The Big Bang Writ Little

By Nancy Atkinson - September 11, 2009 at 7:26 AM UTC | Cosmology
big_bang.jpg

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 < ∞ #sci140

yanikproulx

A fun exercise in brevity.

Here's the rest of their top 10:

Timeless energy, / all dressed up, no place to go: / had to create space. / - #BigBang #haiku #sci140 - God said delB=0 etc, & then light (sym breaking), separation light from darkness (recombination), man created from dirt (evolution) #sci140 -

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

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

sci140 A place for everything, and everything in one place. Then -- kaboom, everything all over the place. -

@newscientist The Big Bang: the moment the universe vanishes when extrapolating its expansion backwards into the past #sci140 - For t<0 some say there was no matter, others say it does not matter. For t>0 its a matter of life and death - as a matter of fact #sci140 - 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 -

Source:

New Scientist

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com