An Easy Trick For Remembering The Age and Size of the Universe

[DonRocks]

1492 - everyone knows that year.

The universe is 14 billion years old.

The universe is 92 billion light-years large (diameter).

Give or take a few.

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You can stop here, or go on for some theory.

Assuming the Big Bang took place at the centroid, that means that the radius is 46 billion light-years (half of 92 billion), and that in a duration of 14 billion years, mass was able to travel 46 billion light years.

Given that no object can travel faster than the speed of light, how is that possible? To travel 46 billion light-years in 14 billion years, objects would seemingly have to travel at over 3 times faster than the speed of light.

I'll let you sit on that one for awhile.

[Al Dente]

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

[DonRocks]

Assuming the Big Bang took place at the centroid, that means that the radius is 46 billion light-years (half of 92 billion), and that in a duration of 14 billion years, mass was able to travel 46 billion light years.

Given that no object can travel faster than the speed of light, how is that possible? To travel 46 billion light-years in 14 billion years, objects would seemingly have to travel at over 3 times faster than the speed of light.

I'll let you sit on that one for awhile.

I'm a little surprised that nobody has either explained this, or thrown up their arms in surrender.

(In case you're dying to know, here is about the best explanation I've seen - anyone can understand it within two minutes.)

[Al Dente]

Here's a good visual on how large the universe is:

[DonRocks]

Could you imagine what would happen if *he* did?

And now we know the origin of the Big Bang.

[DonRocks]

On 4/1/2016 at 1:44 PM, Al Dente said:

Here's a good visual on how large the universe is:

I'm not convinced this is true - in particular, I don't understand why science always talks about "The Big Bang," when there could have easily been 100-million Big Bangs. There are 100-million solar systems in the Milky Way, there are 100-million galaxies in the observable universe - why can't there be 100-million of the things we call "the universe?"

I mean we're already impossibly small; what's another 1/100,000,000th going to change?

Somewhere on this website, almost surely in this Forum, I described a shadow moving around on the bottom of a shoe box (I think that's how I described it) - I like this analogy of the two-dimensional ant on an expanding balloon even better:

"Where is the Center of the Universe?" by Marcus Woo on livescience.com

And I'll bet dollars-to-donuts that, just as the universe may be infinitely large, there are things just as infinitely small. When I was growing up, the smallest thing was an atom; then a quark; now ... maybe a black hole singularity (although I have strong reasons to doubt this (*)). And then after that?

(*) Black holes gobble up a finite amount of matter with a finite-strength force; if the pull was infinitely strong, there would be a hole-hell-of-a-lot more surrounding matter sucked into it.

And then there's this Glory Hole to Hell: