Compared to Trek’s Miles O’Brien, PBS’ Miles O’brien is just small potatoes when it comes to science.
Most of the heavy duty action, especially the formation of anti-particles and particles and their elimination leaving just particles is completed in the first two minutes.
By now, one second of time has passed.
The universe has grown to a few light-years across, about the distance from the Sun to its closest neighboring stars. At a billion degrees, it’s still plenty hot—and still able to cook electrons, which, along with their positron counterparts, continue to pop in and out of existence. But in the ever-expanding, ever-cooling universe, their days (seconds, really) are numbered. What was true for hadrons is true for electrons: eventually only one electron in a billion survives. The rest get annihilated, together with their antimatter sidekicks the positrons, in a sea of photons.
Right about now, one electron for every proton has been “frozen” into existence. As the cosmos continues to cool—dropping below a hundred million degrees—protons fuse with protons as well as with neutrons, forming atomic nuclei and hatching a universe in which 90 percent of these nuclei are hydrogen and 10 percent are helium, along with trace amounts of deuterium, tritium, and lithium.
Two minutes have now passed since the beginning.
Not for another 380,000 years does much happen to our particle soup.
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2003/09/01/in-the-beginning
lieu:
Solo, dad.
They aren’t married or related, are they?
lieu
October 6, 2010, 8:22pm
24
I thought but having trouble confirming…
No relation at all. I specifically read that somewhere yesterday.
OK, this thread has now lost me. Wasn’t Captain Solo from a different series?
Given the speed of light as a maximum, how does the universe get a few light-years across in one second? Or did the speed limit not get set until the four forces established themselves?
Joe
The speed of light applies to things moving in space, not the expansion of space itself.
bup
October 8, 2010, 8:03pm
30
Cosmologists just dick with people. Any contradiction someone comes up with, they make up more bullshit.
Actually, Chief O’Brien was one of the characters that moved from TNG to DS9. In fact, it looks like he was actually in more DS9 episodes.
Michael_Ellis:
Ol’ Neil doesn’t think Pluto’s a planet, either. Doesn’t mean he’s right.
EDIT: Of course, other scientists who didn’t make children cry agree with him, so there’s that.
Let’s not forget the “scientists” who took away my brontosaurus. I’ve been hunting them down, one by one…
i believe they are pretty well all dead by now.