I've been watching TED talks in the mornings--a way to feel informed, and not out of the loop, since i am still actively trying to avoid reading the news. this morning's was Brian Cox, who was labeled on the TED site as the "rock star" of physicists. His talk was from last year, about the Large Hadron Collider, which was I was fascinated by when it was in the news. Mostly because there was this hilarious and scary quote from one of the scientists on the project who said "I don't think the world will end when we switch it on." (Cue sinister movie music: dunh, dunh, dunh.)
This talk is a bit confusing, because my brain, despite the 13.7 billion years its had to develop into something more than it is, does not compute alot of the physics--even explained "simply" as he tried to do in this short lecture. But at about 13 minutes, he starts talking about the stuff that fascinates me: what happened a billionth of a second after the universe began. cool.
Click here to spend 14 minutes pondering the universe....
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Very interesting work and a fun guy to listen to. What I think would be cool would be for him or someone to talk about what happened one billionth of a second BEFORE the universe began. What was the super dense particle sitting in or on when it went "Bang!"? Was it floating in a vacuum inside of some other space? The statement was made something like "The universe is expanding...", which implies that the universe is contained within another space. What is the universe expanding into. Another question that would be cool to hear an answer to is, where did the super dense particle come from or, more specifically, where did all the matter in the universe that was compressed in the super dense particle come from and how did it get so compressed? I've heard some physicists say that the matter always existed, maybe that it is going in a cycle of collapse-expand-collapse-expand forever. So where did the first batch of matter that started the cycle come from? Next time I see you I'll buy you a coffee and we can talk about these fun physics things. :)
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