Listen up, Marco Rubio!: Science lessons for the tea party

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 19:00:00 +0000

If a film of the history of the universe had been made, what would happen if you ran it backwards? At about five billion years ago our planet would disappear, for this is when it probably formed, from the debris of our solar system. Keep going back to the beginning and what happened then? The Big Bang: an explosion so powerful that its temperature and force are still being felt some 13.8 billion years later.

At least this is what scientists from the 1940s began to suggest with increasing confidence. The universe had begun from a point, an unimaginably hot, dense state, and then there was the big bang. Ever since this moment, it has been cooling and expanding, carrying the galaxies outwards from this original point. Ours is a dynamic and exciting universe, in which we are the tiniest of tiny specks. It is composed of the stars, planets and comets making up the visible galaxies; there is also much that’s invisible – black holes and the much more abundant ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’.

Salon.com > Big Bang Theory

Listen up, Marco Rubio!: Science lessons for the tea party