The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59418 Message #2280542
Posted By: Amos
05-Mar-08 - 04:35 PM
Thread Name: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
"As the universe expanded, it cooled down. At 10^-35 seconds, the temperature was a mere 10^27 degrees K (water boils at 373.16 K or 3.7316^2!). At this critical temperature, the universe underwent a phase transition, something like the process that happens when liquid water freezes into ice. The strong nuclear force--which acts at very short distances and holds protons and neutrons together--split off from the other forces. Physicists call this process "symmetry breaking," and it released an enormous amount of energy.
Then, in an extraordinary instant that theorists have dubbed "inflation," the universe expanded exponentially. During this time, the universe grew by a factor of 10^50 in 10^-33 seconds. Talk about runaway inflation!
This scenario, much as it strains credulity, neatly explains several different observations made during the last 20 years--the large-scale smoothness and apparent flatness of the universe among them--that had weakened the original Big Bang theory of cosmology based on a much more leisurely period of expansion.
Things slowed up a bit after the inflationary epoch. A number of observations, well supported by theory, suggest that our universe continued to expand, albeit more slowly, and that it is expanding still.
As space expanded, it continued to cool down. Matter--at first photons, quarks, neutrinos, and electrons, and then protons and neutrons--condensed out, all less than one second after the Big Bang. It was not until one billion years later, when the universe was one-fifth the size it is today, that the matter would form the first stars and galaxies."
Well, so that's the theory. Space expanding madly.
Prior: No space, no time.
Most odd, I must say.
A