A Monkey in Manhattan
This ape's thinking has evolved sufficiently to know that this is all there is.
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The Big Bang Theory
The following extracts are entirely from the amazing book, ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ by the brilliant Bill Bryson.
If you’d like to make a Big Bang universe, you need to gather up everything there is – every last mote and particle of matter between here and the edge of creation – and squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. This is known as a singularity.
Now get ready for a really big bang! You may wish to retire to a safe space to observe the spectacle but unfortunately there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no where. It is natural to think of the singularity as a pregnant dot in a vast, boundless void but there is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there, whether it has been there for ever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist; there is no past for it to emerge from.
And so from nothing our universe begins.
When this happened is a matter of debate, the consensus seems to be heading for about 13.7 billion years ago when there came a moment known to science as t = 0.
13 700 000 000 years ago
In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception.
One ten million trillion trillion trillionth of a second, after the moment of creation, the universe is so small that you would need a microscope to find it.
0. 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1 secs
But then according to inflation theory, the universe underwent a dramatic expansion. Every 10 -34 of that first second, it doubles its size changing it from something you could hold in your hand to something at least 10 million million million million times bigger.
In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast.
1 000 000 000 000 000 miles across
There is a lot of heat now, about 10 billion degrees of it, enough of it to begin the nuclear reactions that create the elements of hydrogen, helium and lithium. 98% of all matter has been produced and it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.
Such quantities are of course ungraspable. It is enough to know to know that in a cracking instant we were endowed with a universe that was vast – at least a hundred billion light years across but possibly any size up to infinite – and perfectly arrayed for the creation of stars, galaxies and other complex systems.
100 000 000 000 000 light years
For mankind, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed. This visible universe – the universe we know and can talk about – is a million million million million miles across.
1000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 miles across
But according to most theories the universe is much roomier still. The number of light years to the edge of this larger unseen universe would be written not with tens of zeros, not even with hundreds but with millions.
Astronomers these days can do the most amazing things. If someone stuck a match on the moon, they could spot the flare. From the tiniest throbs and wobbles of distant stars, they can infer the size, character and habitability of planets much too remote to be seen – planets so distant that it would take us half a million years in a spaceship to get there.
With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them since collecting began (in 1951) is ‘less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.’ (Carl Sagan)
As for our own solar system, none of the maps you would have seen was drawn remotely to scale. It is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper.
On a diagram drawn to scale with the Earth reduced to the size of a pea, Jupiter would be about 300 metres away and Pluto would be 2½ kilometers distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16 000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank everything down so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away.
The number of probable planets in the universe is as many as ten billion trillion – a number vastly beyond imagining. But what is equally beyond imagining is the amount of space through which they are lightly scattered. If we were randomly inserted into the universe, the chance that you would be on or near a planet would be less than 1 in a billion trillion trillion.
0. 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001 chance
‘Worlds are precious’
The average distance between stars is over 30 million million kilometres. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically challenging distances for any traveling individual. Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup on a lonely road in Arizona but it does seem unlikely.
A supernova occurs when a giant star bigger than our sun collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns. Most are so far away that they appear no more than the faintest twinkle, occupying a point in space that wasn’t filled before.
Looking for supernovae is mostly a matter of not finding them! Telescopes can now take pictures and let computers detect the telltale bright spots that marked a supernova explosion, but before this technology it was down to the human eye and countless hours of staring at the sky.
The Reverend Bob Evans from Sydney, Australia does this better than anybody else who has tried to spot these moments of celestial farewell.
To understand how good he is, imagine a standard dining-room table covered in a black tablecloth and throwing a handful of salt across it. The scattered grains can be thought of as a galaxy. Now imagine 1 500 more tables like the first one – enough to make a single line 2 miles long – each with a random array of salt across it. Now add one grain of salt to any table and let Bob Evans walk among them. At a glance he will spot it. That grain of salt is the supernova.
…and he has done it 33 times, beating NASA everytime!
A Monkey in Manhattan 