The First Moments Of Creation

 The First Moments Of Creation

Khushi Raghavendra Shetty

THE BIG BANG!!!!

             “If you want to create an apple pie from scratch, you'll first have to create the universe” -Carl Sagan

In the first moments of creation, space and time, every second was set into motion. This violent first second defined everything we see today, including you and me. Hence understanding the first second is the key to understanding how the universe works. When you look up at the night sky, our universe, an awesome spectacle and look at all the world around us, everything comes from one miraculous moment: THE BIG BANG. The big bang was more than just the creation of matter; it was the creation of space and time. Creating time and space and everything else is a clean trick, it happened, but so far, physics hasn’t figured out how. We don’t know what banged, why it banged, how it banged. But, we do know all the existence suddenly came to life. This is the beginning of creation itself, when time itself starts from zero. In the first second, the universe evolved more rapidly than in 13.8 billion years that followed. It underwent more stages in that first second. So much happened in so less of time that scientists evolve a whole new concept of time.

      For us, one second seems like a really short duration, but for the universe an incredible amount can happen. The big bang unfolds almost instantaneously. Time therefore must be measured in an unimaginably tiny scale called PLANCK TIME. One way to understand what actually happened in one second is to think in terms of Planck time. Planck time being 5.39×10−44 seconds. We have billion, billion and a billion Planck time in a second. By the concept of Planck time we can understand the evolution of universe, moment by moment. In the beginning, space and time is warped as a speck of pure energy being smaller than an atom itself and unimaginably dense. As Planck time starts running, somehow this point bursts! It wasn’t an explosion in space rather was an explosion of space. As our clock approaches to one Planck time all of the space explodes! The universe emerges everywhere at once. Every single point in space was involved in the big bang. So it’s not a ball where you can stand outside of, everywhere you are is inside the big bang. Here dominates a single SUPERFORCE which rules the universe. The original universe is assumed to be in the state of absolute perfection and there was a single unified force that existed at the instant of big bang. As the first Planck time passes by, something causes the split of the super force and hence scattering the state of perfectionism. As the universe cools, different forces freeze out and behave differently. As the universe cooled, different forces break from each other and the super force splits and a new force comes to drive the shape of the universe, that’s GRAVITY. If gravity was a little stronger the universe will bang and later collapse into a big crunch and life would be impossible. But if the gravity were a little weaker, the universe would keep expanding and would ultimately freeze to death. The gravity breaks out from the super force at the right moment with the right strength and absolute precision to forge the creation of stars and DNA! But gravity wasn’t the only force which shaped the universe we live in. By the tenth millionth tick of the Planck time another stupendous event begins, the wildest growth spurt in cosmic theory. As the temperature drops, another force arrives on the scene, THE STRONG FORCE, without which nuclei of atoms themselves would disintegrate. Three forces; gravity, strong nuclear force and the fractured super force rules the universe as it hurtles towards its next milestone event, the event which sets out blueprint for galaxies which fill the cosmos today. This event happens and explains long standing mystery. The galaxies in the universe is spread evenly, the same number in every direction.

Alan Guth, an astronomer proposes the theory of inflation to explain this. Cosmic inflation is when the expansion of the universe is suddenly accelerated, got huge for briefest moments of time. A tiny volume of space suddenly starts to expand much more quickly than before. The inflation is so rapid that it turns chaos into order spreading the constituents of universe evenly throughout the space and fixing their position. It’s like a grain of sand spreading larger than sun, faster than speed of light! While, have we violated Einstein's laws? Here’s one of the real subtle point on big bang. Space can expand in a way that two objects appear to move farther away from each other exceeding the speed of light, but they aren’t moving, it’s the space between them that’s growing. Inflation, once started is hard to stop. Universe is still pure energy, so where does all the matter come from? Now universe is a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth second old. Temperature is a thousand trillion degrees. The infant universe inflates faster than the speed of light pumping vast amounts of energy into space. As the inflation ends, the brightest flash in history floods the cosmos with radiation. This universe full of radiation is nothing like our universe today. Matter didn’t exist and universe was a dense soup of radiation, a chaos of pure energy. How does it turn to matter? To answer the question, we have to turn to Einstein and a very famous equation, E = m c2

Before Einstein people presumed matter and energy to be two different things, along comes Einstein and says, not so fast. Matter and energy are two sides of the same coin. He realized that matter is concentrated energy. This insight provided a way to understand how universe works and allows us to unleash devastating destruction, atomic bombs. Even a little spoon of matter would be enough to harness the power of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. Atom bombs convert matter to energy and big bang converted energy to matter. But it’s nothing like matter we have today. What does this matter look like?

BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY in Long Island is home to RELATIVISTIC HEAVY ION COLLIDER , RHIC in short. Here, they recreate the matter that filled the embryonic universe, one millionth of a second after big bang. In a sense, RHIC really is a time machine recreating the condition of early universe. In order of a micro second after big bang. RHIC fires gold nuclei around a 2.5 miles circular tunnel 78,000 times a second at almost the speed of light. Then it smashes them together in giant star detector. Imagine cars undergoing head on collision and analysing the debris thrown off, that’s what RHIC is doing, it’s hunting for the building blocks of protons by smashing them. Each Collision creates different number of particles depending upon violence of collision. What they see is the spray of most fundamental particles of all, quarks. They’re normally bound inside protons and neutrons but given enough energy, they break free. As the stream of quarks come out , what we found was the most perfect fluid that was ever discovered on planet which flows more easily than water itself. The perfect fluid of fundamental particles occurs at just one millionth of a second of big bang. But as everything in the first second, it doesn’t last long. As the universe expands and cools something called the strong force makes it’s presence felt. The most important characteristic of strong force is the confinement of quarks inside protons and neutrons. As universe cools, strong force dumps quarks together in groups of 3 making protons, neutrons and fundamental building blocks of atoms and universe begins to take the form we know today. But there’s still a piece missing. Somehow, this matter has no mass. The matter we see today has mass which we feel as weight. In space objects feel weightlessness but they still posses mass. If an astronaut had no mass, she would be in deep trouble. If something doesn’t have mass, it doesn’t slow down; if it has no mass then it’s supposed to move at the speed of light. The universe will look like a ball of light! So, where does this mass come from? Apparently, there’s a field which permeates the entire universe and different elementary particles will interact with it in different ways and this interaction of particles with field gives particle its mass. Higgs field is invisible and is accompanied by a fundamental particle called Higgs boson. It interacts with particle of ordinary matter as they pass through the field. The more the object interacts with this field, the more the mass it gets. The proof of existence of Higgs Boson goes to the most advanced machine ever built, LARGE HADRON COLLIDER at CERN. They collide protons into a spray of particles.

On March 14 2023, LHC delivers a seminar with all the 20 years old physics students along with 80 year old Peter Higgs, who invented the idea. Thanks to him and scientists across the world in helping to understand the first second better. We now have the information to continue with our first second. While the Higgs field pops into existence, it might have triggered splitting of super force even further so that four forces emerge to shape the universe. Nearing the end of first second, the final forces split off. Without weak nuclear force, stars wouldn’t shine. The weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force stands alongside the strong nuclear force and gravity to shape the universe we live in.

That being said, with these four forces we have this exquisite universe that can create our home. We are nearing the end of the first second. The cosmos now an inferno of radiation and matter has given birth to our universe we live in. In all, we completely don’t understand the first second of the cosmos, but the fact that we know so much already speaks volumes about the determination and ingenuity of our scientists. As we look up at the night sky, we see a perfect balance of beauty, mystery and capability.