The other day at the super market I was freaking out because I couldn’t find active dry yeast so I could make pizza dough. When I asked a person who worked there about it, they told me they only sell it during the holiday season. Wow, are you serious – people need to make dough more than just a few months out of the year, right? It didn’t make sense. But there was no point in arguing about it. I mean no one in the store could do anything about it anyways. Then when I got home I watched a YouTube clip that starts with a girl sitting in a park and zooms out to our planet, our solar system, galaxy and then the universe and it’s like DAMN, we are small. And I’m over here tripping out about yeast. What the hell is wrong with me?
Music Credits: OHD – Priorities
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First what is the universe exactly? Scientists define the universe as all of space and time and all the things in it including the physical laws that control them. Planets, energy, matter, basically everything you can think of – including your thoughts.
We have been studying the Universe since the dawn of mankind and have brought the stars we see at night down to Earth by naming them and creating stories behind them. But it hasn’t really been until recently that we have started to understand it more completely. Before the invention of the telescope the astronomer Copernicus figured out that we are not at the center of our solar system, but rather the sun is. Of course, like when anyone’s beliefs are challenged, this pissed off a lot of people and especially the Catholic Church. Then when the telescope was invented Galileo figured out that our sun is only one star in a sea of millions. Again this pissed off the status quo and he was forced by the church to withdraw his theory and was to remain under house arrest for the rest of his life. In the early 1900s an American man (Born in the USA Music) named Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is actually expanding, meaning that at one point it was clumped together. This is known as the Big Bang Theory.
The theory states that at one point our Universe may have been no bigger than the size of an atom. The birth of our Universe is thought to have occurred 13.8 billion years ago – when in under a second of time our Universe exploded from the size of an atom to that of a grapefruit. In the next few fractions of a second the extremely hot Universe became populated by a bunch of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Over the next 300,000 years the Universe cooled down enough for those electrons, protons, and neutrons to form atoms of mostly hydrogen and helium. Then in the next billion years gravity pulled together those two elements into giant clouds that eventually become the first galaxies while smaller clumps of gases collapsed to create the first stars. From then until now stars died and spewed heavy elements into space creating new stars and planets.
So how big is the Universe? The answer to that question isn’t really known and might not ever be answered for a few reasons. First we don’t know the shape of the Universe – however scientists have agreed that it is either a sphere, flat, or curved – so pretty much all the possibilities are still possible. However, given the evidence most think it is flat. Sound familiar? Second it’s extremely possible that some parts of the Universe don’t even interact with us. For example the Universe may be expanding faster than light can travel, meaning that even if we are able to observe the entire Universe from Earth – the light coming from the newer parts of the Universe might not even be able to reach us for millions of years. And third the majority of the Universe is invisible – 95% of all mass and energy is dark matter or dark energy – stuff we can’t even see or detect.
There are some scientists such as Stephen Hawkings, that also believe our Universe is only one of many. This is called the Multi-verse Theory – which simply put is a theory that there are a vast array of potential universes outside of our own. There are different ideas about how they may exist – for example the Bubble Theory in which there may have been other Big Bang events which have created other Universes so far away from us that we can’t even understand how far away they actually could be. Another theory is the Multiverse from Repeating Universes Theory which states that if space and time are infinite, the arrangements of particles will repeat themselves an infinite number of times meaning that if you travel far enough you will be able to find another Earth and another you doing the exact same thing you are doing right now.
