Talk:Graphical timeline of the Big Bang

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Is the picture supposed to be labeled "logaritmic time"? Methinks not.

This picture looks nice, but it is rather bare in its description. There are large chunks of the graph listed in which nothing happens. Might it be better, perhaps, to split the picture into separate portions, with each portion linking to different area of the timeline of the Big Bang article? --Modemac 14:51, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

This is a fabulous depiction that may be overlooked by a lot of people who don't understand how to read it. Since it is a logarthmic scale, it really represents how long something happens. For example, inflation occurs over an epoch that's one hundred times the local age of the universe. This means that if inflation were scaled to our timeframe it would be occurring over a trillion years or so. The beauty of this time line is if you understand logarithmic scaling than you can get a feel for the immense amounts of time all of these processes took place over. This perspective gets obscured by people who think in absolute terms and rely on the first three minutes as a "short" period of time, when really it represented the majority of the universe's history. --ScienceApologist 16:23, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Epoch of Nucleosynthesis

Surely the epoch of nucleosynthesis is 100-300 s or so, as per Big Bang nucleosynthesis? Why is it being labelled as covering most of the first 300,000 years? Or is my brain melting again? --Bth

A lot of the descriptions of the epochs in their individual wiki pages are inconsistent with the timeline here. This ought to be ironed out. --207.171.180.101 21:02, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Timeline voodoo

Wow, I just made some epochs into links, no actual text edits, and now all looks more compressed and distorted. :-S I wish I knew how the <timeline> tags actually worked, or at least why it turned into that from making text into simple links. -- 213.113.67.150 03:57, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

A while back an admin made a change to the way the text is generated on the timelines so now whenever they are created the text (especially inline links) isn't generated correctly.—Mike 02:16, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Scale

This scale is confusing. Why use "10*log time" rather than "log time"? E.g. the Planck epoch is at 10^-43 seconds, marked as "-430" on the scale. This would be less confusing if the scale was "-43". This is especially apparent because I followed a link from Timeline of the Big Bang. Axl 22:03, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree. I don't see any disadvantage to using log time. Gmarsden 23:51, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

I think "10*log time" scale is used because the timeline feature does not allow bars or labels to be located at non-integer points on the scale (see [1]), and so a "log time" scale would mean that labels such as "one hour", "one year" etc. could not be placed accurately. If there is a work-round that still allows labels to be placed accurately, then I agree a "log time" scale would be clearer. Gandalf61 09:32, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

It seems to me that a lot of people are baffled to start with, myself included, and there is absolutely no difference whether we mark a point as 1 or 10, that is log 10 or 10*log 10. All the numbers marked are integers (mantissa=zero) and somebody ought to take the bull by the horn and change the scales! Gandalf61, you are authorised. The integer explanation does not sound right either, unless you count zero as an integer, because that appears in the present scale as well. Nobody can ever locate the label lines accurately. Accuracy depends on the width of your pencil nib. In any case, how can we argue about an hour when we are talking about eons? LouisBB (talk) 23:07, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Regretfully, I have to withdraw my comment (above) , reconsidering and realising that there is indeed a programming problem which does not seem solvable. LouisBB (talk) 06:10, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

On 17th October 2006, an anonymous user noted that the label is misspelt "logaritmic". Can one of the graphics experts correct this, please? Axl 22:09, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Done. Gandalf61 21:40, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

RE the scale - can someone just put a strip of white covering up the labels on the scale? Its not an elegant solution, but it works. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.173.6.67 (talk) 22:04, 14 February 2008 (UTC)