‘Despite the cost of living, it’s still popular.’ –Kathleen Norris
… something I’m quite interested in, and it’s related to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). I’ve briefly mentioned the CMB before, but here’s a more decent introduction: when we say CMB we are talking about radiation that was created when the Universe was very very young - around 300,000 years old. At that time the Universe was hot and radiation (or photons) were the dominant component of the Universe. Because it was so hot at that time, the Universe was actually opaque – matter was ionized, meaning electrons were bobbling about not really being attached to any nuclei because of the high temperature. What this means is that photons could not get very far without bumping into something – they could not travel in a straight line for any decent sort of time, and were perpetually scattered around. That’s essentially what opaque means. However, something special happened around 300,000 years into the Universe’s lifetime, and that was a decrease in temperature that allowed these electrons to settle into atoms, effectively setting the photons free. We call this the time of last-scattering.
