Liam Skinner

Chapter 1: The Greatest Story Ever Told

This chapter described our understanding of the very early Universe and how everything

came to be. It’s strange to imagine that the universe in all its complexity and structure was once

quite uniform, as a swirling soup of basic particles. It’s also strange that the development of

anything meaningful depended on the billion and one - to billion imbalance between matter and

antimatter. Every one of our particles is the lucky one in a billion that didn’t get annihilated. I

wonder if, in the case that there are many universes in a multiverse, some of these universes do

not have this imbalance. Those universes would just be photon soup. Or what if some event

caused a very large imbalance - there might be far too much mass and the universe would crunch

back down due to gravity. Our universe might be the odd one out - the only one with precisely

the right kind of Big Bang to set up the development of atoms.

The biggest question I had after reading this chapter was- how do we know all this? Do

physicists observe light from the beginning of the universe, or do they just back-calculate the

equations to figure out what conditions were like early on? It seems ridiculous that we can know

for certain what stuff was like a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. However, it must be a

very fun topic to study - cosmologists get to explore the mind-blowing, freaky stuff.