Astronomy

“Let there be light”, said the Lord. After the flash, whereupon the electrons and protons did recombine out of the plasma, at T=110,000 years give or take, there was light.

“Don’t look directly at it until it cools down”, said the Lord.

And Mrs. God said, “You create an entire universe without even consulting me? It clashes with the drapes. ** Everyone will say my drapes look hideous.”

And Satan said slyly, “Which half is mine?”

And the Lord said, “One thing at a time. I had foreseen the problem of the drapes, but I had supposed it would be easier to change the drapes, though now I see I was mistaken.”

And the Lord said to Satan: “You had your chance to help with the grand design, and you walked off on the project. Now that it’s all done, you are back. Can’t you be a team player on even the simplest effort?”

Satan said, “All I ask is equal access to any intelligent beings that may evolve in this creation of yours.”

The Lord said, “Fat chance of that, Satan. Everywhere you go, there is nothing but trouble. You will have to wait a while until there are places called seats of government, and then I will give you half of those. Best offer; you can take it or leave it.”

Satan said it would be worth the wait.

---

*WMAP, or Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, is a NASA microwave sky survey showing that the temperature of deep space is remarkably uniform in every direction, around 2.725 degrees Kelvin. The survey also shows that there are “hot spots” and “cold spots”, differing by about .0002 degrees after 13.7 billion years, that are best explained as temperature anomalies in the inflation plasma that later evolved into galactic structures we see today. Thus it is thought that the WMAP survey (and the lower resolution COBE survey before it) represent a snapshot of the very early universe. The microwave radiation that paints the WMAP image may be thought of as echoes of the Big Bang event itself.

There is no “you are here” point on this map because we are on the inside looking out. The entire 360 degrees of sky, northern and southern hemispheres, is mapped by the most powerful microwave receivers on the planet. The remarkably consistent two degree arc of the hot spots is seen as mathematically consistent with the age of the universe as calculated by other methods, and with the speed of inflation (a trillionth of a second), for reasons I can’t quite follow. The very large dark spot is said to be the “billion light year hole” in the sky.

** When Garry Trudeau’s “Lacy” died and was led to Heaven (Doonesbury, about 10 years ago), she criticized the drapes. “Shhh”, she was told, “Mrs. God picked them out.” 

 

Wait a minute, I meant Chariot of The Gods, no, dang, I meant Ship of Fools - gosh darn it, why can’t I get this right? I mean micro-black holes - here on Earth, explaining everything we didn’t want to know about the Bermuda Triangle.

History Channel ran a special, nominally on Black Holes, on Thursday night (3/6). The special started out interestingly enough, with about all the generally accepted facts about black holes that you could expect a composite of American families to absorb without breaking out into a sweat.

Black holes result from the crushing collapse of neutron stars after certain very large stars explode into supernovae. The force of their gravity is so enormous that not even light can escape. Their appetite for in-falling matter is insatiable, devouring unlucky stars, gas clouds and possibly galaxies. Consumption by a black hole is a one-way ticket. If there is any way out, it’s Einstein’s hypothesized “other end” of a black hole: past the science fiction writer’s “worm-hole”, perhaps there is a “white hole” spewing matter back out into another part of an infinite universe. But we can’t see any of this.

This first 15-minute sequence was credibly done by the History Channel. I was stunned how quickly it then degenerated into a discussion of the Bermuda Triangle. Some very amiable crackpots were interviewed. Anything attributed to the Bermuda Triangle that lacks explanation was fair game: Magnetic anomalies, local perturbations of gravity (magnitude unspecified), missing ships, aircraft that never return. We’ve heard all that before.

What if micro black holes existed? They could be anywhere, even on Earth. This would explain disappearing airplanes and ships, for example - did the black hole’s gravity just suck them up?

The show did acknowledge that there are scientists who do not subscribe to the micro-black-hole “theory”. Their views were not expanded out to anything resembling a counter-argument. One source was quoted as wryly observing that if the black hole was here, we wouldn’t be having this discussion - a view that earned three seconds of air time.

The magnetometer wouldn’t be detecting the black hole’s perturbation of the local magnetic field, because the black hole would have swallowed it up. But the magnetometer wouldn’t be floating on the ocean, because the black hole would have swallowed the ocean up. But the ocean wouldn’t be swallowed up because the Earth itself would have long since journeyed beyond the light horizon.

If they exist, “micro” black holes aren’t just miniaturized, slow-acting models of the real thing. The black hole’s real-time appetite for attracting and consuming in-falling matter is well documented by physicists and astronomical evidence. There’s no credible evidence that it would take a “micro” black hole any longer to swallow a host Earth than it would to swallow a few cups of seawater on the floor of the Bermuda Triangle. Magnetic anomalies, indeed. Tiny black holes wouldn’t stay tiny long - their event horizons would expand as matter was consumed.

In Chariot of the Gods in 1968, quack author Erich Von Daniken announced that the building of the pyramids could only have been directed from a spaceship 10,000 feet up. Those of you who were around at the time may recall how wildly popular this claptrap was.

To see widely-aired popular science channels like Discovery (haunted houses) and History Channel stoop to exploit fear and ignorance of the “unknown”, with sensationalism and mock science, is very alarming. I don’t know what can be done to combat media charlatanism, but it certainly seems that what we do know about science, astronomy, physics, biology, evolution and geology should be more fascinating (and at least as entertaining) as what we don’t.

I recently learned something new about black holes in Astronomy Magazine. Our popular understanding of the collapsed neutron star core inside an event horizon is only apt inside the event horizon - from the black hole’s point of view. (Remember, in here, concepts of space and time are meaningless). Outside, from our point of view, a black hole never completes its formation. In-falling matter merely piles up outside the even horizon, waiting its turn to be consumed, and this will happen when hell freezes over - that is to say, at the end of time, or never. Take your pick. From our point of view, what does happen is that the event horizon gets bigger and bigger - meaning, I think, that the volume of space forever closed to our understanding expands in real time.

The “black hole detectors” on the History Channel show are no more credible than my gag “squirrel detectors” - thin pieces of wire turned into a coil, mounted on a cedar shingle, connected to nothing, like the minds of the History Channel scriptwriters. At least, I may yet detect a squirrel. They will never detect a black hole on Earth.

Quack.

According to the article “The End of Cosmology” in the March Scientific American, “evidence of the universe is disappearing as the universe expands.”

I guess that’s OK, as long as it doesn’t happen before my subscription runs out.

Edwin Hubble figured out not only that the universe is expanding, but that the speed at which an object recedes due to expansion of the universe is proportional to its distance. That is, an object twice as far away is expanding away from us twice as fast.

Thus, at some distance, there are already objects expanding away from us so fast that we will never ever see the light they emit. No form of radiation they emit will ever reach us. They have already become invisible. By the time our civilization became advanced enough to detect other galaxies, some of them have receded forever from view. We will forever be unable to detect that they ever existed in a younger universe.

At present (13.7 billion years), the “observable universe” still includes most of all matter in the universe, but at, say, 100 billion years, Earth (or its blackened residue) will see a local supergalaxy consisting of a merged Andromeda, Milky Way, and a few small neighboring galaxies in what we now call our Local Group. All else will have drifted from view, into the void of a black eternal night.

That boundary beyond which we can see nothing will be an “event horizon”, conceptually the same as the event horizon of a black hole, but with us on the inside, unable to see out. Cosmologists wryly conclude that energy within that event horizon will therefore be finite and limited — we have permanently lost contact with everything outside the expanding horizon. As the finite star population ages and winks out, the observable universe will turn cold and disappear, eventually collapsing into a black hole.

The whole cosmological cycle may last 100 trillion years. Just to be safe, I’m only renewing my subscription year by year.

A letter to the “Ask Astro” column, and answer, were published in the Dec 2007 Astronomy magazine.

How do gravity assists work?
ALEX FORBES, CASTRO VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

By passing near a large body, a spacecraft can radically alter its speed and trajectory without expending any fuel. This may sound like a free lunch, but it isn’t.

A spacecraft that speeds up during a gravity assist does so by taking away some of the planet’s orbital energy. An imperceptible slowing of the planet results in a vast speed boost for a spacecraft. Mission designers also can select trajectories that slow a spacecraft or alter its orbital inclination.

In 1961, Michael Minovitch, a mathematics and physics graduate student working during the summer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, discovered this technique. It was first employed in February 1974, when NASA’s Mariner 10 mission to Mercury used Venus to alter the craft’s course and speed. — FRANCIS REDDY, SENIOR EDITOR

After submitting the question to Astronomy, I did some research on the web, as usual quickly ending up at Wikipedia. The reason a gravity assist or “slingshot” sounds like a free lunch is because we (or I) tend to think of the planet as a stationary object, which of course we really know isn’t and can’t be. This works because the planet itself is also in motion.

So, if we sneak up on the planet from its “rear” - accelerating toward it in the same direction it is orbiting - my oversimplified understanding is that we get a speed boost from two sources: gravitational acceleration toward the planet, yes, but the planet is also receding from us as we approach, “dragging” us to higher speeds, so we get extra velocity from that.

As we pass the planet, the gravitational boost works in reverse, canceling itself out. But we retain the additional velocity from piggybacking on the planet’s orbital velocity, our speed boost. As Astronomy explains, conservation of momentum is not violated because we have slowed down the planet infinitesmally.

This also works in reverse, slowing us down if we approach the planet going against its orbital direction. Also, “powered slingshots” appear to enhance the effect, according to Wikipedia.

Foggy Mist

IMAGINE that it is a really cold morning, and you have taken a REALLY hot shower. Not just the bathroom mirrors are fogged. The bathroom itself is filled with steam. In fact, the living room windows are even fogged over. So we open the sliding glass door for a little while to vent the moisture.

Instantly, or PDQ as near as anyone can tell, the mist expands out of the apartment to uniformly fill your entire hometown.

Traffic comes to a halt - no one can see past their high beams. Turning on the radio, the entire state is affected, wait, this just in - your bathroom mist did not stop at the borders. The entire United States, all of North America are filled with a uniform swirling fog of steamy water mist.

Try to envision all of this, and remember, if you will, just these two things:

1. We are imagining this, setting the stage for a thought experiment, and
2. I told you not to take such hot showers.

Reports are coming in from all over the world as mist-ified humans figure out what has happened. All of the continents and oceans are affected, and the atmosphere as high as commercial air transport (now flying on Instrument Rules) can see. The International Space Station reports the world below, and outer space above, are filled with a uniform mist, and radio astronomers are reporting that the microwave signature of water vapor has swamped their instruments in all directions.

But this is exactly the condition our thought experiment was designed to create. Our of the tiny space of the shower stall (we’ll define it as a “point source”), we have filled everything with this mist. By “everything” we don’t just mean the planet, or solar system, or Milky Way galaxy, or even the Local Group. We mean all galaxies - the known universe.

And by “known universe” we have no intellectual cause to limit that concept to what we can see. Beyond the limits of the visible universe, redshifted beyond detection, classical theory assumes that the “infinite” universe means just that - it goes on and on forever. Does that infinite space too contain “stuff” like the visible part? We have no evidence that it does, or that it doesn’t. But there sure is going to be hell to pay for your hot shower.

This is our clumsy analog of the condition of the universe T+x milliseconds after the classical theory of the Big Bang. This part of the theory, in which the Bang expands from nothing to fill the void, is called “Inflation”.

If our thought experiment is re-creating the Big Bang, we now have to dismiss the idea of the hot shower and the rest of the existing universe. There is nothing, but mist.

According to the theory, matter cooled as it expanded, as Boyle’s Law would lead us to expect if the universe behaved more like your hot shower than we have reason to expect it would. By taking the intellectual shortcut of making bold assumptions about infinitely small everythings and definable “everythings” bound up in infinitely large containers, the idea of expansion solves a decades-old riddle: why is the “observable” universe so much larger than we could explain if its growth were limited to the speed of light over the past 14.7 billion years?

We’ve Been Over That Before

We’ve been over that before. If “observable” equaled “visible”, the question above would be a contradiction. I guess I still don’t know how they figure we’ve detected an “observable” universe whose size (10 to the 28th power centimeters) so greatly outstrips a light sphere 14.7 billion light-years big (10 to the 15th power centimeters).

One problem with the theory, according to the current Scientific American (News Scan/Cosmology/New Beginnings, October 2007), is that if all that matter propagated from a point source instantaneously, we should see evidence of enormous gravity waves in the cosmic microwave radiation background (CMRB). And the instruments don’t see that.

Why is the “observable” universe so small? I mean, sure, it’s already vastly larger than expected, but isn’t it infinite?

How big is the “singularity” - that theorized point source origin of the Big Bang? Is “point source” just a cosmological figure of speech? Might it be as big as a grapefruit, or a house, or a 20 mile diameter neutron star? Might it be as small as the “singularity” of a black hole (inside the inscrutable event horizon), only with infinite mass? As long as we’re dividing by zero, does a point source of infinite mass make more sense than a grapefruit with infinite mass?

Or does “make sense” beg the whole problem?

Multiple Big Bangs?

The Scientific American news brief reports a bumper crop of new theories designed to accommodate some of the conceptual problems highly trained thinkers are having with the classical Big Bang model. Most of these are “bounce” theories.

In these “bounce” theories, it DOES make sense to talk about a time and place before the Big Bang: the “old” universe collapsed, and then rebounded — in the classical flash that represents our best understanding of events today. And many of today’s thinkers seem to share a certain discomfort with the physical properties of a “singularity”.

The “bounce” theorists figure that by avoiding singularity, we come up with some more credible numbers for the gravity waves that ought to have resulted, reducing by a factor of 50 the strength of the gravitational wave evidence we need to detect. If these wave were as powerful as we’d think, based on the singularity Big Bang theories, we should have seen them by now. We haven’t been able to detect any at all so far.

Speaking of “gravity”, the concept may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Remember our Tar Baby essay where we ask why we can measure and create electromagnetic force, but can’t even tell what we’re measuring when we step on the bathroom scale?

According to the same October issue of Scientific American [Ask The Experts/What is a "fictitious force?"], current thinking on gravity is that it’s really a “fictitious” force, like centrifugal force and unlike electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. Though gravity is obviously tied to the mutually attractive properties of two masses, and manifests itself in the way of any ordinary accelerating mass, we really have no idea at all what real forces are actually operative here.

“General relativity is [Einstein's] theory of gravity — certainly the paradigmatic example of a ‘real’ force. The cornerstone of Einstein’s theory, however, is the proposition that gravity itself is a fictitious force (or, rather, that it is indistinguishable from a fictitious force).”

Well, we could have told him that (couldn’t we?): as observer on the merry-go-round, we feel no distinction between the fictional tug of gravity and the fictional pull of centrifugal force. We feel only the increased tug of the vector of the two forces. And we lean out to grab the brass ring.

Back To The Foggy Mist

Having reviewed all these concepts, we ask, “but what of our bathroom shower mist?”

We stretched our imaginations to suppose a uniform mist has filled the void. Now we must stretch it again to ask what happens after that. Observational measurement shows that it is still expanding, yet it has cooled, and pockets of gas have coalesced gravitationally to form galaxies of all sizes and shapes, and the void in between has cleared.

And yet, to accommodate the thought experiment, we must think back - or forward - to the time when the process reverses, expansion ends, and everything starts falling back in upon itself again. Our point is not to determine whether this “bounce” is what actually happened, or will happen, but to imagine how far that process can take us.

At the risk of repeating ourselves, an infinite mass within an infinite volume of space time collapses back in upon itself. At some point of compression, we have to admit that it must have become finite in size. That is to say, by definition we have a compression of the infinite into the finite, don’t we? Go figure.

As this ball contracts gravitationally, it becomes smaller at hotter, and smaller and hotter, an so on, and we have to ask ourselves again, at what point are we satisfied that this infinite mass has become as small as it is going to get?

Granted, at some point, general relativity and black hole physics take over, and the question becomes meaningless. But, as long as we’re dividing by zero, if we compress an infinite mass down to a singularity, don’t we still end up with an infinite amount of uncompressed material left over? Eh?

Now, an infinite amount of shower mist has all condensed and returned itself back down the great shower head spigot. Small wonder if this did not produce gravity waves.

So where is it cast in stone that this steamy event, occurring in the local bathroom, is simultaneously being felt in New Caledonia, or in M31? If you smell a mathematical rat, are we really double-counting our infinities?

Given that the mathematical properties of an “infinite” amount of matter are so poorly understood, and the physical properties of that quantity of matter being compressed into an infinitely small singularity boggle the credulity, small wonder that cosmologists are trying to evolve theories that link a little more concretely to the observable evidence.

But if the “bounce” theories are correct, there will be waves to come as the shower is turned on once more and fills the void with steamy mist. You and your showers!

I don’t know if evading the singularity solves more observational and theoretical problems than it produces, but it’s fascinating to read hypothetical storylines in which the magnitude of the expected gravity waves might be more in line with something we cannot detect now, but might be detected in the near future with planned improvements in orbiting instrumentation.

For now, it still sounds like the Apaches had a good working model of cosmology: “The Holy Supreme Wind being created the mists of lights …”

Alex Forbes © October 6, 2007

Recently we mused about the “observable universe“, a 10^28 cm radius patch of real estate centered on us, the observer, where the radius of this fanciful sphere should be equal to the theoretical distance light could have traveled since the Big Bang.

Thinking about it, of course, leads to the conclusion that it all depends on what you mean by “observable”. The web references confirm we only mean that light could have reached us from somewhere, at some point in time since the universe became transparent. “Observable” doesn’t directly guarantee us what we can see, and the entire universe is much bigger; last I heard, no one was speculating that the entire universe is bounded and finite.

What we can observe is never really real-time. If the universe is expanding, it is much bigger than the visible boundaries we postulate today. The objects we see out at t minus 10 billion years depict the universe as it appeared in infancy, when it was only a few billion years old. Those objects probably don’t exist any more, “any more” being a completely speculative human construct in the same genus as “time travel”.

We can’t see back to the beginning of time. We can’t even see what’s happening on the sun right now; if it had just gone prematurely supernova, we wouldn’t have an inkling anything was wrong for another 6 minutes.

When I think about the “universe” I get into constant trouble for confusing it with the “observable” universe. What happened to that region of sky where Hubble imaged a galaxy a billion years after the Big Bang? We just won’t know for another 13.7 billion years, I guess. Put that in your tickler file for follow-up.

What is a Blue Supergiant? Just when we thought we were getting comfortable with the properties of red supergiants, current reading reminds us there’s a whole ‘nuther class of star: hot, bright, and huge: 20 to 50 solar masses. These have super-fast but sparse solar winds. They all have the outer shell of expelled mass the suggest a previous red giant phase. A star may swing back and forth between red and blue supergiant, but they still have short lifetimes; the fuel burnout process has already begun, whether red or blue supergiant phase. Rigel is a famous example of the rare blue supergiant.

In 1987, in the Large Magellanic Cloud in the Southern hemisphere, exploding SN1987A produced the most highly visible supernova since the invention of the telescope. Its “progenitor” star, Sanduluk - 69 202a, had been a blue supergiant.

SN1987A (168,000 light years distant) reached a maximum brightness of 3.0, falling well short of the apparent brightness of the Crab Nebula (6,300 light-years distant), which the Chinese described in 1054AD as a daytime “guest star” having a brightness six times greater than Venus and about as brilliant as the full moon ( magnitude -12.6). If you calculated an absolute magnitude for each event, eliminating the 28-fold distance discrepancy, the blue supergiant might just have won out.

But not quite. Cobbing the formula from Wikipedia’s piece on Absolute Magnitude, I worked up a spreadsheet that showed the raw output of the Crab to be about one and a half times as violent as SN1987A. (Warning: the formula actually used in the Wikipedia example for Rigel does not exactly agree with their listed formula for absolute magnitude. I followed the calculation in the example to arrive at the -6.7 absolute magnitude for Rigel, and then applied it to the other objects.)

This is what you get for waking up at 445AM and running out into the parking lot in shorts with a camera - the tail end of the eclipse. Handheld shot with a Canon 5D and 200mm zoom, image stabilized.

I wrote a piece in another department about contemporary Zionism, observing that for me to suggest improvements would put me in the position of Bre’r Rabbit and de Tar Baby. You know, you think you hit ‘im, but he stick to you and you can’t get loose. And Brer Fox, he lay low.

Thinkers like Hawking and Feinmann, and their intellectual heirs and progeny at Cambridge, CalTech (and many other major university centers of theoretical research) provided us with a wealth of articles in respected layperson periodicals like Scientific American, Astronomy, or Sky and Telescope. Their intention no doubt was to bring to the public some of the distilled fruits of cutting edge science, and I am certainly grateful that a market for this kind of writing exists. You certainly won’t find in in People or USA Today.

Sometimes I wonder how much of this material they think the average reader absorbs.

I was reading - or re-reading - how the cosmic microwave background radiation [CMB] of the universe got its start 500,000 years after the Big Bang. As I’d read this figure before, I was startled to realize I’d forgotten why. I felt like the junior high school kid when the teacher asks - “Quick, in what year was the signing of the Magna Carta?”

If I can’t even remember a key point in the cosmic evolutionary timeline, how am I ever going to figure out Gravity on my own?

The grand old document to the left contained precepts considered influential in the formation of constitutional democracies, but, perhaps because it did so in 1215AD), it didn’t contain any solutions to the Unified Field Theory, either.

Fortunately, in this case the CMB authors explain patiently that it took 500,000 years for the universe to cool enough to allow combination of protons and electrons for the first time, forming hot hydrogen atoms, which emit radiation at their signature wavelength. And I actually knew that - it was just a problem of making the connections.

I do find these topics tremendously exciting. I find myself musing on all sorts of imponderables - well, Hawking may ponder, but I only muse. If we can explain electromagnetic radiation, and field polarity, and Fleming’s right-hand rule, and name and measure all the axes of the electromagnetic vector - why can’t we do the same for gravity?

We have yet to generate (or even detect) the weakest gravity wave. Will we ever discover a right-hand rule of gravity? Right now, I don’t think we even know how the respective axis are labeled. One of them might be spatial direction. One of them should be mass. What is the other?

When we accelerate a copper wire through an electric field, we know we are generating electricity by cutting across a “force field” - lines of electrical potential. When we step onto the bathroom scale, what are we measuring? There is no difference between the homely bathroom scale and the modern accelerometer. Both seem to measure the acceleration of a mass. When we step onto the scale, are we measuring our acceleration through time?

Mind you, all these questions have been asked before, and by scientists who actually know what they’re talking about.

Our own thinking exerciseis all junior high school intellectual antics. It’s voodoo physics. I don’t have the tools of the trade. We won’t find subsistence farmers carving interplanetary space capsules out of teak with nothing more than a spokeshave, either.

But when, at some point, some pioneering thinker finally comes up with the elusive Unified Field Theory, explaining once and for all the deep and abiding relationship governing electromagnetic radiation and gravity, I’m very confident that, on that historic day, that thinker isn’t going to happen to be me.

I keep getting stuck in de Tar Baby. And, Professor Hawking, he lay low.

But that won’t stop me from learning, and thinking, and wondering. Have a wonderful and relaxing Sunday - and stay away from those bathroom scales!

Alex

Roll up your sleeves. Some junior high school math with lots of powers of ten is coming up.

After all, honestly, it’s not as if I’d have the good sense to leave well enough alone. In the previous post, we discussed the current size of the “observable universe” (10 to the 28th power centimeters), and cosmology models that depend on “inflation” to explain how we got so big so fast. If, that is, you accept that the 14 billion year age of the universe is “so fast”.

But light travels pretty fast. If the universe only expanded at the speed of light, and (almost by definition, you’d think) has done so ever since the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, that would make a pretty big sphere today. Do we really need “inflation” to account for the 10^28 cm size of today’s “observable universe”?

We only need to know the speed of light and number of years this has been going on, and compare this to the known size of the universe, to figure this out - and we need to do it all in centimeters. Why centimeters? Ask the scientists.

If you ever calculated long-wire radio antenna lengths, you still remember that the speed of light is about 3 million meters per second, so we don’t have to convert from 186,284 miles per hour. That’s 3×10^8 cm per second. We need to convert that to centimeters per year - I make that some 9.4608 x 10^13 cm/yr.

And we need a distance for this over 14 billion years, say (9.5 x 10^13 cm/yr) x (14 x 10^9) yr equals around 1.3 x 10^15 centimeters. That would be the radius of a light sphere originating at the time and point of the Big Bang. Double that to 2.6×10^15 cm for the size of the observable universe.

Heck, I don’t mind showing my work. It’s probably wrong. I did it all longhand, errors and all, while watching Cash Cab on TV. If we have the right power of 10, we’re close enough.

So if the observable universe is 10^28 cm in size, and light alone could have sped out into a sphere roughly 10^15 in size, how did the universe outdistance the speed of light by so much? The difference is a respectable 10^13 centimeters.

After thinking about this article and waking up in the morning, that’s not a subtractive difference, but a factor in powers of ten. The universe we could account for by the speed of light alone, as huge as that sphere is, is a tiny mote compared to what cosmologists call the “observable universe”.

Let’s say we want to compare 100,000 (10^5) to 100 (10^2). While the difference is 99,900 (almost 10^5), normally we would just say that 10^5 is 1,000 times as big as 10^2, or 10^3 times as big. We subtract exponents to get the multiplier.

So the observable universe is about 10^13 times as big as what we could account for by expansion at the speed of light alone. That’s inflation!

Periodically one might wonder why Herr Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit fixed his temperature scale to a freezing point of water at 32 degrees, and the boiling point, at 212 degrees. Reading in Wikipedia that the numerical difference between boiling and freezing is exactly 180 furnishes one with relatively little additional comfort, unless one is planning a series of experiments in which the temperature of ice needs to be?raised to boiling in exactly 180 annoying little increments.

For the big numbers of really hot stuff, of course, scientists use the Kelvin scale, so we say the surface of the sun has a temperature of about 8,500 Kelvin, whereas the surface of a white dwarf is closer to 85,000 Kelvin. For true convenience, this can be converted back to Fahrenheit using the formula TF = (TK whatever 459.67 … where we see that for big numbers the 459.67 conversion constant doesn’t mean a damn thing, and 85,000 x 9/5 is plenty close enough for government work.

Better we switch to theoretical physics, where a conversion factor of 9/5 can be too small to make a damn bit of difference either.

I’m reading in a complimentary Scientific American supplement, The Cosmic Life Cycle, that the Big Bang theory may have outlived its usefulness. It’s conveniently easy to visualize, sort of: from singularity to roughly the size of today’s visible universe, 10 to the 28th power centimeters (10^28), in about 10 to the -35th power (10^-35) seconds.

Cosmologists know that there are several severe objections to the Big Bang model, possibly insurmountable. I can remember only two of them. (1) If the universe expanded from essentially nothing to essentially everything in a finite amount of time, slightly greater than “an instant”, how did different parts of the expanding sphere know to coordinate their expansion with the other parts? (2) If space is curved, as relativity predicts, how come the universe is measurably flat out to 10^28 centimeters, pretty much the extent of today’s visible universe?

Replacement theories are harder to visualize, and we won’t even try, here … but they suppose infinitely expanding fractals, with a separate universe arising out of each whorl. If our visible universe is in a trough of one of those, it would appear “flat” to us, as “inflation” is occuring in other whorls that by definition, we can’t see. In this model, the true size could be up to 10^10^12 centimeters: that’s 10, followed by a trillion zeroes.

In such a model, our pathetic little 10^28 centimeter corner of creation would indeed appear flat, just as the 10×10 backyard vegetable garden appears flat against the 24,902 mile circumference of Planet Earth.

And the Scientific American pundits even speculate that there might be a way to create new universes in a laboratory, starting with super-compressed matter that is triggered into Expansion. What, they asked, if all universes had been created that way?

This would be the theory that in the beginning the earth was without form, and void, and a laboratory tinkerer said, Let there be light … and all that was before was destroyed, and all that came after was good. This is exactly what we were talking about in our November 2006 article Where Did It All Come From? , except we were joking, and - hey - DON’T touch those two little wires together!