The Plank Era

Yesterday I did a post about the “boring billion”: a period of Earth’s history when very little changed. Today I offer the exact opposite, which is the most exciting two minutes in all of existence. And those in fact were the first two minutes of everything, at the start of the Big Bang.

We start with the Plank era, which is the time from the very beginning up to 10 to the power of minus 43 seconds — one ten-million-trillion-trillion-trillionth of a second), and scientists are unsure about how the universe operated at this time.

But by the end of the Plank era, gravity, and then the strong nuclear force, and next electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces separated — those account for all the forces in the universe that we know today. The universe was cooling, and it was only a trillionth of a second old.

The universe expanded in size, and took up the space of a solar system, cooling so that it was under a trillion degrees Kelvin. During this time, sub-atomic particles formed a kind of mixture that had not shaped atoms yet, but did form a critical imbalance in matter and anti-matter (sub-atomic particles each have their counterparts). Just a millionth of a second had gone by.

And after that point, up to one second after the Big Bang, the universe cooled so much that It was only a billion degrees, and had grown so vast it was a few light years apart, and the slight difference in matter and anti-matter was beginning to show an effect — particles that had been popping into existence from the heat and density of the universe were eventually not all annihilated.

And from that point, protons began to fuse together, with their neutrons — atomic nuclei were forming. The cosmos was 100 million degrees, and two minutes — the two most exciting minutes of time — had passed.

It took another 380,000 years, and the universe to cool below 3,000 degrees Kelvin, for electrons to join their paired-up nuclei and actual atoms to form. The rest, of course, is history . . .