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.

Comments

Article blocked

[arth1]

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.

Re:Article blocked

[AK Marc]

Soccer is a British term, invented by the English. That the Americans use "proper" British English and the English don't is ironic. Soccer was short for Association Football. Rugger for Rugby Football. Football wasn't used because it was a class of sport (any sport played on foot - i.e., not no horseback). So Soccer and Rugger were the British English words for those sports. Neither is in widespread use today.

By the time the word was adopted by other counties, futbol and other spellings of football made more sense, as Rugger didn't get as much play, so football was re-translated into English from non-English who adopted it from English. And for England's misuse of language, the US is held as the odd man out for using the more proper term.

Much like aluminum and aluminium. England got that one wrong as well. An Englishman named it Aluminum, as it was alum-like, but he didn't want the regular -ium as it wasn't a metal (it's a transition element that's semi-metalic), so he deliberately mis-named it, but this proper name assigned by the discoverer was ignored (in violation of convention) by the English and renamed. So the English re-named an element appropriately named by the disvoverer, who was also English. So the proper English name is Aluminum (as it was named such by the discoverer, who was an Englishman), but used incorrectly, to this day, by the English, who insist that their error is more correct that the American's non-error.

Re:Article blocked

[mark-t]

Much like aluminum and aluminium. England got that one wrong as well. An Englishman named it Aluminum, as it was alum-like, but he didn't want the regular -ium as it wasn't a metal (it's a transition element that's semi-metalic), so he deliberately mis-named it, but this proper name assigned by the discoverer was ignored (in violation of convention) by the English and renamed. So the English re-named an element appropriately named by the discoverer, who was also English. So the proper English name is Aluminum (as it was named such by the discoverer, who was an Englishman), but used incorrectly, to this day, by the English, who insist that their error is more correct that the American's non-error.

At the time that Humphrey Davy discovered the element, in 1825, the convention was still relatively new, and it is possible that Davy had not yet really known about it when he first named the metal. There was no lack of ancient names of metals that ended in -um, and not -ium (argentum, aurum, cuprum, ferrum, hydrargyrum, plumbum, and stannum). Further, in even the few decades leading up to the metal's discovery, several English metals were quite recently named that did not use the "-ium" convention, molybdenum, platinum, and tantalum. Finally, the metal lanthanum was not discovered until 1837, over a decade later, but its discoverer did not try to follow the "-ium" convention either. "Aluminum" is hardly alone. The "-ium" suffix convention has been universally followed for all elements discovered since.

For what it's worth, Davy himself later decided to change its name from "Aluminum" to "Aluminium" to try and keep with the convention that was being adopted, substantiating the notion that when he had originally named it, he was simply not yet aware of that convention. Even the element now known Berylium had also been renamed from its original "-um" ending in the same decade (it was originally called glucinum), so such renaming is hardly a unique case even for its period. I do not know why the latter name change was internationally accepted while the former was not.

Re:I'm a bit skeptical

[Z00L00K]

In the end we will figure out that someone divided by zero and the universe accidentally came to be.

Refers to Observable Universe Only

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Use the source, Luke

[Opportunist]

Allow me to link to the non-Forbes, non-ad-infested, non-ad-blocker-blocking version of the article: http://scienceblogs.com/starts...