You may have heard of the medieval philosophers who supposedly debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The modern equivalents are surely the astrophysicists who study the beginning and evolution of the universe.
Articles with Big Bang
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A new finale for ‘Creation’
Two centuries have elapsed since Joseph Haydn composed his magnificent The Creation oratorio. In all that time, no other musician has given us a better evocation of how the universe began.
The famed Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory • Photo by Doc Searls (CC BY 2.0)
Our age? It’s now an educated guess
How old is the universe? The amazing thing is not the answer — approximately 15 billion years — but the fact that there is an answer.
Map of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation developed with the data provided by the COBE satellite • NASA (Public Domain)
Fact is, science is skepticism
Astonishing fact Number 1: The universe began billions of years ago in an explosion from an infinitely small, infinitely hot seed of energy. The Big Bang.
Artist's rendering of the Extremely Large Telescope, which has supplanted the proposed OWL instrument • Swinburne Astronomy Productions/ESO (CC BY 4.0)
Telescopes seek blasts from past
To be human is to be interested in origins.
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The joy of life after the Big Bang
“In the beginning, there was not coldness and darkness: there was the fire,” wrote the Jesuit mystic, Teilhard de Chardin, in his The Mass on the World. He added: “The flame has lit up the whole world from within…from the inmost core of the tiniest atom to the mighty sweep of the most universal laws of being.”
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Big thoughts in grapefruit packages
Imagine this: A hundred billion galaxies, each galaxy with a trillion stars, each star with a family of planets as various as the planets of our own solar system, some of them perhaps harboring life and intelligence — an entire universe contained within a physical space the size of a grapefruit.
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The end: clearer but not nearer
Scientists are pretty sure how the universe began. They are less certain how it will end.
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A mystery long ago and far away
When we are standing under the stars, the sky seems unmistakably two dimensional — just up there, like the light-flecked ceiling of the terrestrial ballroom.
Image by Pablo Carlos Budassi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
It all adds up to a very Big Bang
“Professor, that stuff you spoke of in class this morning — about the beginning of the universe…”