Heart of the Matter

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, Easter Sermon.

What it is like out there in the universe? It is cold, it is impersonal but it is the machine that has created you, every single atom inside your body was inside the stars; we are all brothers in a sense. To know the atom, it seems, we must know the universe and to know the universe is to know the atom.

The universe out there is not only the stars, we also live in it; our home is part of the universe also. Every stone on the beach has the atoms which go back longer than the history of the earth; before the earth was formed they were part of the primordial soup that constituted the entire universe. Such simplicity in presenting the conglomerate view of the universe is needed to get closer to the ancient enigma of creation.

The current contour of the earth traces its history back to the geologic turmoil over the past million years ago. Four to five billion years ago earth was still condensing from the fragments of rocks circling the sun. Before that there was no earth, just the drifting clouds from which the planets and the earth were to form.

The earth is old but older are the atoms that compose the earth. Molecules become visible to the eye at a magnification of 10,000,000 times. Atoms making molecules have a shell of negatively charged cloud, electrons; at the core of the atoms is nucleus, composed of a positively charged particle, protons and a neutral particle, neutron; both the neutron and protons are made up of more fundamental particles, quarks. (Note: The weak force between quarks mediates the process of radioactive decay while the strong force binds the quarks together, weaving webs of energy we call matter.)

Crashing atoms in large accelerators such as the one in the Fermi Labs in Illinois (it is a three mile circumference tunnel), particles are speeded up to the speed of light and crashed head on, yielding a host of particles. From the study of these head-on crashes, we learn that the earlier the universe was inhabited by quasars which may have been the nuclei of the young galaxy; they shine more brilliantly than any other particle in the universe. As you turn on your television tube, part of the snow effect you see on an un-tuned channel is the showering of quasars about 15 billion years old.

The particles in an atom are held together by four fundamental forces: gravitational, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces. Particles and forces are the authors of every event in our universe.

Weak nuclear force helps power the sun; tremendous amount of energy is bound up in the nuclei of atoms; some nuclei are unstable and can't contain their energy forever, when they decay, the weak energy is dissipated by bosons particles.

The strong nuclear force binds protons and neutrons together without which there would be no atom and the universe will just be a quark fog. Strong forces are carried out by particles called gluons because they act like most perfect imaginable glue.

Gravitation, the universal attraction of all particles towards one another is the weakest of the four forces. Its range is infinite and holds the planets and galaxies together.

Combining all the forces is the ultimate dream of physicists. No laboratory on earth can generate enough energy for the four forces act like one; only the fire of genesis was hot enough for that.

Today, based on our understanding of the nature of the matter, we have a pretty good idea about what the fire of genesis was. About the shape and form of the universe, we know what it was like from within one hundredth of a second of the big bang till today, about 15 billion years later. Fossils and relics tell it all; cosmology is the testing ground.

A unified theory, a single equation that might account for every fundamental process in nature from the jostling of atoms to the wheeling of the galaxies is needed to make the dream come true of knowing our beginning story of the first one-hundredth second. Today, science is closer to fulfilling Einstein's dream, the nucleus of atom has yielded up evidence of the elegant simplicity of the wide world of the universe. Theories abound that the universe began in a state of perfect simplicity, evidence of which was burned into the heart of every atom by the heat of the big bang at the beginning of time.

Within one second of the creation the heat was so intense that it overwhelmed the strong nuclear force that holds quarks together to make protons and neutrons.

Within one hundredth of a second of creation even the neutrino subatomic particles, so strong and small that they can pierce through trillion miles of solid lead without hitting anything, were tied up in the dense universal broth of energy.

One-ten millionth of a second of the creation, the nuclear weak forces and electromagnetic forces were still welded together and worked as single electroweak force. The Z particles were being created in abundance out of the heat of electroweak epoch. Weak bosons and photons acted interchangeably and the universe was ruled by not four forces but by three.

Within a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth second the electroweak forces had not yet diverged from the strong nuclear forces, exotic X particles and quarks sailed the subnuclear seas of gluons, photons and weak bosons danced interchangeably; only two forces were operating: gravitational and electronuclear force.

And just at the beginning, a fraction of time too small to be described, the things were even simpler. The universe was contained within a single spark of energy, rapidly expanding, but smaller than a nucleus of an atom and ruled by a single primordial law.

If we only come to know what went on during that infinitesimal fraction of time, we will better understand everything around us and beyond. Unfortunately, we lack a theory about how nature behaved under these circumstances; gravitational quantum theory, super symmetry theory, super unified theory are the names given to these frustrations. But if we do stumble on this theory, we will hit upon the very threshold of creation. We will know genesis. We will know God.

To go that last fraction of a second we need knowledge we don't have. It may be that there is no knowledge to be had. May be the universe did not really have a beginning and may be the space-time forms a close circuit without an edge. Aristotle, Einstein and Hawkings believe that. Even the big bang could have been made to appear to us as such by the Creator. If the Creator can create the universe he can also make us believe in its beginning. What happened before the big bang? The science comes to a screeching halt. God takes over.