This episode is presented by eBay.

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sellers.

Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American posted on September 21st, 2010.

I'm Steve Mursky. Our September's single topic issue looks at the ends of things,

including the possible end of time itself. Staff editor George Musser is our astronomy and astrophysics expert.

He's the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory.

Despite that title, he himself is not a complete idiot,

and he's the author of the article Could Time End in the September Issue.

We had a conversation about the piece at the scientific American offices.

First, George, I have to congratulate you on the coinage, as far as I know, of a new word.

I believe it would be pronounced pre-Bangian, although I'm leaning toward Probanjian.

I like the latter, actually.

I'm not sure I'm really the coiner of the coinage.

You've seen it elsewhere, pre-bangian?

Then again, I may have seen it in something else I wrote.

So maybe I coined off myself. And you're plagiarizing.

Exactly.

So obviously by pre-bang-in, we meet before the Big Bang.

...