A Day Without A Yesterday

Professor Brian Cox has changed people's view on science all over the country, the globe even. As Lord Mawson was introduced before the professor, he said that this day - the Infinity Festival - is a day to be inspired. He said that it was the younger generation that should be continuing this discovery into our lives, and planet, and universe. Then, Professor Cox was introduced with a slight change to the programme.

The first thing the world famous physicist said was that he wasn't going to stick to the agenda and talk about particle physics, but cosmology instead. It looks at the sale of our universe, how big it actually is and what happened before the big bang. There are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way and 20 billion planets like ours. One of the furthest galaxy that we can see is of a galaxy taking over another galaxy ;one of them stealing and pulling away the stars of the other. Some of the things that Brian Cox said was so overwhelming you actually feel miniscule sitting in the auditorium where he talked. We are travelling around the sun at 18 km/s so if we bounce a ball and catch it, does it come back to the same place or does it come back to a place that is 18 kilometres away? Einstein developed this theory of relativity in 1905 and we are still unsure if it can actually be proven. The greatest theorists of history have decided that there is no space or time in the universe, but there is space-time. It is described as the fabric of the universe. The planets and stars distort and pull this fabric and it is always getting further and further away. This suggests that in the past everything was closer together and if we look close enough we can see back in time and that the further we look the further back in time we go. A friend of Einstein’s commented “your theory suggests there was a day without a yesterday.”

This, to us, is so completely crazy we can't even begin to have a grasp on this idea. To mind-boggle us even further, Professor Cox then shows the audience a picture that he describes as “the afterglow of the Big Bang.” There are no stars or galaxies because it was too hot for anything to form and eventually all the matter cooled down and the universe was created. He told the eager listeners that it was their job to continue this research. When did this happen? How did this happen? Is our universe eternal?

However, Brian Cox thankfully summed up his talk by saying “If the universe was smooth there would be no stars… and we wouldn’t be here to look at them.”