JB: That was guitarist Brian May of the band Queen.
DB: May is returning to his Ph.D. studies in astronomy. And he’s helped write a book called Bang! The Complete History of the Universe. It traces the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to a future long past when our sun becomes a red giant and consumes the Earth.
JB: Brian May told us how our universe can be something that is finite, but also not have any boundaries.
Brian May: We have a neat little analogy in the book, which is an ant crawling on the surface of a football, I don’t know if you’ve come across this. It’s a fairly crude analogy, but it gives you some idea. This ant, assuming it can’t jump off, it’ll crawl over the surface of the football as long as it likes, and it will never come to a boundary. But the surface that it’s crawling on is nevertheless finite. And that’s kind of the view, translated into three dimensions of space, and one of time. That’s more or less the view that most cosmologists have of the universe at the moment.
1 comment:
Hey I meant to ask you yesterday, how did your first few days at the new job go?
Hope it was smashing!
And hope it leaves you time for more babyblogging (hint, hint)....
:)
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