What Was The Universe Like Immediately After The Big Bang?

[Music] in 1999

the mars climate orbiter was destined for fame

the first ever interplanetary weather satellite it was designed

to study the climate and atmosphere of the red planet

and among many other things give scientists their first detailed

understanding of the distribution of water

on the surface but instead on september the 23rd

after four years of planning and 10 months of interplanetary travel

just as it began to enter the orbit of its planetary host

all contact was lost [Music]

mission control was instantly thrown into confusion more than 300 million

dollars of equipment and hard work had vanished in an instant

what could have gone wrong an investigation was begun and on

november the 11th the mars climate orbiter mishap

investigation board released their findings there had been

a miscommunication in the units that had been used to calculate

orbital insertion nasa had employed the metric system of kilograms and meters

while an external contractor had used the same numbers

but assumed them to be in pounds and feet

the modern scientific world relies on collaboration

and above all else standardization without an absolute to measure against

chaos reigns and orbiters disintegrate yet whatever

we choose whether it be inches kilos or hours they are ultimately

derived from our own existential experiences an inch is the

breadth of a man's thumb a ketogram is about the mass of a liter

of water and an hour is a purely subjective division of a day

here on earth but in the cosmos as a whole

there are no men to measure there's no water to weigh

and the concept of a day on earth means very little

how then might an extraterrestrial quantify its world

and how should we quantify the universe in the most objective way

possible this was the question that inspired the famed physicist max planck

in the final years of the 19th century the german nobel prize winner a

professor at the friedrich vilheim university in berlin

spent much of his academic career contemplating how the laws of nature

could be subdivided and studied on a minute

and discrete scale the key lay in the physical laws of the universe themselves

while the speed that a planet goes around its star may vary the speed of

light from that star does not while the gravitational pull on

a large planet may differ from the gravity on its moon

the gravitational constant that relates mass to weight

does not so by manipulating mathematics to set these fundamental properties of

space and time equal to one it is possible to define fundamental

units that apply to the cosmos regardless of where or when you happen

to be observing it in 1899 planck revealed his calculations

to the world the eponymous plank length measures a

minuscule 1.6 times 10 to the minus 35 meters

a decillionth of a millimeter blank time calculated by dividing the already tiny

planck length by the very large speed of light

is even smaller a mere 5.4 times 10 to the minus 44 seconds long

so there are more units of planck time in a single second

than seconds that have ever passed

while these quantities may seem unnecessarily and pointlessly small for

our brains to comprehend in the last century they have become

invaluable to physicists chemists and cosmologists contemplating the remaining

mysteries of the universe giving us the tools to understand space

and time on the most vital scale because

observations of our universe have lent overwhelming support to a once

outlandish theory that the entire universe was born some

13.8 billion years ago from a minuscule spec that expanded rapidly

exponentially the big bang

modern cosmologists have probed further and further back through our universe's

long history to try and understand the behavior

of matter energy and space-time itself during these earliest moments

and they have been remarkably successful reconstructing events

within just a tiny fraction of a second of the big bang

and it is here at the forefront of cosmological research

that max planck's fundamental units come into their own

arguably the final frontier of big bang science

scientists strive to understand what happened when the cosmos was just one

unit of planck time long and when it was just one planck length

in diameter appropriately this minuscule moment has

become known as the planck error and like other famous frontiers in

history it is a lawless wild west for modern

physics a place where long-held scientific

beliefs snap under the gargantuan pressure

of a universe compressed for in that first moment of existence

our laws of physics break down and reveal a mind-bending world of

astonishing

possibilities [Music]

before we can comprehend the shattering of those laws

we must first understand what it is that buckles

and breaks in the late 17th century isaac newton published his seminal work

the principia mathematica within it he proposed not only his three laws of

motion but also the universal law of gravitation

this simple and elegant calculation related the force of gravity to the

masses of two objects such as a planet and a moon and the

square of the distance between them this simple relation has become a

cornerstone of classical mechanics and in the intervening centuries has

proven remarkably successful at explaining the large-scale motions of

all celestial objects

more than 200 years after newton's principia

a young man sat doodling in a patent office in bern in switzerland

watching the clock counterweight the final hour of the day

becoming a patent clerk was not what he had hoped for but after scraping through

school with a reputation for a poor attitude

and a failed search for teaching positions this was one of the few

options left to him but his heart wasn't in it and even now

he sketched tiny model solar systems in the corner of his patent applications

yearning for his true home within his notebooks and personal mathematics

because despite his failures as a student this man

was no fool his attitude may have been bad but only out of impatience

his mind was alive with the great unanswered questions in physics

his name of course was albert einstein

in 1905 he definitively threw out the rule book of classical mechanics

in favor of a new theory this theory which he called special relativity

described the behavior of things that traveled close to the speed of light

fortunately for einstein his papers found their way to the desk of max

planck himself and with his help was able to leave the

life of a patent clerk behind forever over the next 10 years

einstein sought to reconcile gravity with his new framework

and the new concepts of space and time that he had established with special

relativity this was no easy task since newton's

universal law already explained so much but einstein

kept at it eventually devising another outlandish

theory which would come to be known as general

relativity the mathematics of general relativity

are achingly complex but einstein's equations describe a

cosmos in which the fabric of space-time itself

is affected by the objects within it objects with greater mass

create curves in space-time the larger the mass

the greater the curvature a massive star creates a huge gravity

well and its orbiting planets are trapped circling the curved rim of that

well subsequent precise measurements and

experiments confirmed the validity of this framework

including discrepancies in the orbit of mercury

by providing the scientific world with a new view on gravity einstein paved the

way for a truly modern form of physics more accurate than

newton's classical mechanical approach these heady concepts of distorted

space-time offer a much more precise and predictive toolkit for understanding the

cosmos solving the equations of general

relativity was what allowed the priest come physicist george demetre to imagine

the expansion of the universe from a hot dense state

laying the foundation for the modern big bang theory

but even einstein's powerful mathematical solutions

run into problems when conditions are extreme enough

[Music]

in black holes whose mass can exceed that of 100 billion suns concentrated

within a single point the distortion of space-time is so great

that even light cannot escape and eventually his exquisite mathematics

breaks down physics may speak of infinitely small

points or infinitely high densities but when infinity is involved

mathematical tools can't cope and this

is key for this troublesome singularity at the center of a black hole is similar

to the extremely dense state of the universe during the planck error very

similar for a fraction of a second the entire

mass of the universe was crammed into a space 100 billion billion times

smaller than a single proton general relativity can tell us almost everything

we want to know about the large-scale gravitational

behavior of the universe but it can't tell us about that first

hyper-dense moment scientists must look elsewhere for the

answers to the planck mystery

[Music] traditional computers rely on tiny

transistors on integrated silicon chips for their computing power

these transistors act like switches that can be either on or off

and by linking millions of them together they create the base programming for

everything that a computer can do over the years engineers have made these

transistors ever smaller shrinking them until they're just

5 nanometers in length the same as about 10

silicon atoms with such tiny components the silicon chips in our pcs laptops and

smartphones are more powerful than ever but there's a limit to how much further

we can go any smaller and once these minuscule

tightly packed transistors are actually put to work

strange things begin to happen electrons belonging to a silicon atom on

one transistor can suddenly and inexplicably jump to

another atom on a neighboring component disrupting

the instructions passing through it this is just one of the many mysterious

behaviors we encounter when we're dealing with the extremely

small as a result the next generation of

computing seeks not to overcome these strange effects but rather to

embrace them so-called quantum computers encode their

information not in silicon transistors but rather in the weird particles

themselves individual atoms or electrons have the

remarkable ability to inhabit two discrete states at once and quantum

computers embrace this by turning them into

switches that like schrodinger's cat are

simultaneously on and off until they're not

by understanding and embracing these bizarre behaviors

quantum computing can model and calculate complex and uncertain systems

allowing us to do things that wouldn't be possible even with the most powerful

silicon supercomputer this new age of computing is still in its infancy

but it relies on an entirely new physics framework

that is already about 100 years old

the physics of the very small seem to defy our classical experience of the

world but it could hold the key to

understanding some of the mysteries of the cosmos

including its very first moments around the end of the 19th century while planck

was considering the fundamental scale of the natural world his german colleagues

and collaborators were trying to understand how mata behaved at these

minuscule scales they postulated that the energy in

physical systems such as light energy moving from a

source to a detector did so in discrete individual packets

rather than as a continuous stream insofar as we experience light this

proposition seems ridiculous light behaves just as

if it were a wave reflecting refracting spreading out and

creating interference patterns just like waves on the ocean's surface

but under certain conditions it can also seemingly behave like a particle

those particles are what we know as photons

in the now famous double slit experiment a beam of light passing through both

slits will create an interference pattern on the other side