By Nebil Divay
The beginning of everything. The Big Bang.
Big bang is the answer to the question, how did the universe come into being ? It is one of the most basic questions ever to be asked.
What the Big Bang Theory suggests is that the present vast universe was all in a single dense point at one point of time,from which it started expanding. Note that there was a point from which the universe expanded,and not nothingness as is a common notion that the universe exploded out of nothing. No,it expanded out from one single point. Now scientists call this point Singularity. Its property is that it was extremely hot and was all energy and it was all confined to a small sphere of tiny tiny size so that it was very dense and there was only one single natural force binding all this energy together. And, 13.7 or 13.8 billion years ago this singularity started expanding. The important point here is, it was never an explosion which is another common notion because of the word bang in it,it was expansion rather than an explosion. Explosion is something that has a center point and which throws out light, sound and debris all around in an unpredictable manner. But our creation wasn't an explosion but an expansion.It threw lots of stuff out towards every side, but it was in a uniform manner. It grew on all the sides in equal quantities and not like a blast of some bomb which threw out some there,some here and some elsewhere.Also, It might have been a silent process, but a vigorous one nevertheless, qualities that are seldom seen together. This singularity or Primeval atom as called by George Lamaitre,the Father of Big Bang Theory,simply started expanding because of reasons we don't know yet.
One way of thinking about the expansion, so that we can picture it better in our minds, is to think of the entire universe as a balloon filled with stuff which has infinite elasticity that it keeps on expanding. It's not an empty balloon okay, but a filled one like our earth.
But we don't know yet or our known scientific physical laws don't apply on that stage of the universe,when everything was one in that singularity or before that.Therefore,we don't know how the universe was, when it was just one single point before the big bang. Also, we don't know what caused it to expand. But from then on scientists sort of have knowledge on what happened for the most parts of it and have stitched together to make a story of it. So, it's like you have the entire book but just don't have the first paragraph.
Now, you might be thinking,everything is good so far,but is there proof for this ? We need proof for this story, and yes, we do have it.Big Bang is not a hypothesis,it's a theory and there's mathematical model and evidence to suggest it's true.
In 1927, George lamaitre worked on Einstein general theory of relativity and found a solution to it's equations that describes an expanding universe and published a paper describing it. There's a very strange factor to consider in this,George Lamaitre was a Belgian Priest and Physicist.He was a very religious person who kept his religious life very intact and separate from his academic life throughout his lifetime.
Isn't it ironic that the answer to a scientific question like the origin of the universe was put forward by a religious person.It might also be possible that his religious beliefs had impacted his scientific work, although he has never expressed it that way and said that "As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe."
Few years later,in 1929 Hubbles was looking into farer galaxies and noted that no matter which side of the universe we look into,all the galaxies everywhere were moving away from our Milky way Galaxy.This made him to think, if everything now is going away from each other,at some point of time, all of this must have been in a single point from which it started going apart.This was in agreement with George Lamaitre's solution to Einstein's General Relativity Equation that describes an expanding universe. But there was no datas to prove it.
In 1965,cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered accidentally,which is the radiation leftover during recombination epoch stage of universe which we will come into later,it is even present now and permeated everywhere around as in the universe.This gave us datas to prove for Big bang theory and now it is the most accepted theory among scientist for the origin of the universe. George Lamitre was on his deathbed when the discovery was made and nature was kind enough to the man who discovered one of her mysterious secrets, she let him have the delight to see his theory being proven before his final breath.
Big bang Theory could also give us an idea that our universe was not infinite and ageless and was not always existing here from eternity and is a still place neither expanding nor contracting, which is a common notion when we think about things like the universe and beginning of it. Now time,space the entire universe was all created and started after big bang only,what does it mean by time was started after bigbang,to understand that just look at our calendars.We just keep one point as 0 and before that BC and after that as AD.Every calendars have different starting points.so scientist now place big bang as the zero point from which we started counting time.so just as their is BC,there could be negative time (whatever that may be),there's nothing prevents us from thinking about that.Because we only have data from nanoseconds after seconds after big bang. We are that close and have knowledge about what might have happened during that stage. We just don't have any data before that to conclude that time existed before that.
Our solar system was formed after 8.8 billion years and life was first formed at 10.3 billion years and it was only 3 lakh year ago when modern man evolved.i.e for 99.998% of the time, we weren't here. Human beings,who were just here,only for a mere 0.002% of the time since the bigbang have managed to find out when and how all these, that existed long before them, came into being.Just imagine the capability of being human.
The present universe is entirely filled with billions of galaxies which comprises billions of stars and within all of these galaxies, stars die and supernovae explode, forging heavy elements that can build life. So, the possibility of life outside our earth is in fact, not so less.
These supernova explosions are the most massive explosions ever known. We can't imagine such an explosion, to put things into perspective when our sun dies in 2 billion years it would not make a supernova. At Least 10-15 times heavier stars can only make a supernova. Such massive scales of explosion that sometimes the supernova outshines the entire galaxy. Shock waves from these explosions make gas and dust made of lighter elements like hydrogen, helium and lithium in its path to collapse and react with higher elements present in the explosion. The very high energy associated with it allows the reaction to create newer elements.
So, when we think about it, we are created from elements forged in the scatterings from dead stars.This knowledge makes it a proven fact that we are not apart and separate from the universe,we are one with it. And not only are we one with it,as the forging of these elements happened in the universe, our body is made with elements that were formed in the universe during supernova explosion, which means that the universe is within us.
By Nebil Divay
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