The Beginning of Everything -- The Big Bang

How did everything get started?

Has the universe a beginning or was it here since forever? Well, evidence suggests that there was indeed a starting point to this universe we are part of right now. But how can this be? How can something come from nothing? And what about time? We don't have all the answers yet so let's talk about what we know.

Also, we try to make this one not depressing. Tell us if we succeeded.

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The Beginning of Everything -- The Big Bang

Help us caption & translate this video!

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The beginning of everything.

The Big Bang.

The idea that the universe was suddenly
born and is not infinite.

Up to the middle of the 20th century,
most scientists thought of the universe

as infinite and ageless.

Until Einstein’s theory of relativity gave
us a better understanding of gravity,

and Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies
are moving apart from one another

in a way that fits previous predictions.

In 1964, by accident, cosmic background
radiation was discovered,

a relic of the early universe,

which, together with other observational
evidence, made the Big Bang

the accepted theory in science.

Since then, improved technology like the
Hubble telescope

has given us a pretty good picture of the
Big Bang and the structure of the cosmos.

Recent observations even seem to suggest
that the expansion of the universe

is accelerating.

But how did this Big Bang work?

How can something come from nothing?

Let’s explore what we know.

We can ignore the beginning part
for now.

First of all, the Big Bang was not
an explosion.

It was all space stretching
everywhere all at once.

The universe started
very, very, very small

and quickly expanded to the
size of a football.

The universe didn’t expand into anything,
space was just expanding into itself.

The universe cannot expand into anything
because the universe has no borders;

there is, by definition, no “outside”
the universe.

The universe is all there is.

In this hot, dense environment, energy
manifested itself

in particles that existed only for the
tiniest glimpses of time.

From gluons, pairs of quarks were created,
which destroyed one another,

perhaps after giving off more gluons.

These found other short-lived quarks
to interact with,

forming new quark pairs and
gluons again.

Matter and energy were not just
theoretically equivalent,

it was so hot they were practically
the same stuff.

Somewhere around this time, matter
won over antimatter.

Today, we’re left with almost all
matter and nearly no antimatter at all.

Somehow, one billion and one matter
particles were formed

for every one billion particles of
antimatter.

Instead of one massive ultimate force
in the universe,

there were now several refined versions
of it acting under different rules.

By now the universe has stretched to a
billion kilometers in diameter,

which leads to a decrease in temperature.

The cycle of quarks being born and
converted back to energy

suddenly stops.

From now on, we work with what we have.

Quarks begin forming new particles,
hadrons, like protons and neutrons.

There are many, many combinations of
quarks that can form all sorts of hadrons,

but only very few are reasonably stable
for any length of time.

Please take a moment to appreciate that
by now, only one second has passed

since the beginning of everything.

The universe, which has grown to one
hundred billion kilometers,

is now cold enough to allow most of the
neutrons to decay into protons

and form the first atom, hydrogen.

Imagine the universe at this point as an
extremely hot soup,

ten billion degrees Celsius, filled with
countless particles and energy.

Over the next few minutes, things cooled
and settled down very fast.

Atoms formed out of hadrons and electrons,

making for a stable and electrically
neutral environment.

Some call this period the Dark Age,
because there were no stars

and the hydrogen gas didn’t allow visible
light to move around.

But what’s the meaning of visible light,
anyway, when there’s nothing alive yet

that could have eyes?

When the hydrogen gas clumped together
after millions of years and

gravity put it under great pressure, stars
and galaxies began to form.

Their radiation dissolved the stable
hydrogen gas into a plasma

that still permeates the universe today
and allows visible light to pass.

Finally, there was light!

Okay, but what about the part
we didn’t talk about?

What happened right at the beginning?

This part can be defined as the Big Bang.

We don’t know at all what happened here.

At this point, our tools break down.

Natural laws stop making sense,
time itself becomes wibbly-wobbly.

To understand what happened here,
we need a theory that unifies

Einstein’s relativity and quantum
mechanics, something countless

scientists are working on right now.

But this leaves us with lots of
unanswered questions.

Were there universes before our own?

Is this the first and only universe?

What started the Big Bang, or did it
just occur naturally,

based on laws we don’t understand yet?

We don’t know, and maybe we never will.

But what we do know is that the universe
as we know it started here

and gave birth to particles, galaxies,
stars, the Earth, and you.

Since were ourselves are made of
dead stars, we are not separate

from the universe; we are part of it.

You could even say that we are the
universe’s way of experiencing itself.

So, let’s keep on experiencing it, until
there are no more questions to ask.