What happened at the Big Bang?

As you must know by now, the Big Bang is the incredible event that represents the beginning of the universe. I've already discussed the issue of how it might have happened. In this essay, I want to expand the concept of what exactly happened then, which by the way is the beginning of time and space.

Basically, it goes like this: about 13.7 billion years ago a singularity popped into existence and rapidly expanded at greater than the speed of light into the universe. Calling it a bang is not accurate because it wasn't really an explosion. Explosions occur in space. The Big Bang event created space. Before we discuss the chronology of this momentous event, I want to talk about what a singularity is.

As I've said before a singularity is something we don't understand. It violates Einstein's relativity equations. However, there are some things that we can imply about it. The Big Bang singularity is defined as a Gravitational Singularity. It's a tiny place where gravity becomes infinite. In other words it doesn't have the usual space coordinates. The coordinates are basically zero but the density of this tiny space is infinite. I have no idea what that means. It doesn't compute. All we can theorize about is what happens immediately after this singularity existed.

Some people have equated the Big Bang beginning to a proto-atom, but this is not accurate. It has to be an infinitely dense object that simply popped into existence. This is what makes it hard to imagine that is was an accident. An accident involves things going wrong with stuff that already exists. The Big Bang happened when there was no stuff in existence. The idea of an accidental appearance of a singularity is hard to swallow.

The singularity began its expansion into the Plank epoch. This occurred from 0 to 10 to the - 43 seconds. That's 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds. The four fundamental forces of nature: electromagnetic, gravitational, weak nuclear and strong nuclear were combined into one fundamental force because the temperature was too high. How high? No one really knows. Thermometers weren't invented yet. You could say that it was hundreds of billion of trillions of trillions of degrees Kelvin. That's plenty hot!

One thing to keep in mind here is that inflation theory says that the expansion was greater than the speed of light before 10 to the -32 seconds. This inflation period doesn't fit into the neat timeline, but it's believed to be when dark energy formed. It implies that the temperature went up, not down before it began to cool down again. Cooling is a relative term in this case. Proof for the inflation theory has been found in the B-mode polarization spectrum of the Cosmic Background radiation.

The Grand Unification epoch occurred from 10 to - 36 to 10 to -32 seconds when the temperature dropped to 10 to the 28 degrees Kelvin so that the strong nuclear force could separate from the electromagnetic force. The universe at this point is nothing but a quark-gluon plasma, whatever the heck that is.

Sometime right before one second after the Big Bang, Hadrons appeared. In other words, it cooled sufficiently to have quarks form protons and neutrons. After one second, neutrinos became free moving in space.

Between one and ten seconds, hadrons and anti-hadrons annihilate leaving hadrons and anti-leptons. After this the universe consists of a residue of leptons, which make up the universe's observable mass. This sounds like an Anime movie script.

After ten seconds, the lights get turned on (not light we could see if we were there). Energy in the form of photons now dominate the universe, and by 3 minutes, atomic nuclei like hydrogen, deuterium and helium form from nuclear fusion, but after seventeen minutes, this ceases because the universe had cooled enough to prevent fusion. At this point there is 3 times more hydrogen than helium and only a trace of other nuclei.

After 70,000 years, photons and nuclei are in equal amounts, and by 377,000 years, hydrogen and helium atoms form. In other words, electrons form around the nuclei to make atoms. Now there is matter that can begin to form clouds that gravity can begin to compress.

Stars don't form until at least 150 million years after the Big Bang. When this happened light we could see is now present and the beginning of a universe that we could recognize began. However, cosmologists think that the early stars were so bright they caused ionization of the matter in the universe converting everything back into plasma. Ouch!

It wasn't until a billion years after the Big Bang that stars and galaxies begin to form in earnest. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is believed to have formed 8.8 billion years ago. This is an estimate. Approximately 9 billion years after the Big Bang our solar system forms.

The bottom line is that it took a long time to get to the point where the planet Earth existed and a lot of very intricate things had to occur. This is another reason that I believer that a creator is responsible for the universe. It's just too complicated to be incidental.

Thanks for reading.