Categories: Cosmology

The Big Bang Writ Little

If you are into Twitter (as I am), you might enjoy this: New Scientist challenged their readers to encompass the Big Bang into a Tweet. That means the description of the event that started everything that is needs to be 140 characters or less –and actually it was only 133 characters because to qualify, the Tweet had to include the #sci140 hashtag so the folks at New Scientist could gather them all together. Some went the complete science route by trying to summarize the physics (at least one person fit in the equation for Hubble’s Law), others quoted (“In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” — Douglas Adams), others took a religious bend, and still others described the event in how it might sound (boom, bang, kaboom or tweeeet). Here’s my favorite:

@newscientist yanikproulx

A fun exercise in brevity.

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Here’s the rest of their top 10:

Timeless energy, / all dressed up, no place to go: / had to create space. / – #BigBang #haiku #sci140 – haiQ

God said delB=0 etc, & then light (sym breaking), separation light from darkness (recombination), man created from dirt (evolution) #sci140 – dmadance

#sci140 starburst, molecule, amino acid, protein, cell development, cell division, sex, technology, war, religion, OK magazine. – jonotrumpeto

@newscientist #sci140 Antimatter and matter duke it out. Matter wins 1 billion and one to 1 billion. The matter left expands and makes us. – zeroentropy

#sci140 A place for everything, and everything in one place. Then — kaboom, everything all over the place. – tui4

@newscientist The Big Bang: the moment the universe vanishes when extrapolating its expansion backwards into the past #sci140 – hubi1857

For t0 its a matter of life and death – as a matter of fact #sci140 – thebeerhunter

an argument between the 9th and 10th dimensions overspilled into the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. #sci140 – AlexStavrinides

The Big Bang: Basically a ballooning of bosons, belatedly bloating into our beautiful universe. Brought to you by the letter ‘B’. #sci140 – CoyoteTrax

Source: New Scientist

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/