In the beginning, there was nothing.
Well, except for you.
And the Big Bang.
Ah, The Big Bang theory.
No, not the TV show.
I’m talking about the most popular story
about the earliest moments
in the history of the Universe.
According to this theory,
the Universe emerged from a single point
nearly 14 billion years ago.
This point, known as a singularity,
would have been infinitely dense.
From this singularity,
the entire Universe expanded.
Eventually cooling down enough
to form stars,
galaxies and
planets like the one you’re on now.
And our Universe is still expanding
today.
That’s one of the most compelling pieces
of evidence
supporting the Big Bang theory.
So let's travel back to a time
where it all began.
But before we take this trip in our spaceship, we need to get some food together.
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You better stock up this time machine now because we're not going to see another kitchen for billions of years.
Set your coordinates
to 13.82 billion years ago.
Time to take your shiny new time machine
on an epic spin into the past.
What you’d find when you arrived
would be, well, nothing.
You, and
everything you’ve ever known,
no longer exist.
But by some miracle of your
time machine-slash-spaceship,
you’d arrive
at the exact moment of the Big Bang.
Before this moment,
all the particles that make up
the Universe were crammed so tightly
that not one atom could even form.
In this state,
the density was infinitely higher
than the matter in our current Universe.
Right after the Big Bang occurred,
this matter
existed in the form of quark-qluon plasma,
or QGP.
Very quickly,
in a matter of milliseconds,
the particles making up this QGP
would clump together to form the protons
and neutrons
that make up the atoms we know today.
According to astrophysicist Paul Sutter,
at this point,
everything was crushed into a ball
about the size of a peach.
This ball would have been very hot.
How hot?
Only like a trillion Kelvin.
That’s 999 billion °C (1.8 trillion °F).
But I wouldn’t blink if I were you.
Because if you did,
you’d miss the Universe
rapidly inflating
from the size of a basketball
to roughly the size of the Sun.
Particles would be flying through the QGP
at velocities
higher than the speed of sound.
Like a jet traveling at Mach speed,
these particles would emit
a supersonic boom.
Of course, you wouldn’t hear anything.
Sound can’t
travel through the vacuum of space.
Not to mention,
you’d be witnessing a time
before any matter has formed.
Sorry to say,
you’d barely be able to see anything either.
Everything would look foggy and blurry.
The super dense plasma
would scatter
light similar
to water droplets in clouds.
One microsecond after the Big Bang,
you’d see neutrinos,
quarks and electrons form.
Shortly after that,
you’d see protons and neutrons forming.
This would all be happening
within one second.
At this point,
the temperature of everything
would have dropped
to a chilly 5.5 billion °C (10 billion °F).
And after about three minutes,
things would have cooled down
enough for these protons
and neutrons to form hydrogen nuclei.
You’d now
be witnessing the era of nucleosynthesis.
But don’t get ahead of yourself.
You wouldn’t
see the first elements form
for another 380,000 years.
All those years later,
the Universe has finally expanded
and cooled enough for electrons
to stay in orbit around an atomic nuclei.
The first hydrogen and helium atoms
would form.
You’d finally be able to see things
more clearly, too.
Now you’ve reached the point
in our creation timeline
that scientists
have some evidence of today.
Cosmic microwave background radiation,
or CMB, is leftover radiation
from about 400,000 years
after the Big Bang.
These microwaves
are invisible to the naked eye.
But they reveal that there was a time
when the Universe was both hotter
and denser.
More proof
that scientists point to in favor
of this history of the Universe
is the speed that galaxies
appear to be moving away from us.
faster than those closer to us.
This would suggest that there was a time
when all galaxies were in the same spot.
The singularity.
Of course,
you would have witnessed
all of this firsthand.
But without bringing back
any definitive proof,
the Big Bang would still remain
a theoretical model
of the history of the Universe.
There would still
be so many unanswered questions.
And even if it was all true,
would that really have been
the beginning of everything?
Well, that’s a
story for another WHAT IF.