Credits: Cover image courtesy of Pantheon
Previous image
Next image
In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble, using data from the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, found that the universe is expanding. This was “probably the most important cosmic discovery of all time,” writes Alan Lightman in his new book, “Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings.” Certainly it is among the most thought-provoking.
Hubble’s discovery complicates how we grasp space and time. Can you picture a universe that expands infinitely? And if it is expanding, it must have had a starting point in time. But what existed before that, and how did things get started?
The mind of God? The problem with deifying Stephen Hawking
prospectmagazine.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from prospectmagazine.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A Japanese supercomputer is on a mission to find out how our universe went from nothing to everything in less than a microsecond
businessinsider.in - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from businessinsider.in Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Atlantic
‘It Seems That I Know How the Universe Originated’
The theoretical physicist Andrei Linde may have the world’s most expansive conception of what infinity looks like.
Updated at 3:27 p.m. ET on February 9, 2021.
In Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Book of Sand,” a mysterious Bible peddler knocks on the narrator’s door and offers to sell him a sacred book he came by in a small village in India. The book shows the wear of many hands. The stranger says that the illiterate peasant who gave it to him called it
The Book of Sand, “because neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end.” Opening the volume, the narrator finds that its pages are rumpled and badly set, with an unpredictable Arabic numeral in the upper corner of each page. The stranger suggests that the narrator try to find the first page. It is impossible. No matter how close to the beginning he explores, several pages always remain between the cover and his hand: “It was as though the
I m curious as to what the hell the mechanism for Inflation is? Some kind of particle or field?
By Brando (not verified) on 06 Jul 2009 #permalink
I m a bit confused: the universe is about 14 billion years old so how can we look out to distances of 46 billion light years?
By jdhuey (not verified) on 06 Jul 2009 #permalink
What do you mean by the Universe being flat ? I guess your meaning, obviously, wasn t a 2D pool-table Universe.
By auto focus (not verified) on 06 Jul 2009 #permalink
We know the universe is finite in age? Wrong! We don t know anything.
It s a bit silly to ask if time existed before or after anything. You see. without time there is no before or after. Likewise, there is nothing before or after the Big Bang. It just is. Not now, not here. it is !