Hubble Takes the Long View
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, September 26, 2012
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6 comments
Spacey coolness via the BBC: Hubble captures extraordinary view of Universe.
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Wow… Just think, it took God only 6,000 yrs to paint all that.
Silly me… I meant 6 days.
There in the distance … unthinkably tiny … incredibly far away: Romney’s chance of winning the election!
You know, the sheer size of the universe just plain breaks my brain. Even just our galaxy does it.
Sure is pretty, though, so I got that going for me.
“I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles…and miles!”
Most people know that the universe is expanding, but not folks are familiar with the theory of inflation, which reveals that the term “Big Bang” is misleading,
Inflation theory holds that the universe went from nothing at all to more than 99 percent of its present size in less than one-billionth of a billionth of a second – which is to say, instantly. So while empirical data, especially the uniformity of cosmic microwave background radiation and the origin of the light elements, support the conclusion the universe began from a single point, from any reasonable human perspective there was no explosion. The universe simply appeared everywhere at once, instantaneously.
The universe’s creation is better thought of as the simultaneous appearance of the universe everywhere there is the universe rather than observable expansion from a single point.
Inflation theory explains how the image of the galaxy enclosed in a square in the picture at the link can be thought to be the galaxy when it was only 460 million years old (making it presumptively the oldest object ever photographed). Stars and galaxies did not form right away after creation, but this galaxy was already billions of light years distant from ours when it came together.