On 7 June 2014 02:54, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > 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), >
I once suggested that the Big Bang should be renamed the Very Small White Noise. I'm not sure anyone but me thought it was funny. > 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. > Yes that appears to be a summary of the inflationary era (I haven't counted the zeroes, I'll take your word for that). But I still think Weinberg's book "The First Three Minutes" covers roughly what a lot of people think of as the Big Bang, up to the point where nucleosynthesis ended. I would personally add later periods in which the whole thing was even bigger, and still rather hot - a "fireball" poetically, though of course far too hot for chemicals to exist, And as I said, in either case 99.999...a lot of 9s...% of that happened post-inflation. But as you said it's semantics. If someone has a suitable term that covers the post inflation/pre-CMBR era, I'll be happy to use that instead, and save the term BB for just the initial singularity (which in Eternal inflation doesn't happen anyway). -- 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.
