Big Bang

"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad Three classic observations -- the Hubble expansion of the Universe, the leftover cosmic microwave background radiation, and the observed abundance of the light elements -- lead us inevitably to modeling our Universe as having begun in a hot, dense state from which it expanded and cooled. There is no other explanation that agrees…

"The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to -271.3°C, not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it." -Stephen Hawking One of the most powerful predictions of the Big Bang -- the fact that our cold, star-and-galaxy-rich, slowly-expanding Universe came from a hot, dense, much more homogeneous state -- was the existence of a bath of leftover radiation that should be detectable, even today. Image credit: Pearson / Addison Wesley, retrieved from Jill Bechtold. Back when the…

"Much later, when I discussed the problem with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. But this “blunder,” rejected by Einstein, is still sometimes used by cosmologists even today, and the cosmological constant denoted by the Greek letter Λ rears its ugly head again and again and again." -George Gamow, the father of the Big Bang model The Big Bang -- the prediction that the Universe started from a hot, dense, rapidly expanding state -- tells us where our cold, star-and-galaxy-rich, slowly expanding Universe full of…

"Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view." -Max Planck Tomorrow morning, at 8 AM my time, the press conference that cosmologists have spent the past decade waiting for will finally happen, and the Planck satellite -- the most powerful satellite ever to measure the leftover radiation from the Big Bang -- will finally unveil its results about the origin and composition of the Universe. Image credit: ESA / LFI and HFI Consortia. They've figured out how to subtract the…

"The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out - there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman Here you are, a human being, a grand Universe of atoms that have organized themselves into simple monomers, assembled together into giant macromolecules, which in turn comprise the organelles that make up your cells. And here you are, a collection of around 75 trillion specialized cells, organized in such a way as to make up you. Image credit: J. Roche at Ohio University. But at your core, you are still just…

“It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. It’s a crazy world out there. Be curious.” -Stephen Hawking One of the most existential questions humanity has ever asked is the question of our origins: where do I come from? Inspired by Ben Kilminster's writings, here's the entire history of the Universe -- that's led up to the existence of you -- in just 10 sentences*. Image credit: Amber Stuver of http://www.livingligo.org/. 1.) At some point in the distant past**, the…

“Hell must be isothermal; for otherwise the resident engineers and physical chemists (of which there must be some) could set up a heat engine to run a refrigerator to cool off a portion of their surroundings to any desired temperature.” -Henry Albert Ben One of the most amazing ideas to come out of our observations of the Universe over the last century is that our vast, star-filled, mostly-empty Universe hasn't always been like this. Image credit: Ricky Barnard / Fine Art America. Today, the Universe is very cold, expanding, and the average distance between galaxies is increasing as time…

"Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it." - Samuel Johnson I have a six-sided die. I'm going to roll it ten times, and record each roll. And when I'm done, I'm going to have an incredibly rare, bet-you-can't-reproduce-it result! Image credit: random.org's dice roller. Look at that! Ten rolls of a six-sided die, and I got: 3, 2, 3, 5, 5, 5, 4, 1, 4, and 3! What a glorious, odds-defying sequence of events! In fact, if you took a fair six-sided die and rolled it ten times, you'd have less than a 1-in-60,000,000 chance of…

"Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others." -Timothy Leary Here we are, on planet Earth, the product of generations of civilization-building, maybe four-billion years of evolution on our world, around 13.7 billion years into the existence of our observable Universe. Image credit: Paranal Observatory, ESO / Babak Tafreshi. The Universe, quite possibly, didn't have to be exactly the way it is. It didn't have to have the laws of physics be exactly what they are, with the masses and charges…

"We have been forced to admit for the first time in history not only the possibility of the fact of the growth and decay of the elements of matter. With radium and with uranium we do not see anything but the decay. And yet, somewhere, somehow, it is almost certain that these elements must be continuously forming. They are probably being put together now in the laboratory of the stars." -Robert Millikan The Universe has been around for a long time, but without the Big Bang, we'd never have any of the matter or starlight that gives rise to practically all of our experiences in the entire…

"The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination. It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it." -Richard Feynman What did you think about, wonder about, and dream about the first time you saw the true magnificence of the night sky? Did you wonder about planets orbiting each of the thousands of points of light you saw? Did you think about the possibilities of rocky worlds with liquid water, of life, and even of intelligent aliens? Or did you perhaps think on even larger scales, about what stars…

“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw All that is real about ourselves is nothing to be ashamed about; quite to the contrary, it's something to be eminently thankful for. This very existence is all we have, and while it's minuscule compared to the entire Universe, it required the entire Universe to bring us to the point where it's possible for us to exist. What do I mean by…

"Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me." -Craig Ferguson Earlier this week, evidence was presented measuring a very rare decay rate -- albeit not incredibly precisely -- which point towards the Standard Model being it as far as new particles accessible to colliders (such as the LHC) go. In other words, unless we get hit by a big physics surprise, the LHC will become renowned for having found the Higgs Boson and nothing else, meaning that there's no window into what lies beyond the Standard Model via traditional experimental particle physics. Image credit:…

"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad Despite the wondrous, luminous sights of the night sky, we've learned that normal matter -- protons, neutrons, electrons and the like -- make up only 4% of the total energy in the Universe. Image credit: Large Suite of Dark Matter Simulations (LasDamas) simulation; Vanderbilt. The galaxies and clusters of galaxies lighting up…

“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” -Bertolt Brecht One of the most frequent questions I get about the Universe -- as a cosmologist -- isn't quite about the Big Bang in and of itself. The expansion of the Universe in reverse; image source unknown. The Big Bang is a remarkable idea, of course, that says that, based on the observations that the Universe is expanding and cooling today, it was hotter, denser, and physically smaller in the past. This gets particularly exciting when we extrapolate very far back in the history of…

Paul C. Broun by U.S. Department of Agriculture Congressman Paul Broun struck something into the hearts of empiricists everywhere with his remark that evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of hell."  Some of us were put off, others angered, possibly amused, or else afraid for the fate of the nation.  Greg Laden writes, "this man is saying that the Bible, which he takes absolutely literally, teaches us how to run our public policy and everything in society."  And while Broun may be on the fringe of modern Christianity, he typifies today's Republican…

"It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!" -George Gamow Earlier today, a video (from last month) was released where one of the members of the US House of Representative -- a member who sits on the House Committee for Science, Space and Technology -- proudly proclaimed the following: "All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the big bang theory; all of that is lies straight from the pit of hell." -Paul Broun Well, if the Big Bang is a lie from the pit of hell, then the Universe…

"I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like to be taught." -Winston Churchill My very first time leading a classroom  -- on my own -- was back in June of 2000. I was 21 years old, fresh out of college, and was teaching science in a middle school classroom. And I asked what I thought was an innocuous question, designed to pique their curiosity. I asked the class, "What are we -- you, me, and all human beings -- made of?" I was expecting many possible answers common to all living things, ranging from "blood and guts" to cells, molecules, or atoms. From a scientific standpoint,…

"Not even light can escape such hollowing, this huge mass in a small space. Even the Milky Way with its open arms is said to have a black hole at its heart." -Susan B.A. Somers-Willett Our Milky Way is home to us all. With its hundreds of billions of stars, massive spiral arms, dust lanes, and orbiting globular clusters, it's no wonder that nearly everything we see in the night sky is contained within it. Image credit: All rights reserved by Flickr user Greg Booher. I say nearly everything, of course, because there are a few exceptions. The Andromeda Galaxy, for one, as well as the two…

"Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order." -Robert Coover Our Milky Way, the swath of light and dark that dominates the darkest skies here on Earth, contains a huge variety of stars: large and small, red and blue, from young to old to ancient. Image credit: ESO / Serge Brunier, Frederic Tapissier, The World At…