Frankly, as a scientist, or rather as an astrophysicist, I cannot say anything else: Astrology is a scam. The stars do not influence our lives or destinies. And as a “classical physicist,” I am convinced that science is deterministic. Physical laws govern the cosmosTherefore, if we know these laws well, taking into account the initial conditions and collecting appropriate data, we can understand the behavior of any system.

If I were a more modern physicist – a quantum physicist, say – then I must take into account the deterministic limitations associated with a given chance, as well as its consequences. chaos theory.

The first three minutes of the universe, along with all its subsequent evolution, determined the current composition of the universe. In other words, what we are today – everything that is, everything that will be, everything that was and will not be – was decided in just three minutes! These are the elements of destiny on a Cosmic scale.

So what happened in those first three minutes of our universe? Frankly, the answer is not as easy as this question makes it seem. There are several aspects to this. I will discuss only three here.

The first problem concerns the definition of the “first minutes” of the universe. We astrophysicists – along with anyone who loves cosmology – generally believe that the universe is approximately 14 billion years old. The most accurate estimate is currently 13.787 billion years, plus or minus 20 million years. This statement implies that there is an origin of time, namely the Big Bang.

The question may arise – and some may laugh at it, but it is far from stupid, because there are no stupid questions – about what happened before or whether time can be negative. But the point is that the big bang is the origin of time. Time was createdor – to avoid getting into theological issues – it arises in the Big Bang (as we know it and experience it today). In other words, the fate of the universe was created in the first three minutes of the existence of not only the universe but also time itself.

What happens if there is no time? I don’t know how to answer this question.

Another aspect to consider to answer the question about the first three minutes of our universe is that everything we see around us is what we call the “Observable” universe – which extends from the screen on which you are currently reading this article. The most distant galaxy we know of—three minutes after the big bang—condensed into an extremely small volume, between a quarter and a quintillion of what it is today. It was as if a person was the size of a single atom.

“The Entire Universe” was not limited to just this volume, but there would be much more to the early universe. But other parts of the universe are very far away today and we have no information about them. Beyond thinking that this unattainable universe is the same as ours, the observable, we say “we are not dependent on them.”

With this size, the universe had a much higher density as well as a much higher temperature. This means that the baby universe of the past was very different from the one we know today. But (and this is key) During the first seconds after the big bang, up to the third minute of Life, the temperature of the universe went from about a hundred billion degrees to just a billion degrees… the last number being several dozen times the temperature of the core of the Sun.

Scientists were able to reproduce and study this dramatic temperature range in a laboratory. Especially, Large Hadron Collider (LHC), temperatures of up to five trillion degrees have been reached, or more than 10 times the temperature of the universe in the first second of the Big Bang. As a result, we know very well what happened in the first three minutes of the formation of the universe.

Before these 180 seconds were completed, what dominated the energy of the universe were the particles that seem normal to us today: electrons, neutrinos, photons – along with protons and neutrons, whose antiparticles have already disappeared from the universe (at least from the one we are currently experiencing). But that wasn’t the case before that first second: There were still more complex particles that we didn’t know very well.

Our knowledge of physics today is sufficient – based on laboratory studies – to know how all the particles that dominate the energy of the expanding universe behave. The universe became increasingly larger, colder, and rarefied (i.e., less dense). In a way, the entire universe went through changes of state as it cooled, similar to how gas in a cloud cools and water and even ice form. But the analogy isn’t perfect, because at the same time the density of the cosmos was decreasing, the fabric of space-time was also growing. The result was that in the beginning – within a second of the big bang – all the particles mentioned above were interacting with each other, electrons colliding with positrons and creating photons, or colliding with other photons (which have antiparticles) and rising up. for neutrinos and antineutrinos. They were also colliding with protons and creating neutrons, and vice versa. And when the third minute was reached, all these interactions disappeared.

In these three minutes, the rate of expansion and cooling of the universe triggered the events. First, neutrinos ceased to be in equilibrium with other normal particles: neutrinos and neutrinos annihilated each other (except for a small fraction), and the survivors began to travel freely. Today, it is still extremely difficult to stop a neutrino by making it interact with a proton or an electron; Calculations show that you need a light-year of lead to get an interaction (and the interstellar medium a light-year around us is four times less dense than lead). Traveling freely means that they stop interacting with protons and neutrons, which can transform into each other in the presence of sufficiently energetic neutrinos and antineutrinos. But this stopped happening a few seconds after the big bang: the number of protons and neutrons suddenly froze.

Shortly after that – not a long time for us, but Just after the Big BangWhen the age of the universe doubled every second – positrons and electrons also ceased to be in balance. Only a few survived. From that moment on, the only things in the universe were photons, protons, neutrons, electrons and neutrinos. All normal matter was already present. From that moment on, its evolution began to go its own way, which would eventually result in the creation of stars, followed by planets (or perhaps also gaseous planets).

Note that among all this, there is another type of matter that has long been on its way, that is, long before the first second – without interacting with photons and other particles, under the influence of gravity. I’m talking about Dark Matter, which has already planted the seed of galaxy formation and will dominate the energy of the universe in the future – before dominance is taken over by something else entirely.

And all this, remember, happened in just three minutes.

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