On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 5:15 PM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > That depends if you take the big bang to mean the initial hypothetical > singularity (which doesn't occur in eternal inflation) or the fireball that > starts when inflation ends and ends when "recombination" occurs. I > generally take the BB to include at least "the first 3 minutes", which puts > it (or 99.9999999999999999999999...% of it) post-inflation. > > It's really just a question of semantics but I think most would say 3 minutes is too long to be considered the Big Bang. I'll call the instant when nothing became something and when time was set at zero the big bang (no capital letters because it just wasn't very big), then during the interval between 10^-36 seconds and 10^-33 seconds linear distances in the universe expanded by at least a factor of 10^26, and because volume goes as the cube of the linear distance the volume of the universe increased by at least a factor of 10^78. What happened during the first 10^-36 seconds in the Universe's life is poorly understood so when people talk about the "Big Bang" it's usually this time interval they're talking about because it was really big and it really really banged; in about .00000000000000000000000000000001 seconds the volume of the universe increase by at least a factor of. 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.
After this faster than light inflationary period (like the era we live in today) during a time interval of the same very small duration the universe would increase in size by only a trivial amount, far far less than 1% . John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
