We’re tantalizingly close to figuring it all out; the way it all started, that is. We’ll call the beginning of the universe “t sub zero”. That’s “t” for time and “zero” for the beginning. One possibility is that it’s a quantum singularity – such a nice phrase “quantum singularity”. It just rolls off the tongue. A mangled mass of matter and gravity where space and time and energy as we know it makes absolutely no sense. And at t sub ten to the minus 43 seconds that’s point zero, zero, zero etc. for 42 zeroes – that’s pretty small, the smallest unit of measurable time, actually – at ten to the minus 43 seconds, it, for want of a better word, explodes. It explodes so quickly that by ten to the minus four seconds – that’s ten to the minus 4, one ten-thousandth of a second - this quantum singularity has gone from a chaotic, swirling unknown to the forces of energy and matter that we know today: gravity, electromagnetic forces, nuclear forces – and basic quantum physics can take it all from there. All in one ten-thousandth of a second. Now THAT’S a big bang.

Alright, but I have to keep moving. So, not even a second has passed and quarks and anti-quarks are colliding and destroying each other, and protons and anti-protons are colliding and destroying each other, and mesons and anti-mesons are colliding and destroying each other and everything that’s being created is creating the “anti” of itself and everything’s just destroying itself and it does not look good for the good guys.

But look, over there, there’s one strange little reaction. X-bosons. X-bosons? Yes, X-bosons. They’re creating anti-X’s too and they’re just breaking down into pairs of anti-quarks and quarks and they’re destroying themselves too – except:

When an anti-X decays it produces a billion anti-quarks.
When an X decays, it produces a billion and one quarks.

OK, this is an approximation but, in this massive explosion, one in a billion quarks survives without being annihilated and this is what, when everything cools down a little more, forms the protons and neutrons of the matter that we so know and love.

And not even a second has passed. So much universe, so little time…

beginning – the earth and life

So all that universal creation happens 9 or so billion years ago and now we fast forward to four and a half billion years ago. Our protosun is dark and it’s collapsing under the force of its own gravity and finally it’s just too much and it explodes – a true fusion explosion this time – and dust goes flying every which way only to be pulled back in and, over the next several hundred million years, our little planet is formed.
But it’s not a pretty place. It’s hot and covered with noxious gases and things keep falling on it like meteorites and comets. One is so big that it knocks a massive chunk off of our eventual home and that becomes the moon. Poor little planet. But we’re not alone – the big chunks of ice and rock are falling on all the planets and breaking off bits of them and flinging them around the galaxy so that, on a galactic time scale, we’re really not even separated. Rocks on Mars land here and vice versa. And while all of this is happening, we’re flying around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at 500,000 miles per hour and we’re flying through all kinds of other space debris that lands on this swirling ball we will eventually call home.
So now we come to the problem of life. Life is about self-replication. I mean, there are a lot of things that have to happen before we can call something “alive”, but the ability for something to somehow propagate something like itself is pretty critical. Now, a popular biogenesis theory is that life on earth began in a primordial soup with random chemicals bouncing around until a critical amino acid was formed. But, according to Paul Davies in The Fifth Miracle, a small protein may typically contain a hundred amino acids of twenty varieties. In this simple protein then, there are 10¹³⁰ different arrangements of the amino acids in a molecule of this length. This is much more than the number of atoms in the observable universe. That makes the odds of life occurring on earth an incredibly unlikely prospect.

But not impossible. We are now discovering critters deep in the surface of the earth and around volcanic vents deep in the ocean. One bizarre class of these critters is called “hyperthermophiles” who appear to thrive at temperatures between 100 and 150 degrees Celsius – that’s above boiling, folks. And they are able to go into extended states of suspended animation at super-cool temperatures only to come back to life in the right conditions. So, this 10¹³⁰ odds problem may not be so insurmountable because critters like this could have formed anywhere in universal, galactic or solar system space and fallen to earth with the comets and the meteorites and the space debris. Davies’ pet theory is that life actually developed first on Mars and was brought here by a meteorite. Mars was too small to maintain an atmosphere and so died off, but our Earth took in the orphans and they flourished on our big blue ball.

I like to think that protolife was born as soon as the big bang universe had cooled enough and these self-replicating molecules are spread throughout all the stars we see in the sky and beyond, but that’s just a romantic talking.

self-awareness

So, after this basic self-replicating molecule is created here or finds its way here, random selection takes over and Darwinian evolution creates a broad variety of plants, animals and, eventually the self-aware creatures that we like to think of as “us”. Granted, I skipped a lot of steps along the way, but cut a guy some slack. I’ve got 15 minutes here to create the universe and all the life therein. Even God had six days.

But doesn’t it seem rather odd that the reaction of the X-bosons, remember the X-bosons, was just so that the universe didn’t destroy itself in its infancy? And somehow, the 10¹³⁰ odds problem was overcome and self-replicating molecules were formed. But maybe it’s not a problem of statistics. We glibly talk about random molecules bouncing around, but the reality is, random is just a human construct. It doesn’t exist anymore than Euclid’s perfect triangle or an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing Shakespeare’s sonnets. Random just means that there are too many calculations for us to deal with but everything, everything, is in relationship. And when the calculations begin to feed back into themselves, it appears to become even more “random” – way too many calculations.

But scientists, especially mathematicians, are cutting through this too. I created these pictures behind me and they are fractal, I like to call it, “art”. Fractals are formed by taking fairly simple mathematical formulae and feeding the answer back into the same formula over and over again and then plotting what they do on a computer screen. They are truly “self-replicating” formulas. And it’s amazing what we can see in them. Fractals come out of a branch of mathematics known as “chaos theory”, and it’s incredible how these things appear to be random and yet not random.

So, how the bleep did we get here? Maybe it’s better to acknowledge first that we are here. We are here because of an almost seeming anomaly in the way X-bosons break down. If they didn’t break down that way, there would be no matter and we wouldn’t be here to talk about it, now would we. We are here because of the formation of self-replicating molecules, despite overwhelming odds. But then again, if self-replicating molecules hadn’t formed, we wouldn’t be here.

And self-awareness? Don’t get me started again. How all of this stuff came together and allowed us to know about ourselves is, for want of a better term, miraculous. And yet, here again, if self-awareness hadn’t happened we wouldn’t be able to talk about it.

Most physicists now believe that there are a lot of universes out there that we will never be able to know about – ours is just one universe in what they call the “multi-verse”. Some of them may flash in and out of existence in less than a second. Some of them may be very much like our own, and some may exist in ways that humans could never be able to comprehend.

But our universe exists and it almost seems to exist in a “just so” way that allows us to marvel, every ten to the minus 43 seconds, just how miraculous it is.

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