Time

It's amazing how much time can go by on exam week. What started first as a minor delay has turned into a 2 week delay in my posting schedule, so I apologize, I was advised to do well on my exams so I could stay in school and write these posts as informatively as I can-hence my tardiness. But I digress.
            I would like to continue with a brief history of time. And whilst some of you may have caught the Steven Hawking reference, so I would like to avoid any copyright infringement by giving my version a new title: A brief(er) history of time (which will also be paraphrased).
            What’s the longest time you can think of? An hour? 24 hours? In the scheme of things, time seems to pass very quickly; the oldest person is currently 116, and the planet is older still. Believe what you will, there is some debate on this, but the age of the Earth (scientifically speaking) is approximately 4.5 billion years old. The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, and we could just keep going, but there is one thing that I’ve been dodging, what is the age of the oldest thing? The universe itself?
            To answer that question, we must look at the oldest thing we know of, the edge of the universe, and while we can’t quite do it yet, we have a pretty good idea that it’s about 10^26 meters in every direction. A bit of dimensional analysis (and some very complicated math which I honestly don’t know well enough to explain) can tell us that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. So next time you put off a research paper for several days, remember just how fleeting time can be, and how rapidly academic deadlines can approach.