Chapter 1: The Primordial Era
Due 11 Mar 2004, 8 AM
Welcome to the preflight questions page for Chapter 1. Please enter your identification
information, and then answer the questions. Your grade is only based on
participation; not getting the right answer.
Please input the following:
Why is the cosmic background radiation at 2.7 Kelvins?
This chapter introduced you to the concept of inflation, a period when
the universe repeatedly doubled in size many, many times. To get a vivid sense
of how this doubling can make the universe extremely large, consider this
variation of an ancient puzzle: You are given a chess board and asked to put
one penny on the first square of the board, two pennies on the next square,
four pennies on the third square, and so on (doubling the amount on each
square). Roughly how much money would you put on the twentieth square? The
last (64th) square? (Please answer in words, not numbers.)
Why does nucleosynthesis stop at about three minutes after the big bang begins?
The strong force went away
Nuclei got too slow to fuse
The background radiation prevented it
Ran out of protons
Some other questions that might help you (these questions are not to
be answered here; they're just for you to think about.):
- Why does fusion happen? What can stop it?
- Why is a dense, ionized gas opaque? What changes to make it transparent?
- How is expansion redshift different from velocity redshift?
- What are the three primary observational supports for the Big Bang theory?
- Why doesn't inflation move things faster than the speed of light?
- Why is the uniform temperature of the background radiation a problem?
- If matter/energy curves space, how can the universe be flat?
(Optional) What puzzled you about the reading? What would you like to have
explained in more depth? What questions would you ask to see if the
reader had grasped the most important concepts in the chapter?
When you are satisfied with your entries, you may
Or, you can
|