Thank you! You got what I was trying to ask, but I didn’t know exactly how to put it into words.
Put another way, now that you have landed on the number I was missing:
Each elastic yardstick of 41 million light years, has stretched to 45.5 billion light years, and it took 13.7 billion years to do it. Trying to visualize this type of abstract math borders on the surreal.
EDIT: maybe something like this famous dolly zoom?
But wait, there’s more…!
I’ve heard it said often, in print and video, that inflation took the universe from subatomic size to the size of an orange, or to the size of the solar system, or even several light years, in an instant. That’s quite an error range in the narratives.
But when the CMB flashed, what we call the visible universe was barely 380,000 years old, but already 41 million light years across. And the geometry of it seems flat, so if it is actually curved, it must be have been gigantically larger than that already.
Like I said, trying to visualize this borders on the surreal for a fragile primate mind barely out of the grassy steppes, in a much more placid place and time of the life of the cosmos.
Thank you! You got what I was trying to ask, but I didn’t know exactly how to put it into words.
Put another way, now that you have landed on the number I was missing:
Each elastic yardstick of 41 million light years, has stretched to 45.5 billion light years, and it took 13.7 billion years to do it. Trying to visualize this type of abstract math borders on the surreal.
EDIT: maybe something like this famous dolly zoom?
But wait, there’s more…!
I’ve heard it said often, in print and video, that inflation took the universe from subatomic size to the size of an orange, or to the size of the solar system, or even several light years, in an instant. That’s quite an error range in the narratives.
But when the CMB flashed, what we call the visible universe was barely 380,000 years old, but already 41 million light years across. And the geometry of it seems flat, so if it is actually curved, it must be have been gigantically larger than that already.
Like I said, trying to visualize this borders on the surreal for a fragile primate mind barely out of the grassy steppes, in a much more placid place and time of the life of the cosmos.