Moh Maya

There is one question we’ve all thought about, albeit through different lenses and to varying extents. It is a knowledge gap that lies at the heart of science, at war with the very laws upon which it rests, questioning its very existence! Sort of like an embarrassing secret. In some trains of thought that pass through this particular station, it may also be the holy grail to existentialists. For a definitive ‘how’ would help tackle the even more mammoth ‘why’, a pain that belongs to philosophy – a place where science need not venture.

How did the universe come to be? 
Hmm.

Our universe is incomprehensibly complex. Can we distill it down to elementary essentials?
Yes.

Quite evidently, the universe consists of a lot of… stuff. Stars, planets, and all things bright and beautiful. All of this comprises of finite number of elements which were forged in the hearts of countless super massive stars from nothing but hydrogen (the simplest combination of the two most fundamental sub-atomic particles - electron and proton) and then sprayed all over space when those stars imploded and died (yes, we are all star dusts). Thus, we can generalize the first ingredient and call it mass.

Then we see a lot of energy – the sun for instance, which not just gives warmth and light but also nourishes plants and animals which power our vehicles and industries, millions of years after they die and decay. So energy becomes the second ingredient. Now all we need is an arena for all this mass and energy to play out their billion year dance of evolution. This cosmic arena is space - the final ingredient of our universe.

However, the most famous scientist of all time told us that mass and energy aren’t really different entities but 2 different sides of the same coin. Most of you would also be familiar with the relation between these two ingredients – the most famous equation in all of science.

So, as it turns out, all we need is energy and space. This means our question simplifies to ‘how did space and energy come to be’? As Axl Rose famously sang – Where do we go now?

Science which has brought us this far also tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Certainly, so much of it cannot just pop out of nowhere. However, this apparent vice of science becomes a virtue if we evoke a concept even yours truly does not understand – negative energy. This implies that at the moment of creation, when all the energy in our universe came to be, an equal amount of negative energy was also created. This is sort of like having to create a mountain- you can do it by just digging a lot of earth and piling it all up in one giant heap. But while you have created a mountain, you’ve also dug up a hole - this is negative energy, simplified.

But where is all this negative energy? The answer is it is all around us, in all of space. But how can it be? The second most famous scientist of all time taught us that every object with mass attracts every other object with mass with a force we call gravity. This gravitational force makes our universe one giant storehouse of gravitational potential energy. Few of you would be able to recall the formula from 11^th grade:

That minus sign solves the negative energy conundrum.

And what about space? Edwin Hubble, sometime in early 20^th century, saw through his telescope that galaxies weren’t just moving away from one another, but doing so at an ever increasing pace. This means if we were to rewind the cosmic film, they must have been closer together at some time in the past. The cosmic rewind takes us to this moment where everything that we see today was smaller than the smallest thing we can imagine. This is the big bang – the moment of creation that has had scientists and believers slam their heads and tales for millennia. At this point, we enter the quantum realm (a place even Einstein and Newton dread to tread but which Hank Pym and Scott Lang visit for occasional adventures). 

The rules of this quantum realm are some of the strangest but most fascinating areas of science as we know it. Here, particles can not just be at two places at the same time but also (seem to) appear (or disappear) out of nothing. Is It possible all the mass in the universe just came out of nothing at this quantum moment of creation?

Rewinding the cosmic film by 14 billion years also means we reach the beginning of time as we know it. This makes answering ‘what caused mass to pop out of nothing’ extremely tricky. Causation as we know it implies something at one point of time resulting in something else at another time in the future, as if they were two events on a linear timeline. So how do we answer what comes before the beginning of this timeline? To quote Hawkings - "We have found something that doesn't have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in".

So kurzgesagt, this is the best prevalent understanding of how the universe (i.e. the energy and space that makes all of it) came to be. After 14 billion years of awe-inspiring companionship, this is where physics seems to have given up on us today. But don’t worry, people driven infinitely more by this curiosity than mere mortals like you and me, haven’t given up yet. This means you and I get to surrender our cosmic inquiry and get back to partying another weekend.

Happy?