By the Book 1

I would like to continue our discussion of the CMB, but I’m afraid things have picked up around there and I won’t be able to gather the necessary information to go any more in-depth, but I would like to continue our discussion of a time line. Up to this point I’ve been pulling in things I’ve know and going backwards. But now I would like to go a bit more out there and use a book (oh how scandalous). I’ll basically be going through Edward Harrison’s Cosmology: The Science of the Universe chapter 20. We’ll see what we find.

Note: So you remember when I talked about the “what’s dominate” eras? Well it appears that matter wasn’t dominate in our universe until about 100,000 years after the big bang. I don’t remember if I said that or not.

I found a cool graph. It’s a timeline set on a logarithmic scale. (If you don’t know what a logarithmic scale is you can look here, it’s actually really hard to describe and took me like 4 years for someone to actually explain it to me a way I could understand it.)

Ok now I will take a coupe of moments to explain what all of the things on this graph on graph. They don’t all relate directly to what we want to know but it’s a very very good thing to know what these things mean. Ok first we have monopoles and inflation, and we already talked about those. Next comes quarks. I have a picture of those. They are a fundamental particle (they aren’t made of anything). There are different kinds of them, 6 in total (and their antiparticles of course).When you put them together they make all kinds of things. When you put a certain combination of 3 quarks together you get a proton. And a different combo of 3 gives you a neutron and if you mix them up or put just 2 together you get a whole host of exotic particles. Next comes leptons. These are a little less…uniform. There are also six types of these but they are not all as common. The only one we see often is the electron, but there is also the muon and the tauon, and different ‘flavors’ of those. And tomorrow I will continue with the hadrons.