By the Book 4

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.

By the Book 3

Ok…everyone have a good thanksgiving…and for those not in America…have a good week? Good. Now to get back to the physics. I have another graph for you. This one is a bit more technical but I think we are gonna try to tackle it anyway. Ok, so if you look at the graph you will see two solid lines, one labeled matter and the other labeled cosmic radiation. We have spent quite a bit of time talking about cosmic radiation, we’ve just been calling…light or photons. Anyway, the lines measure the density of the stuff in grams per cubic centimeter (How can light be measured in grams?? Well just use Einstein’s E=mc^2 to convert the amount of energy you have into a mass and there you have it.) with respect to time (here both axis are on logarithmic scales). The graph is a very nice compacted version of all the things we’ve been talking about recently especially the order that things happened in and the dominance areas. I’ll probably refer back to this graph later…I’ll just call it the density graph.

A Little Break for the US of A

Sorry I didn't post yesterday. I've been traveling and I've decided that i won't be posting this week. We've gone to a friends house for the thanksgiving holiday. I need some time off. Hopefully I'll be more gung ho for this new round of learning after some turkey and pie!

GOD! ?

Ok here are some more images...you might have to click the pictures to see all of them. Let me know what you think..

By the Book 2

I forgot about the gluons! We musn't forget them! They are a bit more complicated. For these puppies you can't just picture them as the billiard balls we see electrons and quarks as. Gluons are more like photons, while they are a particle, they also carry stuff...that is, photons carry enegry and deposit it and stuff...but gluons are the 'force carrier' for the strong interaction. They don't have any mass or charge, and there are 8 types.

Ok...now for the hadrons. Hadrons are just stuff made of quarks. there are a few different types of hadrons. We have measons, made of a quark and an anitquark, and baryons, made of three quarks (protons and neutrons are baryons). And that's it for the figure from yesterday.

Other particles you may or may not have heard of include the neutraino, and the muon and the ever popular higgs boson. The muon is just another kind of lepton, like the electon, exept heavier. The neutrino is just one 'flavor' of the leptons. We have an electron nuetrino a muon nuetrino and a tauon (the 3rd lepton) nuetrino and thier antiparticles. The higgs boson is another type of 'force carrier' partile that is suppose to give mass to things. It has yet to be observed (this is the job of most of the large hadron collider), but it is needed theoretically for our whole model to work.

Here is a link to the particle zoo, a very humorous look at the standard model and I've included a picture (you'll have to click on it) with a plethora of information on the stranded model and a great picture of how atoms are really composed.

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.

in the interim

ok...so i'm working on this super awesome but really long post. so i will not be posting today so i can work on that. have a good day and here have an lolcat!