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John Carlos Baez's posts Post Back to profile
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Archnemysis

@johncarlosbaez Numbers on this scale break my brain. Is that last sentence saying, basically, 38 seconds after the creation of the universe?

27 January at 21:34 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.social
8 comments
hnapel

@Archnemysis @johncarlosbaez

No it's a fraction of a second like 1/100000000000000000000000000000000000000

27 January at 21:42 | Open on mastodon.social
Space Catitude ๐Ÿš€

@Archnemysis
Much smaller: 38 orders of magnitude shorter than one second. A mind-bendingly small amount of time -- not sure what to compare to.
@johncarlosbaez

27 January at 21:50 | Open on realsocial.life
Space Catitude ๐Ÿš€

@Archnemysis
But maybe it helps to say 10^-38 could be expanded to "one hundredth of one billionth of one billionth of one billionth of one billionth".
@johncarlosbaez

27 January at 21:55 | Open on realsocial.life
Thanasis Kinias

@TerryHancock
yeah, thereโ€™s basically nothing that fast/short to compare withโ€”even things like โ€œlight travels this far in that timeโ€ break down (10^-30 m is like a millionth of a billionth of the width of an atomic nucleus)
@Archnemysis @johncarlosbaez

28 January at 1:27 | Open on historians.social
Space Catitude ๐Ÿš€

Looks like it's about 200,000X the Planck time -- which is "the smallest interval of time there can be", more or less.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_u

28 January at 2:18 | Open on realsocial.life
John Carlos Baez

@TerryHancock - very much "more or less", since nobody knows what the hell is going on at such short time scales. But still, the Planck time is a good unit to measure times when you're talking about gravitational waves produced by the Big Bang!

28 January at 2:21 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Poloniousmonk

@Archnemysis

I'm a little rusty on my scientific notation, but i think it's 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds.

27 January at 22:43 | Open on autistics.life
John Carlos Baez

@Archnemysis - Not 38 seconds, 10โปยณโธ seconds. As others have said in different ways, that means the gravitational background radiation was released about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang! Check out my timeline of the very early history of the Universe to put this in context:

math.ucr.edu/home/baez/timelin

27 January at 23:56 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
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