ry you o grasp just iny, iallyunassuming, is a proton. It is just oo small.
A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, antial thing.
Protons are so small t a little dib of ink like t on tained in ons are exceedingly microscopic, to say t.
No) sons doo abillionts normal size into a space so small t it on look enormous.
Noo t tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to starta universe.
I’m assuming of course t you ionary universe. If you’d preferinstead to build a more old-fasandard Big Bang universe, you’ll need additionalmaterials. In fact, you o gat mote and particle ofmatter bet into a spot so infinitesimallycompact t it all. It is knoy.
In eit ready for a really big bang. Naturally, you ire to a safeplace to observe tacle. Unfortunately, to retire to because outside ty to expand, it be spreading outto fill a larger emptiness. t exists is t creates as it goes.
It is natural but o visualize ty as a kind of pregnant dot ty has no “around”
around it. t to occupy, no place for it to be. e can’t even ask
lately popped into being, like a good idea, or ing t moment. time doesn’t exist. tfor it to emerge from.
And so, from nothing, our universe begins.
In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory mucoo s and expansive for any form ofy assumes ion. In tlively second (a second t many cosmologists e careers to so ever-finery and t govern pe t. t of noenbillion degrees of it, enougo begin tions t create ter elements—principally one atom in a es, 98 percent of all tter t is a place of t ifying possibility,and beautiful, too. And it time it takes to make a sandwich.
ter of some debate. Cosmologists of creation or someto be 13.7 billion years, but toriously difficult to measure, as at some indeterminate point in tant past, for reasons unkno knoo science as t = 0. e were on our way.
t deal kno kno ion of te arecent one. tre, aBelgian priest-sc tentatively proposed it, but it didn’t really become an activenotion in cosmology until tronomers made anextraordinary and inadvertent discovery.
t ilson. In 1965, trying to make useof a large communications antenna oories at troubled by a persistent background noise—a steady, steamy made anyexperimental ing and unfocused. It came from everypoint in t, tronomers dideveryto track doe tested everyelectrical system. t instruments, cs, ed plugs.
to t tape over every seam and rivet. to t it clean of er paper as “ric material,” or ried worked.
Unknoo t ty miles a Princeton University, a team of scientists led byRobert Dicke rying so diligently to getrid of. ton researc ed in trop George Gamo if you looked deep enougo spaceyou sion left over from ted t by time it crossed tness of tion rumentt migenna at unately, neiton team, had read Gamow’s paper.
t Penzias and ilson ed. t least t of it, 90 billiontrillion miles a pons—t ancient ligime and distance ed to micro as Gamo oput tive. If you to tate Building (ing noreet level representing t of t time ofilson and Penzias’s discovery t distant galaxies anyone ected tiet distant t tieth.
Penzias and ilson’s finding pusance o he sidewalk.
Still una Princeton anddescribed to suggest a solution. Dicke realized atonce wo young men been scooped,” old he phone.
Soon afterropicles: one by Penzias andilson describing team explaining itsnature. Alt been looking for cosmic background radiation,didn’t kno erpreted itscer in any paper, tonresearc only sympato Dennis Overbye in Lonely s of togetood t til t it in times .
Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is sometune your television to any c doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of tatic you see is accounted for by t remnant of t timeyou complain t t you can alcheuniverse.
Alt tion us not to t as anexplosion in tional sense. It , sudden expansion on a ?
One notion is t pery one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like ttribute to y or t any rate, t introduced ameasure of instability into t seems impossible t you could getsomet t t once t proof t you can. It may be t our universe is merely part of many largeruniverses, some in different dimensions, and t Big Bangs are going on all time all overt may be t space and time ogetoo alien for us to imagine—and t ts some sort oftransition p from a form understand to one can. “to religious questions,” Dr. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist atStanford, told times in 2001.
t about tself but about he bang.
Not long after, mind you. By doing a lot of matc goes on inparticle accelerators, scientists believe to 10-43seconds after t ofcreation, you . e mustn’t sraordinary number t comes before us, but it isperco one from time to time just to be reminded of trillion trillion trillionths of a second.
**A ific notation: Since very large numbers are cumbersome to e and nearly impossible to read, scientistsuse a siples) of ten in ten 1010 and 6,500,000becomes 6.5 x 106. tiples of ten: 10 x 10 (or 100) becomes 102; 10 x 10 x 10 (or1,000) is 103; and so on, obviously and indefinitely. ttle superscript number signifies tive notations provide latter in print (especially essentially a mirror image, number indicating to t of t (so 10-4 means 0.0001). tet remains an amazement to me t anyone seeing quot;1.4 x 109 km3’ once t t signifies 1.4Most of ts of to an idea called inflation t propounded in 1979 by a junior particlep, t Stanford, no MIt, named Alan Guty-t t o attend a lecture on t Dicke. ture inspired Guto take an interest in cosmology, andin particular in the universe.
tual result ion t a fraction of a moment aftertion, t a sudden dramatic expansion. It inflated—ineffect ran aself, doubling in size every 10-34seconds. ted no more t’s one million million million million milliont it cosomet least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger. Inflation t make our universe possible. it it, tter and tars, just drifting gas and everlasting darkness.
According to Gut one ten-milliontrilliontrilliontrillionty emerged. After anoterval it romagnetism and trong and uff of pant later by sary particles—tuff of stuff. From notall, suddenly tons, protons, electrons, neutrons, and mucandard Big Bang theory.
Sucities are of course ungraspable. It is enougo kno in a single crackinginstant —at least a -yearsacross, according to t possibly any size up to infinite—and perfectly arrayed fortion of stars, galaxies, and otems.
is extraordinary from our point of vieurned out for us. If t a tiny bit differently—if gravity ionally stronger or a little more sloly—tnever able elements to make you and me and tand on. ybeen a trifle stronger, tself miged tent, precisely t values to give it t dimensions and density and componentparts. been ered void.
t some experts believe trillions and trillions of ty span of eternity, and t t in ticular one is t t in. As Edryonof Columbia University once put it: “In anso tion of our Universe is simply one of time tobillion cubic kilometers, and no less a tion t many general readers are as unmatical as I am, I least in a cer dealing hings on a cosmic scale.
time.” to tempts.”
Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal, believes t te number, eac attributes, in different combinations, and t combines t alloo exist. ore: “If tock of clot surprised to find asuit t fits. If t of numbers, ticular set of numbers suitable to life. e are in t one.”
Rees maintains t six numbers in particular govern our universe, and t if any of tly t be as to exist as it does requires t ed to comparatively stately manner—specifically, in a converts seven one-ts mass to energy. Lo value very slig to 0.006 percent,say—and no transformation could take place: t of ly—to 0.008 percent—and bonding ted. In eitest t be here.
I s everyt rigerm, gravity may turn out to be alittle too strong, and one day it may t collapsingin upon itself, till it crusself doo anoty, possibly to start t may be too il everyt t terial interactions, sot t is inert and dead, but very roomy. tion ist gravity is just rigical density” is ts’ term for it—and t it just t dimensions to alloo go on indefinitely.
Cosmologists in ter moments sometimes call t—teveryt rigivelyas closed, open, and flat.)Noion t o all of us at some point is: to t your ains?
would you find beyond?
tingly, is t you can never get to t’s notbecause it ake too long to get t because even ifyou traveled outraigely and pugnaciously, you an outer boundary. Instead, you o in t t adequately imagine, in conformance ein’s tivity (o in due course). For t it isenougo kno adrift in some large, ever-expanding bubble. Rat allo to be boundless but finite. Space cannot even properly be saidto be expanding because, as t and Nobel laureate Steven einberg notes, “solarsystems and galaxies are not expanding, and space itself is not expanding.” Rat. It is all someto intuition. Or as t J.
B. S. only queerer tis queerer than we can suppose.”
t is usually given for explaining ture of space is to try to imaginesomeone from a universe of flat surfaces, oEartter ’s surface, he would never find an edge.
eventually return to t ed, and terlyconfounded to explain ion in space asour puzzled flatlander, only we are flummoxed by a higher dimension.
Just as tand at ter and say: “t all began. termostpoint of it all.” e are all at ter of it all. Actually, kno for sure; prove it matically. Scientists just assume t really be ter of t t t t be till, actually know.
For us, t raveled in talk about—is amillion million million million (t’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles across. Butaccording to most t large—ta-universe, as it is sometimescalled—is vastly roomier still. According to Rees, t-years to tten not “en zeroes, not even , t going totrouble of trying to envision some additional beyond.
For a long time t troubled a lot of people—namely t it couldn’t begin to explain of all tter t exists ed matter consisted exclusively of lig ioned earlier. Not one particle of tuff so vital to our orogen, oxygen, and all t—emergedfrom tion. But—and roubling point—to forge ts, you need t and energy of a Big Bang. Yet t didn’t produce they come from?
Interestingly, to t question erm “Big Bang” sarcastically, as a. e’ll get to ly, but before urn to tion of migaking a fees to consider just wly “here” is.