Part 6/8:
The climax of Dirac's exploration came with his contemplation of the universe's age. Traditionally, this is viewed as fourteen billion years. However, the concept of a "year" loses relevance beyond the existence of Earth and the sun. Hence, physicists use a universal time unit, termed a jiffy, defined as the time it takes light to traverse the diameter of an elementary particle.
When Dirac recalculated the universe’s age in these jiffies, he astonishingly found it to be approximately ten to the power of forty. For Dirac, this discovery was astounding. Unlike the relationship between electricity and gravity, the universe's age is not static.