\u201cDid this sleepy village stop the Great Plague? \u00a0Today, tourists amble through the pretty village of Eyam. But 350 years ago, during the plague, the town\u2019s terrible sacrifice meant its streets were filled with the wails of the dying\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
And now I transition from the very small and invisible to the chronologically far distant and virtually unimaginable:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The following two quotations come from Richard Panek,\u00a0The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality<\/em>\u00a0(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Mariner Books, 2011). \u00a0They refer to the MIT theoretical physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to his calculations, the universe had gone through a monumental expansion in its first moment of existence.\u00a0 At the age of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of one second \u2013 or 1\/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000 th of a second \u2013 the universe had expanded ten septillion-fold \u2013 or to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times its previous size.\u00a0 (126)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Guth found that if you apply that transformation mathematically to the conditions of the early universe, the phase transition would have produced a temporary vacuum.\u00a0 That vacuum, in turn, would have produced a negative pressure \u2013 a strong gravitational repulsion \u2013 that would have expanded space exponentially.\u00a0 The universe would have doubled in size, then doubled in size again, then doubled in size yet again.\u00a0 It would have done this at least a hundred times, and it would have done so over the course of 10-35 <\/sup>seconds (or 1\/1035<\/sup>).\u00a0 After that, the vacuum would have decayed, the exponential expansion would have stopped, and the standard expansion of the universe \u2013 the one in the Big Bang theory that we can see for ourselves in the redshifting of the light from distant galaxies \u2013 would have begun.\u00a0 (127)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
In other news:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
For roughly thirty hours, thus far, the message board where my Malevolent Stalker, his mendacious wannabe the Mini-Stalker, and several others have anonymously\u00a0published their work for approximately a decade and a half\u00a0has been down. \u00a0Now, I know that I should have more sympathy. \u00a0But I frankly think it\u2019s rather pleasant<\/em> that,\u00a0for part of two days now \u2014 to pick up just a few of the Peterson-related themes that were really, literally, trending on the board immediately before it went down \u2014 they\u2019ve been unable to continue with their earnest discussions not only of such standard-issue topics as my 2012 purging from the Maxwell Institute, my mean-spiritedness, greed, dishonesty, physical ugliness, racism, and hatred of homosexuals; the viciousness of this blog; and the embarrassingly low quality of the Interpreter Foundation\u2019s yet-unreleased Witnesses<\/em> film<\/a>; but of how, by distracting one of its central participants from his urgent professional work, this blog has interfered with Utah\u2019s response to the coronavirus, and how my hatred and fear of science, if they were to spread to the general public, would make fighting COVID-19 almost impossible, and how I need to be more charitable to others.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
So far as I\u2019m aware, I haven\u2019t yet been determined to be the cause of Utah\u2019s recent earthquake or the locust plague in Africa and the Middle East.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 I\u2019m shocked and dismayed at the number of people who still don\u2019t appear to be taking COVID-19 seriously. \u00a0For those \u2014 and especially for the young and, therefore, the immortal among them \u2014 I offer some links. \u00a0The first, especially, should be rather sobering: \u00a0 \u201cModeling study suggests 18 months of COVID-19 social […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3790,8031,71,9108,9191],"class_list":["post-83724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-big-bang","tag-coronavirus","tag-cosmology","tag-covid-19","tag-inflation"],"yoast_head":"\n
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