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately afterâ"not at or beforeâ"the singularity.
"The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org."
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The bing bang was a finite time ago (a constant finite value). In the 'beginning' it was finite.
How the hell it could grow with an 'infinite' speed when the speed of light is finite?
>Hi again. Looks like you’re still using an ad blocker. Please turn it off in order to continue into Forbes’ ad-light experience.
No, I won't. Does Forbes provide me any guarantee against malwares?
It's very unlikely to have an event that happens once and once only.
Bang, and all of space time are created? And that's it? never happens before or since? The maths uniquely defined this once? Unlikely.
If it happens over and over again, then you're better off looking for a recycling mechanism rather than some special one-off god like creationism idea.
So we have a thing we can see, the observable universe, and there many been zillions of these outside of our observation. So the end game for a universe is not cold death, or collapse, its "stuff shoots off joins some other universe which collapses in and bang again".
And if this has been going on forever, and all matter isn't in one unimaginably large black hole, then it follows there is a limit to how big a black hole can get. So it must pop somehow.
So how much matter can a black hole suck in before it pops, and why does it pop? That's the question to answer.
If you find you have to create a magic field to explain a one off thing, then you're probably barking up the wrong tree.
0) Install ghostery or disconnect. The Forbes.com spam site is infested with 3rd-party crap.
1) Install greasemonkey (FF) or Tampermonkey (Google Chrome)
2) Follow the instructions at https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer
3) Now you can read the (mostly regurgitated crap) articles there without the fucking landing page.
If you have a lot of mass in a small enough space, the gravitational pull of the mass creates a black hole. If all the "stuff" in the universe was in such a small space, then how do you get an expanding universe? You should have a black hole from which nothing will ever escape.
You're missing NoScript and NoForbes, two essential add-ons for anyone who doesn't want to be screwed by clueless or evil webbies and braindead websites.
Then was this universe born in a black hole?
Surely if all 'size' was in there, it was as 'big' as it is. The metric was changing then, just as it is changing now.
... for these oh-so-special snowflakes.
How the fuck are the cocksucker shitstains at Forbes detecting that I am running AdBlocker, and how can the motherfucking logic be defeated?
Science does not know everything.
Religion does not know anything.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oddly all I had to do is be persistent and click "yeah, ok, lemme in" enough times.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Allow me to link to the non-Forbes, non-ad-infested, non-ad-blocker-blocking version of the article: http://scienceblogs.com/starts...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The more important question, of course, is not "how big was the universe when it was first born," but "what gave birth to the universe?"
Love sees no species.
Can you name any other type of thing that happens ONCE and only ONCE?
I think it would be outside science, since results need to be repeatable!
Hence you have this oddity, "the big bang" creating this *one* universe and all of space time and it only happens once, for some magic reason.... defying everything else we know.
And likewise Inflation, one magic thing happens, then gone, never to appear again. Again a fixup singleton.
How the fuck are the cocksucker shitstains at Forbes detecting that I am running AdBlocker, and how can the motherfucking logic be defeated?
This^ is the reason for all the Ethan/Forbes hate, narcissistic nerds absolutely hate somebody who can slam the door shut on their hand crafted, ad-free, browser. Especially when that "somebody" is the marketing department of a mainstream financial rag.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
like today. What a dumb question.
Our universe was a soccer ball sized weapon stored in a missile rack on one of the star cruisers of the high masters. It was fired at an enemy installation during the ieter-universal wars. Our universe is just the debris field that occurred after detonation.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
If the universe is 13.8 billion years old and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light how can it be bigger than 27.6 billion light years across? How can it extend for 46.1 billion light years in all directions?
Size of a football for us that aren't North American.
Same.
An association football ("soccer") ball is 22-23 cm in diameter
An American football ball is 28 cm from tip to tip on the long axis, and 18 cm in diameter.
This article is about order of magnitude, and these two numbers are identical to well within order of magnitude.
http://www.football-bible.com/...
http://www.livestrong.com/arti...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
That the Americans use "proper" British English and the English don't is ironic.
Actually it is not - languages change over time. The proper english term today is 'football' - in fact 'soccer' and 'rugger' were only really ever used as slang terms so hardly "proper" english. The problem is that America doesn't keep up with english which is, by definition, the language native to England. If you want to keep calling the language you speak english then you need to keep up with those changes.
you're no better or more accurate than religious beliefs.
They definitely are.
They are better or more accurate than religious beliefs if, and only if, their work can make predictions about things that can be measured.
Conventional big-bang cosmology definitely did make testable predictions: the cosmic microwave background; the isotope ratio of elements formed by nucleosynthesis in the high density plasma of the early part of the big bang.
Whether inflationary cosmology--or the even more speculative landscape cosmologies-- will make similar predictions is still somewhat open. Right now inflationary cosmology does have one success; it predicts the isotropy of cosmic background radiation even from regions causally disconnected in the early universe. It's hard to find another hypothesis that also makes this prediction, so inflation is getting to be pretty well accepted as a baseline, at least until some better model comes along that also fits the data. But there are many people looking for that better model.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Size of humans is right in the middle of that range.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I always thought inflation occurred after the Big Bang, not before it. Wonder where I got that idea...
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
The second problem is the Big Bang Theory is not-even-Science -- there is no way to replicate or reproduce the experiment!
I completely agree with your assessment of the one you colourfully name "Starts-With-A-Shit" since he gets his particle physics wrong all the time too. However I have to disagree with your assessment of the Big Bang Theory.
For a start it has made several predictions which have turned out to be correct: the relative abundances of the elements in the Universe and the cosmic microwave background. Secondly it is partly reproducible in the Large Hadron Collider in that we can recreate the conditions of the early universe to figure out the physics and then make predictions on how the universe would look today if it had started in a Big Bang.
There are still some unknowns such as Dark Matter and how the matter/antimatter asymmetry came about but that is one way to test the model: if we find that the physics behind these is incompatible with the Big Bang then we will have falsified the model. Hence since it makes predictions, is falsifiable and is partly reproducible it is hard to argue that it is not science.
Can you name any other type of thing that happens ONCE and only ONCE?
Science is about things you can observe. Whether there is just one of them, or many of them, isn't really an issue. The issue is whether you can observe it.
You can observe the universe, so making observations about the universe is science, even though there is only one universe. (At least, only one we can observe).
I think it would be outside science, since results need to be repeatable!
You can repeat measurements of the universe.
Hence you have this oddity, "the big bang" creating this *one* universe and all of space time and it only happens once, for some magic reason....
Ah, the "magic" reason is the tricky word here. If we can come up with hypotheses to explain why that can be tested by observations we can make, it's not magic any more. Often the hypothesis come first, and the tests later. When atoms were first proposed, for example, it was pointed out that they could not possibly ever be observed; they were just hypothetical objects that allowed us to make models about what could be observed.. But we measure and observe them now.
defying everything else we know.
But the whole point is to come up with hypotheses that don't defy everything we now know. And that's harder and harder as we know more and more.
And likewise Inflation, one magic thing happens, then gone, never to appear again. Again a fixup singleton.
Does the hypothesis have consequences that can be observed and measured? If it does, it's not relevant whether it happened once, or many times, as long as we can make those measurements. Can we measure it with observational astronomy? Can we create inflationary conditions with particle accelerators recreating conditions similar to the big bang? Can the inflationary fields themselves be measured in some other way we haven't thought of? Until we measure something, it's a hypothesis.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I am more concerned about the universe being 46 billion light years in all directions....More likely we can only see 46 billion light years.
Actually we can only see 13.8 billion light years in each direction because that is the age of the universe and so the furtherest possible distance that light can travel in that time. You should indeed be very skeptical about the 46 billion light year number because that is an extrapolation as to where the objects we can see now are but, without actual knowledge of the rate of expansion, there is no way to know whether that number is right. It's also rather strange to take a photo of something and then state the distance where the object is now rather than the distance shown in the photo.
However you should not be skeptical about the distance being uniform. If we lived in a 2D universe then you could imagine it as being on the surface of an expanding sphere. If you looked in all directions around you then the universe would appear the same but this would also be true for anyone else in the universe since you would all be sitting on the surface of a sphere. This is the same thing for our 3D universe but it is far harder to imagine!
Xenu had it right.
> From our point of view, it appears to extend for 46.1 billion light years in all directions
If the universe is really only 13.8 billion years old, then surely the size of the universe from our point of view can only be 13.8 billion light years in all directions?
Fuck Forbes. Fuck them to all fucking hell Don't EVER link to those motherfuckers again!
Now consider the probability that human beings made a fatal error in constructing the big bang theory. This number may be extremely small, but it is a gazillion times bigger than the former number!
The more likely possibility is that human beings made an error. Thus it is more rational to believe in the possibility with the greater probability, namely that human beings made a fatal error in constructing the big bang theory.
Welcome to David Hume's argument against miracles! It is valid.
Evolution didn't happen. God created everything 6000 years ago. Watch Kent Hovinds movies.
Add UserCSS, e.g. with Stylish:
So, if this planet isn't special, where's everyone else?
Gah! The internet is FULL of garbage pseudo-sciencey articles like this one where somebody makes lots of declarations about the unproven and it's supposed to be taken as anything more than a figment of the author's imagination. I assert that the measurement I have just given is more accurate that the answers the author provided and I challenge the author to PROVE why his answer is more accurate.
NOBODY has any experience with the sorts of pressures and temperatures involved or even possibly currently-unknown states of matter that might be involved in such a scenario.
NOBODY has any experience with the ways the basic laws of physics might be altered by changes in the size and shape of the universe naturally implied by having it be "small" at the beginning.
EVERYTHING about the initial conditions of the universe is so unknown to us that there is simply no way to honestly assert ANYTHING about it. One cannot experiment upon it, model it, text it, nor observe it...... and even if one COULD observe it with an ideal space telescope placed at an ideal location in the universe and aimed in the precise direction (something we will never actually be able to do) to see "back in time", one would still be likely to see a distorted view and not know how to calibrate the observations to properly remove the distortion (the instruments and observations themselves whould be affected by the changes in the fabric of space-time
Chalk this one up to "junk science" somebody is hyping to get published.
Wouldn't it be more likely and logical that Jesus created the Universe, the sun and moon and stars and planets as it is written in the Bible?
infinite. There is no way for us to know.
...it was big enough to fill the entire universe. Even if it was the "size" of a mere soccer ball, there was no time or space beyond.
Yeah, the size of the universe is interesting from a purely academic standpoint but isn't it meaningless? I mean it's still the whole universe, right? Although toward the end of the article we have the implication that it WASN'T the entire universe - just what we can observe. So there may have been volume beyond the soccer ball. And if there was, does it matter? Does it affect our universe initial conditions?. And what's up with the superluminal expansion? And not just a little superluminal - it makes the USS Enterprise look like a slacker. At what point did the speed of light limit kick in and why? What changed? Something just doesn't make much sense. Can universal laws just change? Obviously they did - superluminal expansion wasn't just a feature, it was a necessity since density at that point had to make your run of the mill black hole look like a dense fog. So escape velocity was way over light speed. This implies things were weird as hell.
Okay. If the universe is 13.8 billion years old and the fastest stuff travels at the speed of light and the initial size of the universe is something "macro" in scale (between a soccer ball and a city block), then why isn't the universe 13.8 billion light years in diameter? Where does the 46.1 billion LY come from? Thanks!
inflation kept going making the universe larger thus the light further away had to cover more space
there were too theories about the universe in the astrophysics community;one that the universe doesn't have enough mass to stop expansion and that the universe will expand until everything dies out spread out in an empty dead void; or the other theory that there is enough mass and the expansion will halt and the universe collapse in on itself. To test this an orbital x-ray telescope was launched to look at radiation left over from the big bang. But what they discovered was that both therories are wrong, and that the universe is accelerating faster now than in the past. Einstein proved that space and time are two aspects of the same thing, Like an algebra equation what you do to one side of the equation i.e. space you also have to do to time, so if the universe is accelerating so is time. As light moves great distances through space it shifts from gamma ray and ultraviolet towards longer wavelengths like infrared and radio waves, this is called red shift. Redshift is used by astronomers and astrophysicists to calculate how big or galaxy is, how far away stars and galaxies are, how old the universe is, and how big it is. Unfortunately the calculations for redshift are dependant on formulas that don't take into account a universe that is accelerating even now. We have no way to measure or calculate the rate of acceleration since it affects the whole universe and our frame of reference. Therefore we can't calculate how far away things are accurately or how big or how old they really are. The universe could be more than 13.8 billion years old or 1 second old. physicists and the bible could both be right. The universe cold be thousands of years old and billions at the same time depending on your frame or reference 13.8+ billion from our point of view and only thousands to an outside observer i.e GOD. If you combine relativity with an accelerating universe. Redshift is also used to measure what a stars or its planets atmospheres contain using a prism and a spectrometer but with inaccurate redshift calculations the results are clearly wrong. So essentially astrophysicists and astronomers are full of sound and fury signifying nothing with the emperor having proved himself not wearing clothes.
Surely this goes against everything we know about the expansion of space time? When the universe expands, it not like an explosion where matter expands into space or void. The actual space itself stretches and thus the ruler with it. Not to mention there's nothing to expand into as the universe is the entirety of everything. This is true even if you take into account the size of the universe being bigger than what we see in the observable universe due to the event horizon. So a universe pre-inflation of 1 ruler unit in radius will still be 1 ruler in radius unit today? What am I missing?
nonsense like the 13.8 Gly figure, which has no physical significance
It does have a physical significance: it is the distance which the photons making an image travelled. True it is not the physical separation between us and the object now but we don't even know that the object observed even exists now so you might be quoting a physical separation to something which is not there which is hardly something with physical significance.