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The Big Bang

© 1985 by Andrew J. Morris

This universe of ours came to being bout 15 billion years ago. It really started with a bang, so that even today we can measure some of the effects of the original burst of energy. You might ask what existed before the Big Bang, if the universe was not yet born. In fact, there was no 'before' the Big Bang. Both time and space came into being along with the unverse. Until then, there was no time, no space, no empty void. Nothing. That is a little hard to grasp, but there it is.

Suddenly, the universe began to exist. We call the beginning of the universe the Big Bang because it expanded very rapidly, much as a firecracker explodes with a bang. The starting point mathematicians describe as a 'singularity,' but we are unable to describe it in much detail, because its character is frought with paradox, contradictions and infinite values. This singularity contained all of the energy we find in the universe today, as well as the energy equivalent of all of the matter in our universe. It was in one sense infinitely small, yet being the whole of the universe, it was also infinitely large. It was also infinitely hot, since heat is in a sense a measure of the density of energy.

After .00001 second, the universe had cooled down to one trillion degrees (measured on the Kelvin scale). Later, .1 second after the Big Bang, it was only 100 billion degrees. By that time, the infinitely small point had expanded to an area about four light years across, or about 23,520 billion miles. That is just a little over one parsec, the unit astronomers use to measure the vast distances of space.

This vision of rapid expansion might give the impression that something is moving faster than the speed of light, a feat Einstein has assured us is impossible. Remember though that we are talking about the entire universe here. It was not matter and energy expanding through an empty void, but space itself was expanding. There is another concept that is hard to grasp with common sense, but nobody ever said this story was going to be easy to follow. Science has gone beyond 'common' sense in its explanations to a realm of logical necessity. In any case, things get easier to understand from here on out, though some of the quantities involved remain incomprehensible in magnitude.

During the first fourteen seconds of our universe's existence, the energy involved was so desnse that it fluctuated freely between being pure energy and being matter and anti-matter. Matter and anti-matter were created out of energy and then combined to create energy, in a constant dynamic cycle. Then about 14 seconds after the Big Bang the universe cooled to only about three billion degrees, too cool to support the creation of matter and anti-matter directly from energy. Most of the existing matter and anti-matter then combined, releasing energy into the expanding, cooling universe. Luckily for us, a tiny amount of matter was left over. Since that time, no new matter has been created, though a tiny fraction of the matter that existed then has since been converted back into energy. It is not clear if the excess matter failed to annihilate itself because there was somehow a little more matter in the universe than anti-matter, or if the two just never came together, so that today, somewhere in our universe, there is still a great deal of anti-matter.

At 3 billion degrees, the universe was still too hot for complex atoms to survive, so the matter was just loose electrons, protons and neutrons. As the universe continued to cool, some neutrons and protons were able to bind into atomic nuclei, so that by four minutes after the Big Bang, the matter in the universe consisted of about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium nuclei. It was not until about 7,000 years later that the temperature dropped to 5,000 degrees, allowing electrons to bind themselves to the existing nuclei to form complete atoms.

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