The Origin of Everything, Part Two

You think a nuclear war is violent? Well, being witness to the Big Bang would give you nightmares for the rest of your life. (Of course, one could make the case that nuclear war is more destructive than the Big Bang, and vice versa for the latter. But let's just talk about the energy released in the moment of creation.)

 The Creation of Matter

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you know Einstein's equation, E=mc². It's very elegant. It describes a lot - nuclear fusion in the sun, nuclear fission in our nuclear power plants, the power of our hydrogen, atom, and nuclear bombs, and also...how matter was created in the early universe.

E=mc² explains all of these in facets. You can use various aspects of it to describe phenomena, from why we can't go faster than the speed of light, to what happened in the early universe. And to explain that, I'm going to have to use the facet of E=mc² that says that all matter is essentially a condensed form of energy. It's an abstract concept, so I request you to bear with me.

There are some nights where your brain feels like it is on hyper drive - won't let you have a moment's rest. There's just so much flurry up there that you feel like you have to get up and make sense of it all before you get a good night's sleep. I don't know the technical term for it. But you have thoughts and thoughts and thoughts...an onlooker will see you get restless, always changing positions. It's not very pleasant.

In some sense, that was what was happening in the early universe. There was an extreme amount of energy all over the place. The universe could not calm down. And because of this, particles could not be made. Rest could not be had. If a particle was made, it would be destroyed. It would have nothing to coalesce with.

Of course, the situation changed. Maybe the universe had milk and cookies, because it calmed down. It started cooling. And as it cooled, it allowed the formation of particles.

 Think about that for a second. This is the beginning of the universe. You know the law of conservation of matter - "Matter can neither be created nor be destroyed, it can only change from one form to another"? Do you know what it implies? The atoms in you, in me, in that bookshelf to my right, and the most distant star are all nearly 13,820,000,000 years old. They just have a long history of being in lots of chemical reactions.

"What can come out of a man looking up at the night sky?" They said. 

Constants

When I was in elementary school and first learned of the Big Bang, I hypothesized a tiny little solar system and tiny stars inside something like a sun. And I imagined the Big Bang like the hatching of an egg. Like that fiery ball just spit everything out and that’s the way it’s been since. I was wrong in some respects, and right in some.

Because, essentially, the “cosmic egg” did contain the ingredients for everything. Matter was only one of the things that the Big Bang spit out. It also spit out the four fundamental forces, dark matter, dark energy – you name it. And what that means is that it also defined the physics, chemistry, math, and biology that we study today.

My physics textbook for this year has this question (which I’m paraphrasing) –

“Physicist P.A.M. Dirac was playing around with some physical constants (like the speed of light and the universal gravitational constant) when he arrived at a quantity whose unit was time. And this quantity was roughly equal to the age of the universe. What does this tell you about the constancy of these quantities?”

The answer seems to jump out – that these constants have remained constant for 13.82 billion years. They were literally born with the Big Bang.

This post and the last don’t really do justice to the story of creation. Maybe there’ll be posts sprinkled throughout this blog in the future regarding this subject. Till then, ponder over this: We’re a more integral part of this universe than we ever imagined.