Posts

Showing posts with the label Our universe was born 13.8 billion years ago. If we condense that time down to one calendar year

Cosmic calendar

Image
Cosmic Calendar A graphical view of the Cosmic Calendar, featuring the months of the year, days of December, and the final minute. The Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the  chronology of the universe , scaling its  current age  of 13.8 billion years to a single  year  in order to help intuit it for pedagogical purposes in  science education  or  popular science . In this visualization, the  Big Bang  took place at the beginning of January 1 at midnight, and the current moment maps onto the end of December 31 just before midnight.At this scale, there are 437.5 years per second, 1.575 million years per hour, and 37.8 million years per day. The concept was popularized by  Carl Sagan  in his book  The Dragons of Eden (1977) and on his television series  Cosmos . Sagan goes on to extend the comparison in terms of surface area, explaining that if the Cosmic Calendar is scaled to the size of a foo...