foreign and welcome to get sleepy where we listen we relax and we get sleepy I'm your host Tom thank you for listening tonight shortly I'll be telling you the story of well everything this is the history of our universe how it began and how everything around us came to be our story was beautifully written by Layla and it draws on current scientific thinking translated into lay persons terms and sleepy language we've allowed ourselves some poetic license but we've stayed as close as possible to predominant scientific thought and hope we haven't lost much in translation that
said we should bear in mind that nothing in science is ever set in stone every Theory and scientific tenet is fair game for revision-based new information or Innovative explanations as an example the web Space Telescope launched into orbit in 2021 has sent back new observations with implications for the timeline of the universe there are many open questions about the history of our universe and no doubt there will continue to be for many years to come but I really hope you enjoy this interpretation tonight but for now let's just ground ourselves in the present moment appreciating
the comfort of your bed the support of the pillow under your head and the Stillness of the space around you [Music] allow your breathing to gently slow and deepen [Music] and if there is any lingering tension in some areas of your body bring your focus there for the next few breaths [Music] and use the healing properties of the breath to soften and pacify that tension breathe in calm and peace then release tension with the exhale [Music] while you listen along tonight remember that you can fall asleep anytime you like [Music] it's okay if you're still
feeling wide awake for now [Music] allow yourself as much time as you need to unwind reassuring yourself that sleep will come without any Force [Music] and now that you're a little more relaxed and settled Let's Travel back to the likely Origins of the universe [Music] in the beginning perhaps we were all one or rather it was all one [Music] since there were no humans or other creatures or even matter as we know it [Music] space time itself was uniform and infinite then there was no separate time or space or Dimensions or matter or forces like
gravity [Music] and then time began and with the start of time came the beginning of change separation differentiation [Music] at first there was just an unimaginably hot dense universe bound together by some kind of Super Force today scientists recognize four fundamental forces in nature which include gravity and the electromagnetic force that causes magnets to stick to a refrigerator but as I've said in the beginning there were no separate forces [Music] instead the fundamental forces we experienced today would have been all unified into a single Super Force [Music] then came the Big Bang when the universe
was less than a second old much less in fact it was perhaps a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old and maybe 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit [Music] that's when the universe exploded in size doubling and doubling over and over again all in less than the blink of an eye we tend to think of the Big Bang as an explosion but it's probably better described as an expansion [Music] scientists talk about this super rapid expansion as inflation and that's a very telling term [Music] because the big bang and its
aftermath can be envisioned more like the inflating of a balloon than like an explosion outward from a single point in this analogy the universe is the surface of the balloon there is nothing else no air in the middle or outside the surface of the balloon is the sum total of existence in other words the inflating universe didn't inflate into anything there was nothing outside of the universe and it didn't inflate around anything [Music] so now in your mind's eye just picture what the surface of a balloon goes through when it inflates like the surface of
a balloon stretching that tiny newborn universe swelled and stretched everywhere at once rather than growing outward from some Central Point [Music] to think about this imagine you're an ant on the surface of a balloon as the balloon inflates the whole thing stretches any two points become farther and farther away from one another there's no middle on the surface of the balloon everywhere stretches away from everywhere else at the same time with no starting or ending point of course there were no ants or humans to experience that early inflation of the cosmos there was no one
and nothing or that was everything all combined as one depending on how you look at it [Music] but at any rate there were no creatures like us to observe it all so we have to deduce what happened in those Early Times [Music] we can do that using the remaining evidence and the best scientific theories humans have put together drawing on the combined efforts of scientific Minds from Albert Einstein to so many others but back to that change separation and differentiation [Music] in that first instant that first fraction of a second of the universe the Super
Force began to break apart [Music] gravity disconnected and broke free becoming its own separate Force [Music] and the universe ballooned out so rapidly that we can hardly even conceive of how fast it was because the time period was so short and still only the tiniest fraction of a second passed before that incredible inflation slowed down a little bit like an explosion whose Force diminishes over time [Music] the universe continued to expand mind you just at a slightly more sedate pace and as it expanded it also called just a little as it could matter formed tangible
stuff at least in its tiniest most microscopic form but here's the most incredible thing matter formed but not just Mata Mata and antimatter both formed at once now if you're wondering what antimatter is it's just what it sounds like Mata and antimatter are two partners equal and opposite as it were particles of matter and antimatter encounter one another they annihilate each other meaning they destroy each other in a burst of energy or perhaps we might see it another way as the Mata and anti-matter combining to form Pure Energy [Music] it's also considered possible that more
subatomic particles could have formed like quarks and neutrinos becoming the building blocks for more Mata and antimatter but back to Pure Energy foreign as an analogy imagine a rainbow a rainbow is formed when sunlight separates out into the different parts of the spectrum [Music] if light passes through a prism for example it's scattered into bands of color rainbows those colors of the rainbow are the different parts of the spectrum of light when the colors combine say if we remove the prism the rainbow goes away and we're left with regular sunlight again we could say in
a sense that when the colors join they annihilate each other they disappear into pure white light leaving an absence of color [Music] so it is with Mata and antimatter when they meet they disappear into a burst of energy like light or heat therefore in that earliest fraction of a second after the big bang Mata and antimatter appeared annihilated one another and disappeared [Music] but incredibly it seems that the matter and anti-matter somehow became out of balance for some reason the matter slightly outweighed the ante [Music] just slightly perhaps one particle of matter survived for every
billion that met their anti-matter particle and was annihilated this was an astonishing and wonderful occurrence because the universe as we know it was born from this imbalance [Music] after the matter and antimatter annihilated each other that little bit of excess matter was left over with no more antimatter to make it disappear this leftover Mata is the basis of all the stuff in the universe that stuff has changed and evolved exponentially since that time it has reformed in ever more complex patterns becoming stars and planets and seas and people and everything else there is but let's
get back to that first instant after the birth of the universe back to the first appearance of Mata after most of the matter and antimatter was annihilated the leftover Mata was concentrated in little pockets scattered around the expanding Cosmos [Music] those pockets of early Mata were nothing most of us would recognize today of course there was no air or water or gas or dust much less planets or Seas or people there were not even molecules or atoms [Music] they were just infinitesimally tiny particles of matter that scientists call quarks [Music] these unbelievably minuscule particles now
make up the protons electrons and neutrons that form atoms [Music] but at the time it was still too hot and too dense for these tiny quarks to come together to form more complex matter instead they'd Collide and Destroy one another once again creating radiation [Music] as that so young universe kept expanding and cooling though it soon became cool enough for the quarks to actually stick together vibrating in complementary and resonant ways and so they could form into the parts of atoms that we're a little more used to hearing about they combined into protons electrons and
neutrons [Music] still incredibly tiny but a little more complex just a step closer to the world we know now everything we've talked about so far happened within the first seconds of the universe's existence and as more seconds passed the cosmos kept expanding and Cooling and more early particles of matter coalesced until finally possibly around three minutes into the life of the universe though this timeline has been hotly debated the cosmos had called to perhaps a bit less than 2 billion degrees Fahrenheit and at that point the coalescing protons and neutrons could start joining to form
the next level of complexity in the development of matter as we know it the nucleus of an atom so these particles came together to create the nuclei of the very first elements hydrogen and helium at that point it was a foggy universe for it was still so hot at least beginning atoms constantly smashed together and broke apart into a haze of particles this foggy Universe has been described as an opaque but very bright environment a bit like driving through a pea soup fog where your headlights are reflected back to you from all around tremendously bright
but you can see nothing and still the universe was expanding and Cooling and aging and now time began to pass in earnest it's at this point in the story that we can stop speaking in terms of seconds and minutes and begin to think in terms of years many many years in fact hundreds of thousands of years passed before the fog thinned and the universe became transparent when the universe called to maybe somewhere around a toasty 2000 degrees Fahrenheit conditions were favorable enough for electrons to bind to those first nuclei and so they formed the first
atoms these initial atoms were hydrogen and helium [Music] gases that to this day Remain the most common elements in the universe other elements like those necessary for life still hadn't formed however and they wouldn't form for millions of years to come [Music] at the haze of particles became bound into atoms of hydrogen and helium and the fog thinned and light at last could shine you see in the early universe even light and matter hadn't been separate at this point though a few hundred thousands of years into the history of the universe light and matter finally
became decoupled [Music] in other words they separated our telescopes today can still pick up that earliest light drifting to us across the vast distances of space [Music] over time at first light has cooled into microwave radiation [Music] scientists call it the cosmic background radiation [Music] this radiation gives us important clues about the early universe and its powerful evidence to support the theory of the Big Bang [Music] when our instruments detect this Ancient Light it essentially allows us to see back in time to the early universe but we can see no farther back than the time
of the first light before that time after all there was no separate light to linger on for us to see [Music] still even after that dawning of first light in that newly transparent universe it remained very dark devoid of stars and Suns for this reason the next period in the history of the cosmos can be referred to as the Dark Ages before the dawn of stars it would have appeared to humanize like the calm of an endless night stretching on and on silent and unwavering the same in every direction [Music] there were no Burning Lights
in space as there are today just microscopic particles drifting and colliding here and there so tiny we humans couldn't even have seen them if any had been around nevertheless time went on and that mostly dark Universe continued to grow and to cool and change eras and ages past and accumulated [Music] at this point in our story time stretches to periods that are hard to imagine because of their length in contrast to the start of the universe when things happened so fast it's hard to comprehend just how quickly so in the Dark Ages stretched on and
on and the universe stretched and expanded [Music] a hundred million years passed and then another 100 million and still in the scale of all time the universe was very very young [Music] by the time it was say a few hundred million years old that young universe held drifting clouds of gas [Music] and these clouds of gas began to fill their own weight their gravity pulled to the clouds Tighter and Tighter together until they started to collapse in on themselves [Music] at last these collapsing balls of gas became furnaces dense and hot enough to cause nuclear
reactions as hydrogen atoms fused together in their centers these were the first Stars burning bright in the dark vastness of early space these first Stars would have been very very bright and very very massive than they would have endured but a short time before exploding [Music] the first stars must have burned indescribably bright Illuminating the Endless Night with their fire until they essentially bound themselves out [Music] the nuclear fusion reactions in the star's centers converted hydrogen into helium until their hydrogen was all gone then their centers contracted and became unstable then they grew hotter and
hotter and the atoms inside them fused into more and more elements finally bringing into existence other kinds of matter besides hydrogen and helium for the first time [Music] elements like carbon could form the basis of all Life as We Know It and also oxygen nitrogen and finally iron [Music] when a star reached that point nuclear fusion stopped inside it and within less than a second it would begin to collapse in on itself again buckling under the weight of its own gravity [Music] but as the iron atoms in its core were crushed together their nuclei would
repel each other with such Force such nuclear force that it overcame gravity [Music] and then the star would explode outwards in what we call a supernova explosion an enormous shock wave would Propel the elements forged in the Stars out into space and so when the stars exploded those other types of matter spread across the universe slowly but surely making possible the world we know today then from the scattered dust of those first Stars more and more complex elements formed and as the age of the universe began to be measured in billions of years that Stardust
collected and coalesced and Evermore galaxies and stars were born swirling dust and gas formed into more and more new stars grouped together into galaxies and as more and more galaxies formed these grouped together into clusters of galaxies populating the Dark Universe with Mata and Light eventually the cluster of galaxies formed that astronomers Now call the local group local because it's in our region of space within it was born a collection of stars that we call the Milky Way our galaxy [Music] then some 9 billion years after the big bang yet another cloud of gas and
dust began to come together and coalesce perhaps triggered by the force of an exploding Supernova nearby [Music] it was one of countless such clouds of dust and gas to come together in this way but this one from our point of view at least was special because the center of this collapsing cloud became our sun and around that Center the outer bits of the clouds matter clumped together into larger and larger balls spinning through space around the newborn Sun over time these collided and joined into bigger and bigger spheres and thus roughly four and a half
billion years ago the planets of our solar system were born [Music] and then at last life began on one water-retch planet in the inner part of the solar system only about a hundred million miles from the Sun the first and only life we know of in the universe and that life evolved and evolved into more and more complex forms of life at first there were microbes tiny microscopic living things so small as to be invisible to our eyes [Music] over time more microbes emerged that produced oxygen these set the stage for animal Life as We
Know It slowly producing an oxygen-rich atmosphere like that which we breathe every day then eventually simple animals developed at the bottom of the Earth's wide oceans such as sea sponges perhaps 800 million years ago [Music] short time later cosmically speaking just a few hundred million years or so more and more types of animals evolved filling the planet's Seas with living things [Music] and those sea animals proliferated and evolved growing ever more complex and diverse and differentiated and at last some of them crawled from the sea and set up life on land and still those animals
evolved and grew changing and developing ever more branches of the Tree of Life ever more complex life forms spread into nearly every environment on the globe until one of those life forms gazed at the heavens and wondered and finally created telescopes and scientific instruments with which to view distant stars and Ancient Light that life form we humans began to reveal sum of what came before to unravel some of the Mysteries of the universe all the way back to First Light and even before all the way back to the beginning when all was one but with
each Mystery unraveled we seem to find an even greater mystery lurking Beyond [Music] and the secrets of our Cosmos continue to stretch the limits of human comprehension [Music] say that in the end the more we think we know the greater the mysteries of existence still human Minds press onward seeking knowledge and understanding striving to know the unknowable and understand the incomprehensible to bring light to ideas that drift Among Us like the drifting Stardust of space [Music] and these ideas born of myriad Minds join together into even larger and more complex explanations and understandings is shared
ideas coalesce to form something larger much like that Stardust born of myriad Stars coalesced to form everything around us including our minds themselves and so perhaps the circle of existence is more like a spiral building up and up circling yes but also reaching ever upwards in a beautiful progression [Music] like a magnificent Symphony of the universe thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]
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