What happened before the Big Bang?

By Steve Jurvetson - Flickr, CC BY 2.0

I watched a program on TV presented by Geekdom's pinup boy, Professor Brian Cox, last night. Seems he was in Australia, wowing the folks in Canberra and no doubt some other places, with exceedingly geeky lectures about the Big Bang and what came before.

I expect anybody reading this post will be familiar with the Big Bang theory (not the TV show) but just in case Wikipedia will be sufficient for our purposes. Suffice to say that scientific evidence from astronomical calculations - the background radiation that fills space, the red shift in galaxies and the like - all support the idea that the universe as we know it began in a huge expansion13.8 billion years ago. The thing about the BBT that gets everybody - doubters and believers alike - is what happened before the Big Bang?

Enter Brian Cox. Here's an interview he did with Jeff Forshaw and the Guardian newspaper in which they discuss a few ideas about the Big Bang.

I'm expecting that in the next episode of the show we'll see what evidence they're looking for at Australian observatories. Since we have so few people on our vast continent, we have a lot of very dark sky, and a number of very large telescope arrays. The biggest one is the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, located about 300km north-east of Geraldton, Western Australia. It is the home of the Australian SKA Pathfinder and the Murchison Widefield Array groups of radio telescopes. It will also shortly be the home of a significant part of the Square Kilometre Array, a radio telescope that will have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometre (the other part will be in South Africa). When completed, the SKA will be 50 times more sensitive than any radio telescope in existence. (source Australian Geographic) Brian hasn't been to that one, but he did visit Siding Spring in NSW, located not all that far from the Parkes dish which Donna talked about in her recent post.

Anyway, here's a Youtube video with a rather good, easily understood description of possible theories. It's less than 5 minutes long.

I can't help but add a little personal story about how I first discovered the incomparable Terry Pratchett.

I’ll always remember the first Discworld book I read. I was kicking my heels in the domestic terminal at Perth airport, browsing for a book to read on the long flight to Sydney. I’d seen the book with the cartoon cover in the SF section a few times before, but had skipped over it for spaceships and things. This time, I picked it up and read the blurb. Then I read the prologue, in which TP introduced everybody to the great space-going turtles that carried worlds on their backs. It was an Indian legend that I’d come across in my studies.

Some scientists believed in the ‘steady gait’ theory, in which the turtles journeyed unendingly through the multi-verse, never changing pace. Others contended that the turtles were travelling to a meeting place, where they would mate and create more star turtles. This was known as the ‘big bang’ theory. After I’d wiped tears of laughter from my eyes, I made my way to the counter and bought the book. I bought hard copies of every book Sir T wrote.

Sigh. I will miss Terry Pratchett forever.

We Are Stardust

You probably remember the lyrics from this old song:

We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Can you hear it playing in your head? (Gotcha...earworm!)

But just in case you're too young (or too old) to remember, here's a YouTube so you can catch the audio.

Those few lines are from the Joni Mitchell song, Woodstock, performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Poetic lyricry, for sure. But there's hard scientific truth in those words.

I picked up a copy of John Gribbin's Companion to the Cosmos at a local consignment shop and I've been reading and absorbing the ideas and theories ever since. I soon stumbled on the scientific underpinings of those romantic Mitchell words. This book provided detailed theories of the very beginnings of our universe, and how those words from the song ring true.

Or at least theoretically true.

Through math and physics, the particulars of those first few split seconds of the Big Bang have been worked out. How can scientists possibly know what happened all those billions of years ago, you wonder? Actually, according to Gribbin, the information from which the Big Bang and its mechanics are derived is "simple."

It's what came after--as the universe began to form and expand and change--that things get really complicated!

So what--via theory--is known about the phrase "We Are Stardust?"

Here's my extremely over-simplified (and that I can somewhat wrap my head around) version:

Just after the Big Bang explosion--and that does mean "just after"--at about .0001 or a tenth of a thousandth of a second, the universe was a hot fireball of radiation that was about 1,000 billion degrees above absolute zero.

Under these extreme conditions particles (protons, neurons and electrons) began to convert themselves from radiation into pairs of particles, swapping energy for mass. The particles of matter and anti-matter material that formed usually met and annihilated each other, but as the universe "cooled" (relatively speaking) there were just enough left-over particles--to the tune of about 1 in 1,000,000,000--to form everything we see in the universe today.

By one 1/100th of a second after creation, things were "calming down a little." The temperature had dropped to a mere 100 billion K and protons and neutrons were no longer being manufactured out of radiation.

And 1/10th of a second, the temperature was only 30 billion K.

At 1.01 seconds after the Big Bang, it was down to 10 billion K. (Can you say 'rapid cooling?')

Now, as the universe got "older" (relatively speaking again!) things really began to "slow down."

At 13.8 seconds after the Big Bang, the temperature was a mere 3 million K.

At 3 minutes and 2 seconds, it was only 1 billion K, which is only about 70 times hotter than the center of our Sun.

It took another 300,000 years to cool to 5,000 K, a temperature just slightly below the surface of our Sun. But remember, we're talking the entire universe being this temperature, which equated to everything in existence being a "hot soup."

A few hundred thousand years later, our universe became transparent, and only the echo of the Big Bang remained as background radiation to provide evidence to our species--some 15 billion years later--that it had happened at all.

Slowly, over unfathomable eons of time (*boggles!*) gravity pulled sheets of gases together to form into the first generation stars, and these stars formed galaxies, the galaxies formed superclusters and the superclusters formed chains. This became the basic structure of matter in the universe.

But those first generation stars aren't like the stars we know today.

The Big Bang theory was developed from Einstein's Theory of Relativity which puts forward that only helium, hydrogen and traces of a few light elements were produced at the time the universe came into existence. So those first stars were made up only of hydrogen and helium. It wasn't until later--billions and billions of years later--that these stars began to run out their life cycles and explode--and this is when carbon and other heavy elements were formed.

And so...we carbon-based life forms are indeed star dust. We carry in our bodies the stuff of dead stars, the remains of supernovas. In fact, about 40% of our bodies are made up of the fiery remnants of stars.

Our Sun is a relative newcomer, forming only about 5 billion years ago. The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old, give or take about 50 million years. (Although, surprise!--there was a new discovery put forward in June that implies the Earth--and the Moon--may be older than believed.)

Nice.  But what does all this have to do with writing Science Fiction Romance, you ask? Well...everything.

I like to think of it this way. If I were to write historicals, I'd research the place and time and conditions in which my story is set to get the facts right. Right?

But since I pen adventurous romances about planetary explorers and space fleet captains and interstellar escapees "boldly going" through space or discovering new worlds, now I've got an insiders' look at the pyrotechnics that created this wondrous universe...

...and that my hero and heroine are not only brave, resourceful and intelligent, but also chock full of ancient cosmic fireworks.

(Cue music. *wink*)

Have a great week and a fabulous Fourth of July!

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