Was Our Current Universe Already Inevitable At One Second Old?

[Music]

on average our hearts beat 1.3 times

they pump 6.3 liters of blood around the

body

four babies are born worldwide and two

people die to a human a single second

is not a very long time

and yet

in the entire universe

our planet travels 220 kilometers in

orbit around the center of the galaxy

our sun loses about a million tonnes of

its mass out into space

4800 new stars are born in the milky way

and across the observable cosmos just

under 1 000 supernovae

entire star systems

to smithereens

a lot can happen

in one second

but is it enough time

to build a universe

the smallest fraction of time by which

we measure our lives the second can

trace its origins through thousands of

years of human history as early as the

23rd century bc the ancient sumerian and

babylonian civilizations devised a

system of counting based on the

supremely divisible number 60. later the

egyptians favored the practicality of

the number 12 as the number of finger

joints on a single hand that could be

counted with the thumb our modern

concept of time is thus built upon these

cultural preferences

atomic clocks the universal standard for

measuring time on earth and in space

define a second as 9 billion one hundred

and ninety two million six hundred and

thirty one thousand seven hundred and

seventy radiation pulses of an

irradiated cesium 133 atom

as an ultimate definition it is accurate

precise

but inelegant

it is a reflection of our history our

perception of time space and matter

but one second seems impractical when

considering the history of the cosmos as

a whole

indeed on a cosmic scale our universe

has clocked up some

436 quadrillion seconds so far

and those seconds can also contain

almost incomprehensible vastness

in 2020 scientists in the german

electron synchrotron in hamburg

bombarded hydrogen atoms with x-rays

knocking electrons free from their

orbits and sending them skipping to the

adjoining atom as the speed of light is

the fastest you can go and hydrogen is

the smallest molecule there is the time

it took for this to happen was and is

the shortest fraction of time ever

measured in an experiment

that time was 247 zeptoseconds or nearly

250 billionths of a trillionth of a

second

there are 2

500 times more zeptoseconds in a single

second then there have been seconds

in the history

of the universe

and so as we peer back through the eons

glimpsing the universe's childhood from

distant and ancient starlight and

reconstructing its growing pains in

powerful particle accelerators

we uncover

a surprising truth

one second is more than enough time

to build

a universe

for most of its existence our cosmos has

looked surprisingly like it does today

stars have lived and died galaxies have

formed spun and collided space has

calmly expanded and cooled

but our universe did have a beginning a

period of wild revolutionary change

assembling an orderly cosmos from

practically nothing at all

though a single second seems barely long

enough to accomplish the ultimate act of

creation as we shall see the briefest of

moments to our human eyes can be an

eternity from a different perspective

and incredibly we can draw a clear line

back from our vast present cosmos to the

miraculously perfect mix of raw

ingredients that came into being in that

first moment

so just how recognizable is our universe

when just a single second has passed

is the cosmos we see and feel around us

already inevitable

and with 436 quadrillion seconds to

choose from across 13.8 billion years

could it really all come down

to the first one

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thanks

this is the united states national radio

quiet zone

this 34 000 square kilometer patch of

land stretches across three states and

two mountain ranges in the eastern u.s

and demarcates a region of eerie silence

from radio transmission wi-fi signal and

cell phone service

and the green bank observatory in west

virginia sits at the heart

of this oasis of calm

the exclusion of all earthly sources of

radio noise makes green bank the best

place in the world to listen closely to

the stars and for the last 65 years the

site has been associated with the

headline grabbing search for

extraterrestrial intelligence

and in 2012 the immense steerable radio

telescope detected a signal that made

astronomers sit up and take notice

coming from a point more than 4 500

light years away in the giraffe

constellation a high-speed pulsing

signal pierced to the west virginian

radio silence

it was loud and persistent

but it was not

aliens

the signal was in fact coming from a

rapidly spinning and incredibly dense

ball of stuff

it

was a neutron star whirling around its

axis 346 times a second emitting a

stream of radio noise that intersected

with earth and the green bank telescope

over and over again astronomers named it

poetically psr

j0740

the star weighed in at around 2.1 times

the mass of our sun but all of that mass

was crammed into a ball that was just 27

kilometers in diameter making psr

j0740 the most massive neutron star ever

discovered constructed from the densest

material in the universe

a neutron star is the corpse left behind

when a gigantic star reaches the end of

its life

when the heat from fusion is no longer

enough to keep the star inflated the

core collapses under immense

gravitational forces in the hydrogen and

helium atoms left over in that core the

pressure is enough to squeeze electrons

and protons together on a subatomic

level creating a formless paste of

neutrons with no empty space between

them weighing 10 trillion kilograms per

cubic centimeter

a single spoonful of neutron star would

weigh as much as 8