Nice.
But I also have a few questions in mind for quite some time about these topics :)
How could they know that it covers a diameter of 150 billion light years? Since there are newer and newer discoveries of things we couldn't see or imagine before - maybe our comprehensnion of our surroundings can grasp as much information, while there is much beyond.
Or maybe not :D We cannot be certain about it.
Also, the way they explain it sounds a whole lot like an explosion that could be, in reality, a tiny hydrogen explosion, but we are inside it, and for us it is enourmous and all there is, when it's simply 1 of infinite tiny hydrogen explosions :D
Since they thought the atom is the smallest particle there could be for hundreds of years - even the name suggests it, then we can only hope to find those discoveries in our lifetime..
How do you think?
Those calculations are made by Google automatically ... what I liked most about the book "The first three minutes of the Universe" (Steven Weinberg), is that he began his story with the legend of the creation of the universe of the Vikings, I think. In a great show of humility and declaration of principles, the author said he did not know if what he was going to tell next was something as crazy as the Viking legend, more or less. And of course, I did not know if it was true or just a pure and hard speculation.
The Big Bang has already become a dogma of faith, and in my opinion this of trying to make "Science" play the role "traditionally" reserved for religion (mythology, I would say), only brings about a deterioration for this and an eventual loss of social credibility.
Theories are theories, things that not only are we not sure of, but could even be totally wrong. It is not necessary to dig a lot in the history of science to find such "solid" things as phlogiston, ether, the determinism of Newtonian mechanics and so on, and when I say solid, they were very solid, certainly at the level of paradigm. Much more than the Big Bang. By the way, I also recommend digging into the biography of the ideological parents of the creature (I speak of the Big Bang), it is very revealing. I would like to recommend another book, very good too, about the ideological ascendancy of Western science: "The religion of technology", by David F. Noble. It's amazing how the ideas that some people say (and honestly believe) fight sneak in the back door.
I would feel much more comfortable telling the truth: we do not know if the Doppler effect is the only and primordial cause of the displacements we observe in the spectra, and we can not be sure of the distances beyond what we can actually measure by triangulation ( and not even that, let's remember the Hipparcos controversy), it's really so overwhelming what we ignore, that I can not explain how nobody can stay so wide after "explaining" the origin of the Universe. These activities have always been the objective of mythology (or the sociology of mass control, if we want), I do not think it will fit the scientific method to make constructions of that type.
It is my opinion, of course.
Nice! :)
I will definitely check out your recommendations!
And yes, theories are simply theories, we could go on and on and oooon with those and they can all get busted by an accidental revelation :D