'A long time ago'? Physicist works out when the Star Wars films happened

Thanks to the opening titles, we all know that the ‘Star Wars’ movies happened ‘a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…’.

But how long is ‘a long time ago’ exactly? All a bit nebulous isn’t it.

Well no longer. Thanks to Georgetown University assistant professor Patrick Johnson, we’re a bit nearer to working it out.

In an excerpt from his book ‘The Physics of Star Wars: The Science Behind a Galaxy Far, Far Away’ published in Wired, Johnson appears to made a breakthrough.

“The best theories that we have indicate that our universe is about 13.7 billion years old,” he writes.

“Assuming the Star Wars galaxy is in our universe, we need a few indicators to determine when in our universe’s history Star Wars could occur.”

From here, he takes into consideration a few factors, from the age of our universe, the age of the galaxies in our universe, formed a billion years ago after the ‘big bang’, and when single cell organisms began to evolve into ‘fully formed multicellular organisms’.

All really basic stuff.

“Altogether, this means that Star Wars needs to be at least 9 billion years after the big bang. This leaves plenty of years before the current time (about 4.7 billion to be precise), so it could still count as ‘a long time ago,’ but it is certainly closer to now than to the big bang,” he continues.

So roughly speaking, Luke, the Empire and the rise of Darth Vader all happened around five billion years ago.

But hang on, there’s another outside possibility too.

“It is also possible that Star Wars took place in a time before the big bang,” he adds. “This may sound like an impossible suggestion, but the big bang just marks a point in history when our current laws of physics didn’t work.

“It is possible a universe existed before the big bang; it would have been very hot and dense and collapsed upon itself. In this scenario, all of space and time were crumpled up together in an unrecognizable fashion. This is not science fiction—some theories suggest this. The biggest downside to these theories is that they will never be directly measurable unless we can travel to one of these universes or our universe collides with another universe.”

Yep, that’s what we thought too.

And just as a reminder, the next movie, ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’, arrived on December 14.

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