Chapter One: How to Build a Universe
The Facts:
- 1 light-year(distance light travels in 1 year) = 9460730472580800 metres (exactly) ≈ 5.878625 trillion miles ≈ 63241.077 astronomical units ≈ 0.306601 parsecs
- During the big bang temperatures were at 10 billion degrees
- Main initial ingredients: hydrogen and helium with a hint of lithium
- After 3 minutes of the initial bang 98% of all matter was produced
- Universe is 13.8 billion years old
- The visible end of the universe is 90 billion trillion miles away(~100 billion light years across)
- The Universe doubled every 10^-34 seconds under the inflation theory proposed by Alan Guth
Summary:
The Universe started as a infinitely small singularity with space only inside and nothing outside of it, space is created as it expands. In a single second it expanded massively and after a few minutes it is billions of miles wide.
Ancient cosmic radiation exists from the beginning of the universe and was discovered by two scientists testing equipment for bell with a large communications antenna. They were attempting to receive a clear signal but would always get noise, what they didn't realize was they were intercepting cosmic radiation in the form of microwaves from the beginning of the universe postulated by George Gamow(Russian scientists).
The chances that the universe turned out correctly for life are slim. If gravity had been slightly stronger or weaker then elements and conditions created would have been different and may not have been able to support life. Therefore, scientists agree that universes occur often if not infinitely and there are multiple universes in history even though we understand only one time and one t=0.
Scientists predict 3 possibilities for future of the universe:
- Closed: Gravity will end up being too strong and the universe will collapse on itself and shrink back to a singularity.
- Open: Universe will continue to expand until everything is so far apart reactions no longer occur and everything becomes stagnant and "dead".
- Flat: The "Goldilocks effect", everything is just right and the Universe will eventually stop expanding allowing things to exists to no end.
The Universe is endless in that a person who believes the Earth is flat would end up walking around the Earth and arriving in the same place.
