Interesting fact: Gorge Gamow and colleges predicted the CMB in 1948 and they predicted it would have a temperature of somewhere between 5 and 50 degrees Kelvin (it has a temperature of 2.7 K but hey they were pretty damn close).
Cosmology rule of thumb: The density of mass in the universe (one of our lines in the density graph) is inversely proportional to the square of the age of the universe. In math terms this is Density of mass =1/((age of the universe)^2).
In his book Harrison then takes the reader on a journey back in time much as we did in the backtracking series (of course he did it much more eloquently) and we will fall into step with him to when the universe is only 500,000 years old and pick up there.
Ok so first he talks about the hydrogen plasma we talked about earlier and, get this, it took about 10,000 years for the nuclei to capture their electrons. I had no idea it happened that fast. This is called the decoupling epoch…but I’m not much for complicated names…so i’ll just keep talking about the plasma like I have been. Oh, something else I should mention, when telescopes like the Hubble satellite look at space they look back in time (but I’m sure you already knew that) and they can see very far…but even with the most advanced telescope we could ever build we wouldn’t be able to see (at least with light) during or before the plasma period. Remember how I said we the light was trapped in the plasma? Well it created this fog stuff that is impossible to see into or through this fog. So our telescopes could never look past this period.
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