An Essay on The Big Bang
By Anonymous. Page 3.
With the Big Bang model as the better model, the existence and the future of the universe can also be explained. Around 15 to 20 billion years ago what we know as "time" began. The points that were to become the universe exploded from a singularity in the primeval fireball we call the Big Bang. The exact nature of this explosion may never be known.
However, recent theoretical breakthroughs, based on the principles of quantum theory, have suggested that space, and the matter within it, masks an infinitesimal realm of utter chaos, where events happen randomly, in a state of quantum weirdness.4 Before the universe began, this chaos was all there was. At some point in "time", a portion of this randomness happened to form a bubble, with a temperature in excess of 10 to the power of 34 degrees Kelvin. Being that hot, naturally it expanded. For an extremely brief and short period, billionths of billionths of a second, it inflated.
At the end of the period of inflation, the universe may have a diameter of a few centimetres. The temperature had cooled enough for particles of matter and antimatter to form, and they instantly destroy each other, producing fire and a thin haze of matter-apparently because slightly more matter than antimatter was formed.5
The fireball was the universe at an age of trillionth of a second. The temperature of the expanding universe dropped rapidly, cooling to a few billion degrees in few minutes. Matter continued to condense out of energy, first protons and neutrons, then electrons, and finally neutrinos. After a few minutes, the temperature had dropped, and protons and neutrons combined and formed hydrogen, deuterium, helium. Within a billion years, this cloud of energy, atoms, and neutrinos had cooled enough for galaxies to form. The expanding cloud cooled still further until today, its temperature is a couple of degrees above absolute zero.
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Endnotes
1. Dinah L. Mache, Astronomy, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1987. p. 128.
2. Ibid., p. 130.
3. Joseph Silk, The Big Bang, New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1989. p. 60.
4. Terry Holt, The Universe Next Door, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985. p. 326.
5. Ibid., p. 327.
6. Charles J. Caes, Cosmology, The Search For The Order Of The Universe, USA: Tab Books Inc., 1986. p. 72.
7. John Gribbin, In Search Of The Big Bang, New York: Bantam Books, 1986. p. 273.
Bibliography
Boslough, John. Stephen Hawking's Universe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Caes, J. Charles. Cosmology, The Search For The Order Of The Universe. USA: Tab Books Inc., 1986.
Gribbin, John. In Search Of The Big Bang. New York: Bantam Books, 1986.
Holt, Terry. The Universe Next Door. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985.
Kaufmann, J. William III. Astronomy: The Structure Of The Universe. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1977.
Mache, L. Dinah. Astronomy. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1987.
Silk, Joseph. The Big Bang. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1989.
