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

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.

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.