
Originally Posted by
AmandaG Let's take a point in time a milion years after the Big Bang. From every documentary I've watched and every book I've read (which, admittedly, are directed at laypeople, and, I'm sure, grossly oversimplified), galaxies, stars, what-have-you were forming in their early stages very quickly after the Big Bang occured. At that point, 1 million years post-BB, was the universe vastly smaller than it is today? Is it as simple as calculating 186000 m/s * 1 million years, and generating the size of the universe like that? I suspect it can't be that easy, because you have to factor in expansion rates and relativity, and a bunch of stuff I just don't understand.
What the hell am I trying to get at here? I'm having the hardest time trying to figure out how to word this. Okay. I understand that before the Big Bang, there was nothing. Time didn't exist before that moment. Some sub-atomic sized bit of energy violently converted into matter. Matter and anti-matter fought it out, matter was in greater numbers and won. Am I right so far? Now, from what I've gathered, all these things took place in a tiny amount of time. Milliseconds, maybe. I could be way off about that, though.
So those first few seconds, a lot went on, yes? Now, going by your balloon/coin analogy, are you saying that in the early stages of the universe, that balloon was, for all intents and purposes, deflated? Everything was created, but much more proximal than it is today? So if it were possible to build a time machine and find some nice rock to stand on where the Earth woudl someday be, I could look up at the sky of those first moments and see...well, almost everything?