AaS! 86: Why do we need cosmic inflation? (Part 2)

Ask a Spaceman!

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysics, Science, Cosmos, Holes, Black, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Universe, Cosmology, Space, Physics

4.8 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2018

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Part 2! What was going in the very early universe? How does inflation provide the seeds of larger structures? How can we possibly test this? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to WCBE Radio for hosting the recording session, Greg Mobius for producing, and Cathy Rinella for editing.

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, Chief Scientist at COSI Science Center, and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back.
0:08.2	Our bedtime story today starts when the universe was a mere 10 to the minus 36 seconds old.
0:16.0	Notice that we don't even bother with cool sounding Greek prefixes here.
0:20.5	There's no nanos or picos or femtos.
0:23.6	It's just 10 to the minus 36. 0.000 many more one seconds. You may want to listen to part one
0:33.6	on this two-part series on inflation, but if you're chill and just want the words to wash
0:38.2	over you with no meaning or context or significance, that's fine by me. Five stars on iTunes,
0:43.7	please. I tried to find a cool metaphor to express how quick this moment is, the moment leading
0:53.2	up to inflation and then the event of inflation itself.
0:56.3	I couldn't find one. Here is something that falls far short. You have a billion heartbeats in
1:02.9	your life, roughly. Start counting and it kind of stresses you out to count, but you have a billion
1:07.4	heartbeats in your life. Compare the length of your heartbeat, like
1:12.8	boom, boom, to the length of your life. Your life is much, much longer than your heartbeat. You can
1:17.4	get a vague sense of the extent of your life if you compare it to the length of a heartbeat.
1:23.9	If your heartbeat lasted 10 to the minus 36 seconds, you would need a billion, billion, billion,
1:33.3	billion lifetimes to reach one second.
1:38.1	So, yeah, it's not long.
1:41.3	I guess I could just say that.
1:42.7	It's not long at all.
1:44.3	The universe at this epoch is almost, and that's the key word here, almost incomprehensibly
1:51.9	different than it is today.
1:54.6	It's a little bit comprehensible and we're going to use that to our advantage.
	...

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