Recorded by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, the image is a heat map of the cosmos as it appeared only 370,000 years after the Big Bang, showing space speckled with faint spots from which galaxies would grow over billions of years.
In order to describe what happens at very small distances or very high energies corresponding to the first moments after the Big Bang, where space and time become discontinuous, general relativity has to be merged with quantum theory, a project that has engrossed the present generation of physicists.
But then as it turned out the tops of these cellars, with the many shade trees and cool breezes drifting in off the river, provided a bang up space to spend the day drinking.
In the Big Bang the space-time universe commences and then continues to exist in time measurable subsequent to the initiating singularity (Silk 2001, 456).
"You get a lot more bang -- or space -- for the buck," said Barbara Fox, the president of the Fox Residential Group.
Our bodies are made of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and iron that had to be synthesized in thermonuclear reactions in successive generations of stars that went bang and seeded space and future stars with heavier elements.
According to relativity, he said, cosmic rays should not exist above a certain energy, roughly 1020 electron volts, because they would lose energy to the faint radio waves, presumably from the Big Bang, that fill space.
Earlier this year, cosmologists realized that they could derive an independent age estimate by scrutinizing the cosmic microwave background, a primordial glow from the big bang that permeates space.
But the Big Bang has no space-time context; there is neither time prior to the Big Bang nor a space in which the Big Bang occurs.
