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From the surface of Earth, the sun and moon look to be about the same size. Other planets are tiny specks of light, and everything seemingly spins around us. But that’s not what our solar system is really like. So, how did we find out what was where, and which way things were moving?
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From the rotation of our own Milky Way galaxy, to the expansion of the universe, much of the night sky is moving in ways we can’t quite explain. To plug the wholes in our understanding we have dark energy and dark matter. We don’t actually know what they are, but they can still surprise us.
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After covering history and background in the last episode, we can relax and play with the strange ideas and concepts surrounding the theory of the big bang. The event horizon around our universe, the way that time flows differently depending on where you are, how parts of the early universe may have run away and become impossible to observe, and even a theory we propose with no math and fewer reasons.
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Before 1923, the universe was thought to be static and eternal, unchanging and without beginning or end. Its size was likely just a few tens of thousands of lightyears across, with one large island of stars, our galaxy, the Milky Way. Discoveries showed us that the universe is much larger than we thought, and is getting bigger all the time. The universe seems to have had a beginning, and might even, one day, come to an end. Join us for a talk about how we got notions like the big bang and the expanding universe.
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