THINGS I LEARNED DURING QUARANTINE--BIG BANG
Sitting in the house with little to do and the library closed, I have to keep my mind busy. I watched a couple educational movies on Cosmos that literally expanded my horizons.
I spent an hour and a half watching a movie explaining what occurred during the first second after the Big Bang, billions of years ago. Of course nobody was there with a stopwatch.
According to the movie, scientists measure time in "Planck times" (tp) which are trillionths of a second. The term honors German physicist Max Planck who first proposed the concept in 1899. He incorporated the speed of light and Newton's gravitational constant along with Planck's constant in a series of complicated equations.
Actually a unit of Planck time is much shorter than a trillionth of a second It is defined as the time to travel one Planck length at the speed of light--a time interval of 5.391 X 10 to the minus 44th of a second. In other words, how far does light travel in one second. That's quick. Lickety split!
One Planck time is the shortest theoretically measurable time interval. The key word here is theoretical because we don't have the technology yet to measure it. This concept is useful in quantum physics and I don't purport to be an expert on that.
To slow things down, there are actually words to describe short periods of time (in ascending order). For example: 1 yoctosecond (1 septillionth of a second), 1 zeptosecond (1 sextillionth), 1 attosecond (1 quintillionth), 1 femtosecond (1 quadrillionth) and 1 picosecond(1 trillionth). There will be a quiz on this,
To put this in context, an attosecond (1000 zeptoseconds) is to a second as a second is to 31.7 billion years. It takes 0.35 attoseconds for light to travel the diameter of a hydrogen atom. They didn't really measure that, they computed it mathematically. The famous Higgs boson particle, discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2013, hangs around for less than a yoctosecond before it breaks down.
The cost to obtain this information is astronomical in itself--billions of Euros. The Europeans built the LHC, the largest machine in the world. Located several hundred feet underground in France and Switzerland, it has 17 miles of concrete tunnels in which trillions of particles are fired at each other at nearly the speed of light. They are expected to collide with each other, and scientists observe these collisions to better understand what happened in the Big Bang. The best analogy is a big football game where arms and legs are flying around on every play.
For most of us, there isn't a big demand for trillions of anything except when discussing the Federal deficit. To paraphrase Sen. Everett Dirksen in the 1960's, "Congress spends a trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money!"
The narrator explained that particles from the Big Bang were moving faster than the speed of light. Einstein wasn't around in those days to tell them that you can't do that. Einstein's theories regarding the bending of light were recently proven. This occurred a Planck time or two after the Big Bang, which could be caused only by gravitational waves produced by inflation. The Big Bang, by definition is simply inflation on a cosmic scale. This discovery of inflation gratifies Washington economists and also those scientists who espouse the Big Bang Theory.
In any event, nobody was able to explain what caused the Big Bang in the first place, or how all that matter in the universe was compressed into a single atom. If anyone can explain that, a Nobel Prize awaits--as well as a noble one.
Did I mention that it's been a long quarantine?? In my next installment, I'll explain about all the stuff that's buried in the Rings of Saturn.
I spent an hour and a half watching a movie explaining what occurred during the first second after the Big Bang, billions of years ago. Of course nobody was there with a stopwatch.
According to the movie, scientists measure time in "Planck times" (tp) which are trillionths of a second. The term honors German physicist Max Planck who first proposed the concept in 1899. He incorporated the speed of light and Newton's gravitational constant along with Planck's constant in a series of complicated equations.
Actually a unit of Planck time is much shorter than a trillionth of a second It is defined as the time to travel one Planck length at the speed of light--a time interval of 5.391 X 10 to the minus 44th of a second. In other words, how far does light travel in one second. That's quick. Lickety split!
One Planck time is the shortest theoretically measurable time interval. The key word here is theoretical because we don't have the technology yet to measure it. This concept is useful in quantum physics and I don't purport to be an expert on that.
To slow things down, there are actually words to describe short periods of time (in ascending order). For example: 1 yoctosecond (1 septillionth of a second), 1 zeptosecond (1 sextillionth), 1 attosecond (1 quintillionth), 1 femtosecond (1 quadrillionth) and 1 picosecond(1 trillionth). There will be a quiz on this,
To put this in context, an attosecond (1000 zeptoseconds) is to a second as a second is to 31.7 billion years. It takes 0.35 attoseconds for light to travel the diameter of a hydrogen atom. They didn't really measure that, they computed it mathematically. The famous Higgs boson particle, discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2013, hangs around for less than a yoctosecond before it breaks down.
The cost to obtain this information is astronomical in itself--billions of Euros. The Europeans built the LHC, the largest machine in the world. Located several hundred feet underground in France and Switzerland, it has 17 miles of concrete tunnels in which trillions of particles are fired at each other at nearly the speed of light. They are expected to collide with each other, and scientists observe these collisions to better understand what happened in the Big Bang. The best analogy is a big football game where arms and legs are flying around on every play.
For most of us, there isn't a big demand for trillions of anything except when discussing the Federal deficit. To paraphrase Sen. Everett Dirksen in the 1960's, "Congress spends a trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money!"
The narrator explained that particles from the Big Bang were moving faster than the speed of light. Einstein wasn't around in those days to tell them that you can't do that. Einstein's theories regarding the bending of light were recently proven. This occurred a Planck time or two after the Big Bang, which could be caused only by gravitational waves produced by inflation. The Big Bang, by definition is simply inflation on a cosmic scale. This discovery of inflation gratifies Washington economists and also those scientists who espouse the Big Bang Theory.
In any event, nobody was able to explain what caused the Big Bang in the first place, or how all that matter in the universe was compressed into a single atom. If anyone can explain that, a Nobel Prize awaits--as well as a noble one.
Did I mention that it's been a long quarantine?? In my next installment, I'll explain about all the stuff that's buried in the Rings of Saturn.
posted by kensuskinreport at
9:27 PM
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