The Beginning Of Universe And Its Expansion

Try to think of nothing in its purest form. That thought, let alone the sentence that summoned it should perfectly exemplify a paradox. You see, the idea of nothing is simply a theory. That is why our story begins nearly 14 billion years ago, and not 16 or 17, for we cannot grasp what came before the start of the universe. In the beginning, everything in the known universe was contained in a mass exponentially smaller than the point of a pin. This conglomerate’s only option to contain itself was to expand rapidly, due to the overload of compressed energy. Today, we refer to this action as “The big bang.” However, before the universe could grow to one hundred billion trillion-trillionths of a meter in even less seconds than said number, it’s spread had to be contingent on an anomaly. We can think of gravity's role in the universe as a CEO of a company, someone who handles the bigger picture of the cosmos, dealing with stuff like space and time.

Quantum mechanics on the other hand is more like a branch manager, both vital to the company’s success, but dealing with smaller scale operations instead, like atoms and molecules. The anomaly between these two resides in context, since the universe was so small at the beginning, the bigger picture didn’t have enough room to be big, and the two somehow escaped one another’s function to become independent bodies of scientific law. As Neil Degrasse Tyson puts it: “We suspect there must have been kind of a shotgun wedding between the two. Alas, the vows exchanged during that ceremony continue to elude us.” Nonetheless, they were somehow able to achieve this, leaving ambiguity behind them. As the two broke apart from one another the universe continued to expand, which also meant its energy did. The leftover energy at its origin however formed “electroweak” and “strong nuclear” forces which broke down even further to lay the foundation of chemistry and physics: forces that do stuff like bind molecules together, or tie matter to gravity. During this, there were still primitive particles floating around, like quarks. Quarks are one of many particles that are simple, meaning as of now there is no evidence suggesting they can break down any further, like an atom could into protons and electrons.

The interesting thing about quarks though is that they are destined to be bound to one another, if one were to be separated far enough from its partner, it would use its internal energy to form another quark alongside itself, leaving a new set of quarks, 4 total instead of the initial 2. The problem with this, is that at a millionth of a second old, the universe was almost perfectly dense with quarks in proportion to its volume. This means that a single quark was either just close enough or just far enough from another to either bind to or form a new pair. At this point, the energy in the universe was dispersed enough to significantly cool down things, leaving it unable to form new quarks. However, this new temperature helped form a new group of particles called hadrons, which consisted of protons and neutrons. Since there were now a limited number of quarks, that meant there were a limited number of hadrons that could bind to them. Eventually, the leftover hadrons would turn into the source of matter used to create almost everything, even galaxies.

As established, at this time in the universe its expansion had an inverse relationship with temperature. As it stretched light years across, it got cold enough for protons and neutrons to fuse together, thereby creating atoms. Eventually electrons followed, fusing with the newly created nuclei to make the atoms and particles more diverse and complete, with multiple variants thereof. The universe became pretty patient with itself after this. It took around a billion years for gravity to pull enough matter together to form galaxies, within these billions of concentrations however were even more billions of stars. These stars would later produce atomically heavier elements than ever before, ones that would play a key role in the creation of planets and life on them, such as carbon. It wouldn’t be until the collapse of these stars though, until said elements could be put to use. Once their homes exploded from becoming too hot over time, their innards were propelled far across space, and a select few marinated together for 9 more billion years to eventually form the sun, which was born from a gas cloud, in turn creating more elements around itself to be turned into orbiting masses. As more and more of these orbitals collided with each other they accreted into larger masses that later cooled into planets. Neil Degrasse Tyson explained Earth’s formation as sort of a “goldilocks” zone whereas any farther from the sun would’ve frozen our water and any closer would’ve evaporated it, either option leaving the planet lifeless.

Counter-intuitively, the liquidity of our oceans is the very reason why aerobic life exists. As chemicals in our oceans formed bacteria, said organisms gave off oxygen which made the atmosphere habitable for other forms of life. Slowly these forms evolved, some still here today, while others were wiped out by a massive comet. So if you're ever a little down and feel like nothing ever goes your way, think about all it took for the universe just so you could have that very thought of negativity.