The universe is so vast we can’t calculate its size with the knowledge we now have because we’re too busy playing Candy Crush on our cell phones. Maybe artificial intelligence can give us that information and also why doing the Hokey Pokey is so important to us.
Woody Allen posed the question: “What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream? It’s bigger than the fuss about which is better for you, butter or margarine, but to some, as useless as the ‘G’ in lasagna. It’s called science. Let’s see if the following qualifies.
A new study by British cosmology researchers at King’s College London has found that our universe should have lost its existence moments after it was first created. (Note to reader) ‘Lost its existence’ sounds pretty ominous, doesn’t it? If that happened, we wouldn’t be here reading about it, now would we?
So, all the ‘stuff’ from the ‘big bang’ would have ‘vanished’ into ‘space?’ Huh? It’s a ‘Bizzaro World’ scenario, not unlike finding ourselves on vacation and not knowing the way back to our hotel. No; space is a little more complex than that. We don’t know what we don’t know.
One of the mysteries of the universe is why Pluto was downgraded from a full-fledged planet to just a huge rock in the sky. In 2003 the Hubble Space Telescope discovery of Eris in the Kuyper Belt showed it to be bigger than Pluto. Couldn’t they have added Eris and made it 10 planets? Is it better to add than subtract?
Don’t let the fact that the British researchers, living in a rain soaked, tabloid rich, entitled land where not paying a television tax is considered a criminal offence and driving on the other side of the road is normal, are looking at creation from the wrong side of the street. According to them, everything we know would not have come into existence like dental floss and ATM’s. On the down side, we wouldn’t have Ben and Jerry’s and Bloomin’ Onions®
Let’s just be grateful for what we have in our world even if it includes including ‘entertainment’ like some of the worst TV of all time. Shows which actually made it through the audience testing/pilot phase. It’s astonishing that anything that included the Osbourne family and Duck Dynasty, a sitcom passed off as reality, with bearded idiots posing as idiots with beards, ever caught the fancy of an audience. It would be worse if there was a television tax; oh wait, that’s called cable!
Back to science.
The Big Bang led to the creation of the Universe (Or so we’re told) None of us were around at that time, so we extrapolated various theorems based on the best studies of the time.
It is believed that shortly after creation, the Universe went through a short period of rapid expansion known as cosmic inflation. This is the same phenomena that a teenage boy goes through when he sees the opposite sex multiple times a day.
We’re still expanding at a very rapid pace, and like a mad monkey with a handful of its own leavin’s, fling matter outward at an exponential rate in all directions.
Putting it into terms that we all understand, you’re on a skateboard and a Saturn 5 booster rocket overtakes you and is gone faster than you realize what happened. That’s faster than some of those ‘pocket rockets’ that whiz past you on I-95.
The expansion of our Universe is still going on, but the pace is quite sedate compared to the pace after Big Bang. In other words, we’re slowing down. We may have reached middle age. After all we’re four and a half billion give or take a half billion years old. If you were that old, you’d slow down too. Of course if you met the Earth in a pick-up bar it may claim to be only a couple of billion. If you hear “I’m older than the Rockies but younger than the moon” you’re in for a good night. Everyone loves a Post-Cambrian fling.
Pay attention now: the expansion rippled space-time flowed into waves of gravitational energy as it went. Got that? It explains the fact that though the Universe seems to be expanding the same in all directions, it is actually flat and has evenly distributed cosmic microwave background radiation. I know; my brain hurts too, just thinking about it, so what’s it all about?
Put your right hand in and take your right hand out, put your right hand in and shake it all about. You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about!
