BIRTH AND EVOLUTION OF A UNIVERSE_COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND

Imagine sitting on the beach looking out at the ocean. You suddenly notice a beach ball floating on the water. The beach ball suddenly swells to the size of a hot air balloon filled with hot gas. The hot gas suddenly turns into hot sand (QUARKS & ELECTRONS). Then most of the sand disappears (becoming PHOTONS) but now the balloon is filled with super hot sand (quarks and electrons) and the super heat (super hot photons) inside the super hot balloon causes it to continue to swell up faster and faster. The super hot sand cools some and clumps together and turns into a larger ball of very hot granules (PROTONS & NEUTRONS) filling up the balloon. The balloon continues its expansion a little slower. The granules clump together into small pebbles (HYDROGEN ATOMS, mostly), and now the growing balloon continues to swell, filled up with a hot ball of pebbles.

As it swells bigger, the balloon gradually becomes transparent and you can now see a mixture of boulders (STARS), gigantic boulders (SUPER-GIANT STARS)and monster giant boulders (GALAXIES) filling up the humongously large but cooler balloon. The balloon is now much lighter than air. The weight of the various hot and cold stuff now filling it up initially slows down the balloon’s expansion but as the warm stuff thins out this "hot air balloon" becomes lighter and lighter.

The tension in the skin of the balloon is called THE COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT. The cosmological constant, as its name implies, is a built-in constant repulsive force intrinsic to the balloon. It works to prevent its deflation and collapse. This tension in its skin and the heat of the hot stuff in it cause the hot balloon's continued expansion. The weight of the stuff in it (known as THE FORCE OF GRAVITY) is an opposing attractive tension trying to shrink and crush the balloon. However, the force of gravity gets weaker and weaker as the stuff in the humongous balloon thins out. The increasing expansion begins slow at first, until a point is reached in which the balloon begins to quickly expand under the relentless repulsive tension of the cosmological constant.

The original beach ball floating on the ocean (the Megaverse) near the shores is just one of a great many beach balls floating on the ocean. In fact the ocean is filled up with beach balls of various sizes covering the surface of the ocean out to the horizon. There might be more beach balls of various sizes (in this “Multiverse”) than you can see, but, because they may be beyond the horizon (beyond the boundary of your universe), you are not able to see them from where you are stretched out on your beach chair.

If you go for a swim in the ocean and dive under the water you will see that the ocean water is filled up with tiny little bubbles of gas. Bubbles of gas appear, pop and disappear. Bubbles in the water are always appearing and disappearing. Once in a blue moon a really big bubble will appear and suddenly appear on the surface of the ocean. It grows as big as a beach ball and floats on the ocean. More beach balls pop up on the surface. Some of them pop and disappear. Other beach ball size bubbles will suddenly swell and get heavier. Suddenly the beach ball swells to the size of a hot air balloon filled with hot gas. The hot gas suddenly turns into hot sand . . .

Let us properly translate the above metaphor into the language of cosmology.

Cosmologists looking out in the universe through The Hubble Space Telescope are like you sitting on the beach looking out at the ocean. After looking deep into the cosmos they see a spherical ball of light suddenly appear out of seemingly nowhere. They observe this spherical ball of light expanding rapidly. If the ball of light was initially as big as a beach ball, after a tiny fraction of a thousandth of a nanosecond it was as big as the solar system! If you compare the huge hot air balloon to the solar system, then the solar system is filled with hot gas.

As the solar system sized universe continues to rapidly swell up, the hot gas cools a little and congeals into quarks, antiquarks, electrons and positrons. (This is the hot sand in the beach scene). When quarks and antiquarks collide they disappear leaving pure photon energy; when electrons and positrons collide they disappear turning into pure photons. As the photon energy fills up the young universe the left over quarks and electrons are superheated and the heat of the super hot photons drive it to swell more and more humongously. As the universe expands the left over quarks start to stick together creating protons and neutrons. This is equivalent to the very hot granules in the story.

A hydrogen atom is a proton with an electron stuck to it. The earliest atoms that formed were mostly these pebbles. When protons and neutrons clump together they form a helium nucleus containing two protons and two neutrons; two electron stuck to this clump is a helium atom. More than ninety-nine percent of the atoms in this original congealing cloud are hydrogen and helium atoms. The universe’s contents are mostly hydrogen and helium atoms but there are extremely tiny amounts of Lithium and Beryllium atoms in the mix (relatively speaking). The huge spherical cloud of mostly hydrogen atoms is very cold and heavy, and the hydrogen atoms in the middle of the cold heavy mass of hydrogen atom cloud are under tremendous pressure. This extreme pressure squeezes the hydrogen atoms together and this crushing gravitational fusion of hydrogen gas (known as thermonuclear fusion) turns into stars.

The "boulders" and "gigantic boulders" we talked about in the story represent the birth of small stars and big stars. As this fusion process continues more and more stars are born and they group together in large collections called galaxies. The monster giant boulders? Galaxies! The universe is still expanding but now it is expanding very slowly because the gravitational attraction of the galaxies is slowing down the expansion more and more. However over time (billions of years) the distance between the galaxies is so wide that the force of gravity becomes very very very weak. The “membrane" of the balloon is equivalent to the space-time fabric skin of the universe. As I mentioned, there is a constant tension in the membrane of the balloon that is trying to make it swell also. Similarly there is a tension in the space-time fabric skin of the universe. This constant tension of stretch is called The Cosmological Constant. The gravitational attraction of the material stuff inside the universe is now too weak to resist this tension and so the expansion of the universe is no longer slowing down but is instead swiftly speeding up.


The source of our universe is a large reservoir of quantum fluctuations of very tiny quantum sized space-time bubbles. These bubbles appear and disappear at random all the time. The bubbles have vacuum energy, or inflation energy, stored within the membrane of its space-time fabric. The constant energy tension provides the bubble's repulsive force but the surrounding ocean of quantum fluctuations resist this repulsive tendency.

Every so often a bubble, by pure chance, finds a path of least resistance and begins to rise. As it does so it begins to inflate and the decreasing density may get it to the ocean's surface where it floats. With no resistance the inflation energy of energetic inflatons seeps into the bubble's cavity. As the bubble inflates, the inflatons congeal and transforms into quarks, antiquarks, electrons and antielectrons that fill up the ballooning bubble.

As a result of this early physics a billion antiquarks and a billion and one quarks annihilate each other, and a billion hot energetic photons are created leaving one quark in a billion. The same fate meets the antielectrons, leaving one electron out of a billion and creating a billion more hot energetic photons. The super heating by the ocean of photons continues the expansion of the humongous quickly expanding bubble. The relative trace amounts of quarks cool more and more and quarks begin to stick together forming protons and neutrons. Protons are long-lived (many, many billions and billions of years). Neutrons start to disintegrate into protons unless they partner up with protons within ten and half minutes!

Single protons are the most numerous. A good portion of these protons and neutrons stick together to form proton-neutron clumps.Then a large portion of these proton-neutron bits stick together to form clumps of 2-proton/2-neutron clumps called a HELIUM NUCLEUS. When a single electron sticks to a single proton a hydrogen atom is born. When two electrons stick to a helium nucleus a helium atom is born.

After this bit of early chemistry takes place the huge cloud of atoms is mainly hydrogen and helium, and tiny traces of lithium and beryllium atoms. Lithium is a 3-proton/3-neutron/3-electron pebble. Beryllium is a 4-proton/4-neutron/4-electron pebble. This congealing ball consists of seventy-five percent hydrogen atoms, less than twenty-five percent helium atoms and a relatively very tiny trace (less than 1%)of lithium and beryllium atoms.

The stupendously bloated expanding universe is becoming transparent as the photons fly off en mass from the huge cloud of mainly cooled hydrogen atoms. This super cooled mass initially containing only a bulk of hydrogen and helium, and trace amounts of lithium and beryllium get increasingly heavier under the crushing force of gravity until the bulk of hydrogen atoms in the center of the cloud begin to fuse together to create the first stars that shine from the photon energy released by the fusion of hydrogen atoms. The physics of the process of nuclear fusion squeezes hydrogen atoms together, first producing more helium and eventually manufacturing more lithium and beryllium, and eventually all the heavier elements found in the periodic table.

The "Love-Child"

 of the so-called BIG BANG birth of the universe was that original congealing mass of quarks and electrons bathing in its amniotic fluid of an ocean of photons. This beautiful neonate came out of The Big Bang glowing brightly. The baby universe laid in its crib dressed up in brightly colored garments. When we flip through "The Photo Album of My Wonder Years", that is, when we look out deeply into the past of the 13.7 billion year old universe, we can see its baby pictures.

The earliest snap shots of the baby universe is called The COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND.

The vast majority of stars in the universe are later generation stars of normal size like our Sun that can burn bright for ten billion years. Stars collect into a variety of large herds called galaxies, like the Milky Way.

Galaxies collect into clusters

 and super clusters.

A few million of the hundreds of billions of stars that make up a galaxy are super giants,

like Polaris and super red giants, like Betelgeuse. Earlier generation giants like Polaris live fast and die young (two to three million years). However, these original giant stars are the "cooking pots" of the heavier elements in the universe. Except for the first elements (hydrogen, helium, lithium and beryllium) created by The Big Bang birth of the universe, the rest of the hundred or so other heavier elements are cooked up in these first generation giant stars, which can be two to a million times the mass of the Sun.


When super giants

like the red giant, Betelgeuse

and the blue giant, Regulus

eventually explode

in a tremendous rage called a SUPERNOVA, they spew all their manufactured elements into the surrounding clouds of hydrogen. The new later generation stars that form from this cloud incorporate the mountains of seeds of these "newly minted" hundred or so different elements. Piles of element seeds (Phosphorous, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Iodine, Carbon, Sulfur, Nickle, Lead, Platinum, Gold, etc)) that are not locked up in the new sun clump together and revolve around the star. The biggest pieces grow bigger by gravitationally attracting and collecting the smaller clumps

This process of accretion in a star system creates the orbiting planets, like in our SOLAR SYSTEM: The rocky planets

Mercury, Venus, our home planet the Earth and Mars; the gas giant planets

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; and the diminutive ice-dwarf planets Pluto, Ceres and Eris.

From an original flock of thousands or so original protoplanets in the solar system, only about ten survived after the feeding frenzy. However, Between Mars and Jupiter is a wall of thousands of chunks of smaller pieces of rocks called the Asteroid Belt.

And just outside of the dwarf planets Pluto and Eris is a belt made up of a mix of tens of thousands of asteroids and rubble-piles of large snow ball-ices (COMETS) called the Kuiper Belt.

And way beyond this belt is a cloud of tens of billions of comets called the Oort Cloud,

 forming the outermost spherical boundary of our solar system.

Planets

 provide a haven for chemistry to continue to take place. Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, CO2 and Methane gases, and Carbon, Sulfur, Iron, Lead and Uranium solids, and liquids like H2O have better "chemistry" with one another rooming closer together within smaller, cozier, "tents" like the EARTH

as compared to being scattered far and wide in the great expanse of outer space. Under the friendlier earthy conditions, carbon compounds like hydrocarbons and carbohydrates, and nitrogen compounds like amino acids and nucleic acids find it easier to soup together and intimately fraternize under these better and stabler chemical conditions.

Nucleic acids form long chains known as RIBONUCLEIC ACIDS and DEOXY-RIBONUCLEIC ACIDS (RNA & DNA). Of the billions upon billions of different types of stable molecules that form within the Earth's chemical haven, only these two types of molecules happen to posses the ability to copy themselves. DNA is a gigantically long chain of nucleic acid molecules that only resides in each of our cell's NUCLEUS. It contains the information of how to organize and link up AMINO ACID molecules into long chains called PROTEINS. RNA is the other chain of nucleic acids. Compared to the gigantically long DNA, RNA

is short. RNA copies the DNA-stored information of how to make the protein insulin, for example.

RNA takes this information out of the cell nucleus to the sites of protein manufacture. These sites of protein synthesis, called RIBOSOMES, reside outside in the cell's CYTOPLASM. The ribosomes read the RNA blueprint copy of how to organize amino acids into the particular long amino acid chain called hemoglobin, for example, a vital protein needed to transport oxygen that the mitochondria uses to meet our ATP energy needs.

As science pieces together the jigsaw puzzle of data gathered from observations, research and experimentation, the conception, birth and evolution of our life friendly universe is becoming clearer. It appears to be a natural history and logical progression that is tangible through rational perception. There is no inexplicable mystery. It does appear to be a miracle at first glance but the apparent miracle is an illusion. If you very patiently pore through the scientific data and research literature, the logic and history of reality explains itself.