Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff… it’s All Small Stuff!

by Whabby

Given all the recent turmoil in the nest, I thought it might be nice to put some perspective on things. Every March, Huz, his brother and I vacation in Palm Springs. I still vividly remember an incident from our vacation two years ago. Huz’s brother John (a highly intelligent person who’s a VP of human resources for a big oil company) called me over to talk about an article he’d just finished in the newspaper about the beginning of the universe. His reaction to the article was total disbelief… he literally couldn’t accept the reality of what he was reading! Huz, who read the article too, had exactly the same reaction. This had to be utter nonsense!

The subject of the article was something you’ve all probably heard of: The Big Bang. The currently accepted account of how our universe began. I have to say that, at one level, I find myself agreeing with Huz and his brother. The Big Bang is a simply mind-boggling story, made all the more incredible because it happens to be true.

To tell this story, and give you a bit of a flavor for it’s nuances, lets start at the beginning. Today, August 8, 2008. Take a good long look at the photo that accompanies this blog, owls. It’s the Hubble Deep Field, essentially a photograph of a very small piece of the sky taken with Hubble’s advanced camera for surveys. The thing to appreciate about this photo is that virtually all of the blobs and smudges and points of light in the photo are actually galaxies (the field of view of the photo is so small that there’s hardly a foreground star among them). Thousands of galaxies. At our current point in time today (August 8, 2008), some of those galaxies are as far as 40 billion light years away from us, and getting much farther away every second.

They weren’t always that far away, though. Six billion or so years ago, when the universe was about half its present age, it was also only about half of today’s size, so all the billions of galaxies were only half as far away from us (and from each other). Going even further back in time, the universe was even smaller. At one point, about 13.3 billion years ago, the universe was only 1/1000 the size it is today, so all these galaxies were a thousand times closer to each other (and us).

But the shrinkage didn’t end there. There was a time, only a few hundred thousand years earlier, when the universe was so small that all the galaxies were merged together into one clump. A little earlier than that, even, believe it or not, the clump was smaller than the period at the end of a sentence. In fact, there existed a discrete point in time when the clump was no larger than an atom! It was, in fact, just this side of being infinitely small!

Well, as you can imagine, having all those billions of galaxies worth of material packed into a space less than the size of an atom must have meant that the clump had to be pretty dense, and you’d be right. In fact, the clump was just a hairs breadth away from being infinitely dense, and infinitely hot, too!

I’m not kidding about any of this, unbelievable as it seems. If you like, I’ll blog in the future about how we know that this was the way the universe started, and how this nearly infinitely hot, dense speck eventually produced the universe we know today.

For now, just sit back and imagine how small everything used to be. It kind of gives new meaning to that time-honored phrase, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff”, don’t you think?