UniVerses

The first few hundred thousand years are strange indeed. Nothing in our experience helps us understand that early universe.

In our world things move back and forth through dimensions which are constant. Forward and back, left and right, up and down. (The exception, of course, is time. We cannot move back in time.) In the world we encounter, over vast distances, units of length are constant.

But in the first millennia the Laws of Physics were stranger than anything we can imagine. Dimensions, mass and energy were very odd.

In those extreme conditions matter and energy related in ways we cannot comprehend. Our closest experience to such conditions is in the heart of a thermonuclear explosion.

Our minds are comfortable with the concept of space, uniformly stretching out to infinity. In the beginning space itself was dynamic and evolving, too. 

For example, there was a spectacular event called the Cosmic Inflation during which the entire Universe dispersed over incredible distances in an instant. Space and dimensions as we know them didn’t exist until some time after the Big Bang. 

As matter and energy diverged, the infinitesimal and the infinite came into being.

Matter whose behavior is familiar, in which subatomic particles are bound together, did not begin until later. It is only within a very narrow window that things behave as they ought.

Inside stars the rules are very different. Below temperatures of a few thousand degrees familiar physics applies. Yet when we peer inside atoms to understand how they behave we are confronted with another bizarre world. Quantum mechanics are quite rude and defy proper decorum as well.

In time things cooled, and the great cycles began.

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