Recipe For A Universe

Recipe For A Universe

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Bismillah.

"Do not the Unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together (as one unit of creation), before we clove them asunder. We made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe? (The Noble Quran, 21:30)"

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|Time-Line of the Big Bang|

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""The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

-Albert Einstein: a normal clerk who became an extraordinary physicist, by imagination.-

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Take a massive explosion to create plenty of stardust and a raging heat. Simmer for an eternity in a background of cosmic microwaves. Let the ingredients congeal and leave to cool and serve cold with cultures of tiny organisms 13.7 billion years later.

To understand the basic ingredients and the ‘cooking conditions’ of the cosmos, from the beginning of time to the present day, particle physicists have to try and reverse-engineer the ‘dish’ of the Universe. Within the complex concoction, cryptic clues hide the instructions for the cosmic recipe.

Space, time, matter... everything originated in the Big Bang, an incommensurable huge explosion that happened 13.7 billion years ago. The Universe was then incredibly hot and dense but only a few moments after, as it started to cool down, the conditions were just right to give rise to the building blocks of matter – in particular, the quarks and electrons of which we are all made. A few millionths of a second later, quarks aggregated to produce protons and neutrons, which in turn were bundled into nuclei three minutes later.

|Quarks and Leptons|

Then, as the Universe continued to expand and cool, things began to happen more slowly. It took 380,000 years for the electrons to be trapped in orbits around nuclei, forming the first atoms. These were mainly helium and hydrogen, which are still by far the most abundant elements in the Universe.

|An Atom|

Another 1.6 million years later, gravity began to take control as clouds of gas began to form stars and galaxies. Since then heavier atoms, such as carbon, oxygen and iron, of which we are all made, have been continuously ‘cooked’ in the hearts of the stars and stirred in with the rest of the Universe each time a star comes to a spectacular end as a supernova.

|An Imaginary Galaxy|

Zoom into the Milky Way galaxy and there, the earth. And we, inside it reside.

|Our Place|

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*Adapted from CERN's website :

http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html

God bless and make us imagine. Salam.