How the Universe Works - S03E04 - First Second of the Big Bang
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00:00The most momentous second in history, the first.
00:11In that first moment of creation, in the first second, space and time, matter and energy,
00:20everything was set into motion.
00:22Space and time burst into existence, giving birth to the universe.
00:29More things happened in that first second than will probably happen in the entire future
00:33history of the universe, no matter how long it lives.
00:37This violent first second will define everything, including you.
00:43So that very first second, understanding that is the key to understanding the universe itself.
00:59Look up at the night sky, at our universe.
01:14An awesome spectacle, stunning, exhilarating, humbling.
01:21And look at all the world around us, bursting with life, with natural wonders, with those
01:32we love.
01:36All of this, everything we see, comes from one miraculous moment, the Big Bang.
01:52The Big Bang was more than just a creation of matter.
01:55It was a creation of the universe, which means a creation of space and time.
02:01Creating time, space and everything is a pretty neat trick.
02:06Obviously it happened, but so far, physics hasn't figured out how.
02:12We don't know why it banged, we don't know what banged, we don't know how it's banging.
02:20All we know for sure is that all of existence suddenly bursts into being.
02:30This is the beginning of the first second.
02:34And time itself is set to zero.
02:39It's the moment when everything we see, all hundred billion galaxies, each of which contains
02:44a hundred billion stars, all of that material was compressed in a region which was infinitely
02:50small.
02:51In its first second, the universe evolves more radically than in the 13.8 billion years
02:57that follow.
02:58The first second of the universe was the most important second the universe ever had.
03:04And it went through more stages in that first second than it has in all the time since.
03:11So much happens so quickly that scientists need a whole new concept of time.
03:21For human beings, one second can seem like a very short time.
03:25But for the universe, an incredible amount can happen.
03:29We measure our lives in hours, minutes, and seconds.
03:34But they're useless at the time scale of creation, because the Big Bang unfolds almost instantaneously.
03:44We have taken our understanding of what the universe was like back from one second to
03:49a tenth of a second, a hundredth of a second, a thousandth of a second, a millionth of a
03:53second, a billionth of a second, all the way back to a time where the laws of physics,
03:58as we now know them, break down.
04:01That far back, time must be measured in unimaginably tiny slivers, known as Planck time.
04:10One way of understanding how much actually happened in the first second is to think in
04:15units of the Planck time, the Planck time being 10 to the minus 43 seconds.
04:20There's a billion, billion, billion, billion, billion Planck times in one second.
04:24There are only a billion, billion seconds in the entire history of the universe.
04:28That's far fewer seconds in all of history since one second to today than there were
04:33from the Planck time to the first second.
04:37By breaking time up into such tiny fragments, we can imagine the birth of the universe moment
04:44by moment.
04:49In the beginning, space and time are wrapped up in an infinitesimally small speck of pure
04:56energy.
04:59As the Planck time clock starts running, this knot of space and time somehow breaks free.
05:10The Big Bang wasn't an explosion in space.
05:14It was an explosion of space.
05:19As the hands of our cosmic clock approach the first Planck time, all of space expands.
05:27The universe emerges everywhere at once.
05:34The wonderful thing is it happened right here at the end of your nose, and it happened five
05:38billion light years away.
05:40Every single point in space was involved in the Big Bang.
05:46So it's not as if it's a ball that you can stand outside of.
05:49Everywhere you are is inside of the Big Bang.
05:54In this very first instant of creation, some scientists believe that a single pure force,
06:01a super force, rules everything in the universe.
06:07We think that the original universe was a state of perfection, a single unified force
06:13that existed at the instant of the Big Bang.
06:19As the first Planck times pass by, something causes the super force to split, shattering
06:28this state of perfection.
06:31As the universe cools, these different forces freeze out.
06:34That means they behave differently.
06:40Think for example in terms of steam.
06:43If I have steam and I cool it, it turns to a liquid.
06:47If I cool it again, it turns to a solid.
06:50So in the same way as the universe began to cool, the different forces broke off from
06:55each other.
07:00When the super force splits, a new force emerges to drive and shape the cosmos, gravity.
07:08It will mold matter into planets, stars and galaxies.
07:14If gravity were a little bit stronger, perhaps we would have had a Big Bang which would stop
07:19and then it would re-collapse immediately into a big crunch.
07:24Life would be impossible.
07:26If gravity were a little weaker, then we would have a Big Bang that just keeps on going
07:31and the universe would freeze to death.
07:36But gravity breaks away from the super force at exactly the right strength to create galaxies,
07:43stars and life itself.
07:47So our universe in some sense is fine tuned.
07:50We're just right to have a universe that expands slowly, making it possible to create
07:56DNA and life as we know it.
08:01Gravity may be the perfect strength in our universe, but it's not the only force that
08:07will govern the cosmos.
08:09By the ten millionth tick of the plank clock, another stupendous event will begin.
08:16The wildest growth spurt in cosmic history.
08:32The first second of the universe has barely begun, and the shortest possible units of
08:37time, plank time, are flying by in the millions.
08:42The universe is a super hot ball of radiation, billions of times smaller than an atom and
08:50dense beyond imagination.
08:57Gravity has begun shaping the future of the cosmos.
09:00But as the universe expands and the temperature drops, another force arrives on the scene.
09:07The strong force.
09:13Without the strong nuclear force, the nuclei of the atoms themselves would all disintegrate.
09:23Three forces, gravity, the strong force and the fractured super force, rule the universe
09:30as it hurdles towards its next milestone.
09:34An event that sets out the blueprint for the galaxies that fill the cosmos today.
09:42We think this event happened because it explains a long-standing mystery.
09:48Everywhere we've looked in the universe, its billions of galaxies are spread evenly,
09:55the same number in every direction.
09:59All of these parts of the universe must have, at one point, been in contact with each other.
10:05It's kind of like having two people who live on opposite sides of a country, getting up
10:08at the same time, eating the same breakfast, dressing the same way, even when they don't
10:12talk to each other.
10:13There must be something common in their past that links them.
10:17This problem needed a solution.
10:20And in 1979, a young cosmologist named Alan Guth proposed one.
10:27He called it inflation.
10:32This was very exciting.
10:33I suddenly realized that this might be the key to a very important secret of the universe.
10:38But at the same time, I was, of course, very nervous because it was all new and I was shaky
10:43about whether or not it was right.
10:48Guth speculated that the infant universe went through a phenomenal growth spurt.
10:54Big inflation was a moment in the history, the very early history of the universe, when
10:58the expansion suddenly accelerated.
11:00It got huge for the briefest moments of time.
11:05Just 10 million plank times after the Big Bang, a tiny volume of space suddenly starts
11:11to expand much more quickly than before.
11:15This inflation is so rapid that it turns chaos into order, spreading the constituents of
11:22our universe evenly throughout space and fixing their positions within it.
11:29As the universe cooled down in those earliest moments, it increased in volume by a factor
11:34of 10 to the 90th in a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.
11:41It's like a grain of sand swelling to larger than the sun, faster than the speed of light.
11:47Well, have we violated Einstein's laws?
11:50Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
11:52And here's one of the real subtle points about the Big Bang.
11:55Space can expand so much that two objects appear to move apart faster than the speed
12:00of light, but they're not moving.
12:03It's the space in between them that's growing.
12:06Guth's audacious idea, the inflationary universe, could push the limit of our understanding
12:13back to the very first moments of the first second.
12:17But how could we ever test it?
12:20How could we peer into the birth of creation?
12:27TV static holds a clue.
12:31One percent of the static on this screen comes from the light from the Big Bang.
12:38In 1964, astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were listening to radio signals from
12:45space.
12:47But in every direction, they were picking up a background hum.
12:52Puzzled by the hum, they suspected they knew the culprit and swept the entire receiver
12:58free of pigeon droppings, to no avail.
13:01If anything, the background got even greater.
13:06And according to legend, when they gave a talk at Princeton, one physicist raised his
13:10hand and says, either you are listening to the effects of bird dropping or the creation
13:17of the universe.
13:20What Penzias and Wilson had stumbled upon was the afterglow of the fireball created
13:26by the Big Bang.
13:29As the universe expanded, it cooled.
13:31After a few hundred thousand years, it was just protons and electrons flying around.
13:35But at some point, the universe cooled enough that when an electron and proton got together,
13:40all over the universe, essentially all at once, the universe became transparent.
13:45Think of a gigantic fog that suddenly lifts.
13:49Before the fog lifts, you can only see a few feet in front of you.
13:53Then suddenly, everything becomes clear.
13:57That's what happened 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
14:03Ever since that moment, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, this light has traveled uninterrupted
14:11through space.
14:14Scientists call it the Cosmic Microwave Background.
14:21If you were to write down a handful of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time,
14:26one of them might be the discovery of DNA.
14:29Another one might be the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background.
14:34That's how big this discovery was.
14:38The Cosmic Microwave Background first lit up the universe 380,000 years after the Big
14:45Bang.
14:46But it bears the imprint of a time much earlier than that, a time when inflation was transforming
14:53the cosmos.
14:54If the secrets to inflation are anywhere, they're hidden here.
15:00Scientists needed to take a closer look.
15:14The infant universe is just 10 million plank time old.
15:20It abruptly inflates in the greatest growth spurt in history, and the universe expands
15:26faster than the speed of light.
15:30The secrets to this expansion are hidden in the Cosmic Microwave Background, the first
15:36ever light to shine through the cosmos.
15:41To reveal these secrets, scientists need the best picture of this light they can get.
15:54May 2009, the European Space Agency launches the Planck satellite.
16:03It orbits the sun, scanning the temperature of the entire visible universe.
16:10It's so sensitive, it can measure the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background to within
16:16a millionth of a degree.
16:19The blue spots in the map are cold spots.
16:22They're going to evolve to become large empty voids.
16:24The red spots in the map, those are hot spots.
16:27They're going to form clusters of galaxies.
16:30This map is a blueprint for how our universe is going to form and evolve.
16:35When you look at this map, we're also looking back in time and seeing the echoes of creation.
16:41The tiny variations measured by Planck go on to form the galaxies that fill the universe,
16:47and inflation explains them perfectly.
16:52But scientists need a smoking gun, something out of science fiction, gravitational waves.
17:02One of the tests is that we might be able to see the gravity waves that were produced
17:07at the very end of inflation.
17:11Gravitational waves stretch and contract space-time itself.
17:15They travel through the universe like ripples in a pond.
17:19Scientists believe that the violence of inflation sent these waves reverberating throughout
17:25the cosmos.
17:26If we could see them, it would be case closed.
17:30Scientists would know that inflation was real.
17:35March 2014, 30 years since Alan Guth came up with inflation, a telescope at the South
17:43Pole shakes the world.
17:46Today scientists announced they have discovered what was going on in the earliest moments
17:51of our universe, right after the Big Bang.
17:56This is the most exciting scientific result of my career.
18:01Inflation was an incredibly violent process.
18:04Different parts of the universe all expanding at somewhat different rates, but all faster
18:08than the speed of light.
18:09And this difference in expansion rate produced gravitational waves.
18:13And these gravitational waves produced a signature on the microwave sky that we've now seen.
18:19It's something I am so happy has happened in my lifetime.
18:27The data is an almost perfect fit for inflation.
18:32What we're finding is that the very simplest models of inflation are agreeing beautifully
18:36with what observations are being made.
18:39And that's incredibly gratifying and provides, I think, very strong evidence that inflation
18:43really happened.
18:47Inflation explains why galaxies are spread so smoothly across the cosmos.
18:54In the tiniest fraction of a second, it transforms a minute and uniform bit of space into the
19:01entire visible universe.
19:08And the implications are stunning.
19:11Maybe it wasn't just the visible universe that grew under inflation.
19:18Some scientists now believe that other regions of space, too distant for their light to ever
19:24reach us, underwent inflation too and are still inflating now.
19:30One of the profound things about inflation is once it starts, it's hard to stop it.
19:37Inflation never stops everywhere.
19:38It stops in places.
19:40And every place where it stops, one produces a universe.
19:45Inflation seems to go on producing other pocket universes literally forever.
19:50Indeed, inflation makes our Big Bang and then goes on and makes lots of other Big Bangs
19:57and creates this big collection of universes, the multiverse.
20:04Our universe may just be one of an infinite collection of universes.
20:09And a multiverse much, much larger than we ever imagined.
20:14And some scientists argue, not only are there multiple universes out there, they think every
20:21possible universe must exist.
20:28People identical to us would live out every possible parallel life in every possible parallel
20:35world.
20:36It's a mind-blowing outcome.
20:43Now that we have such strong evidence for inflation, it's time to take ideas like the
20:48multiverse really seriously.
20:53Let's reset.
20:54The universe is just 100 billion plank times old, and the seeds of its galaxies have already
21:01been sown.
21:04Everything is still pure energy.
21:08So where does all the matter, the stuff of stars and you and me, come from?
21:26We're on a journey through the first second of time.
21:30The universe is a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old.
21:36The temperature is a thousand trillion trillion degrees.
21:42The infant universe inflates far faster than the speed of light, pumping vast amounts of
21:48energy into space.
21:50But the cosmos is still just the size of a baseball.
21:57Science says that for a brief period, empty space gets energy, and it turns out the universe
22:05keeps dumping energy into space to produce everything we see.
22:09And so apparently, you produce an incredible amount of stuff from nothing without violating
22:16the laws of physics.
22:17It's almost magic, but that's the key word, almost.
22:22It's allowed by the laws of physics.
22:25As inflation ends, the brightest flash in history floods the cosmos with radiation.
22:33During the first second of the universe, it was unimaginably hot and dense.
22:38It was basically a ball of energy.
22:41It's not a place you'd want to stand in.
22:43You'd vaporize pretty quickly.
22:47Everything's zipping around at the speed of light.
22:50This universe full of radiation is nothing like our universe today, full of stuff, material
22:57stuff.
22:59Because it was so hot, atoms didn't exist, matter as we know it didn't exist.
23:03The universe was a dense soup of radiation.
23:09The earliest universe is a chaos of pure energy.
23:14How does it transform into a universe of matter?
23:19To answer that question, we have to turn to Einstein and a very famous equation, E
23:27equals mc squared.
23:32Before Einstein, people said matter is matter, energy is energy, and never the twain shall
23:37meet.
23:38Along comes Einstein and says, not so fast.
23:40They really are the same thing.
23:46Einstein realized that matter is just concentrated energy.
23:51This insight transformed our understanding of the universe and allowed us to unleash
23:58devastating destruction.
24:06Energy E, that can turn into m, matter, and vice versa.
24:13Just a small teaspoon of matter would be enough to unleash the power of hundreds of
24:17hydrogen bombs.
24:25While atomic bombs convert matter into energy, in the Big Bang, energy starts to turn into
24:32matter.
24:33But it's nothing like the matter that makes up the world we live in.
24:38So what does this primal matter look like?
24:48This is the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, home to the Relativistic Heavy
24:54Ion Collider, or RIC for short.
25:01Here they recreate matter that filled the embryonic universe one millionth of a second
25:07after the Big Bang.
25:08In a sense, RIC really is a time machine.
25:11We're reproducing the conditions that existed in the early universe on the order of one
25:16microsecond after the Big Bang.
25:20RIC fires gold nuclei around a two and a half mile circular tunnel, 78,000 times a second,
25:28almost the speed of light.
25:34Then it smashes them together in a giant star detector.
25:42Imagine smashing two cars together in a head-on collision and working out what the cars looked
25:49like by analyzing the debris thrown off.
25:55That's what the team at RIC is doing.
25:57They're hunting for the building blocks of protons by smashing them to pieces.
26:08Each collision that you see here, you can see that they're different.
26:11Some collisions have more tracks coming out of them.
26:14The curved lines represent, in fact, they are the particles that come out of the collision.
26:19And you can see each collision generates a different number of particles depending on
26:24the violence of the collision.
26:27What Mike and his team see is a spray of the most fundamental particles of all, quarks.
26:35Quarks are normally bound inside protons and neutrons, but give quarks enough energy and
26:41they break free.
26:43We expected these quarks, once they're liberated from the protons and neutrons, not to interact
26:49much with each other, just to stream out into our detector.
26:53What we found was the most perfect fluid that was ever discovered, ever measured on
26:59the planet.
27:00So it actually flows much more easily than water does.
27:04This was absolutely surprising.
27:07And RIC shows us that perfect fluid of elementary particles occurs at just one millionth a second
27:14into the Big Bang.
27:16But it doesn't last for long.
27:21As the universe expands, it cools.
27:24And something called the strong force makes its presence felt.
27:30The most important characteristic of the strong force is the confinement of quarks inside
27:35protons and neutrons that we see as today.
27:40When the temperature of the universe drops to two trillion degrees, the strong force
27:45clumps quarks together in groups of three, making protons and neutrons, the building
27:52blocks of atoms.
27:54The universe begins to take the form we know today.
28:00But as matter is bursting into existence all around the universe, there's still something
28:06missing.
28:09Somehow, this matter has no mass.
28:24The universe is hurtling through its first second of existence.
28:29It begins a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton.
28:35After surging through a burst of expansion called inflation, faster than the speed of
28:40light, the entire cosmos has grown to about the size of our solar system.
28:48And matter is bursting into existence.
28:54But this matter is strange.
28:56It has no mass.
29:03The matter in today's universe has mass.
29:06On Earth, we feel it as weight.
29:12In space, objects can feel weightless, but they still have mass.
29:21If this astronaut had no mass, he'd be in big trouble.
29:28You can't actually slow something down if it doesn't have any mass.
29:32If something doesn't have any mass, it has to move at the speed of light.
29:36There's no way of stopping it.
29:37So a universe that's full of matter, but matter which has no mass, is one in which it just
29:42looks like a big ball of light.
29:45The earliest universe had no mass, just elementary particles fizzing at the speed of light.
29:52But today, our universe is full of planets and stars that clearly have mass.
29:58So where does mass come from?
30:02Apparently, there's some field that permeates the entire universe, and different elementary
30:07particles will interact with it in different ways.
30:10And it's the interaction of the particle with the field that gives the particle its property
30:15that we call mass.
30:18Scientists call it the Higgs field after Peter Higgs, one of the first scientists to propose
30:22it in the 1960s.
30:25The Higgs field is invisible.
30:28It stretches throughout space and is accompanied by a fundamental particle called the Higgs
30:33boson, which interacts with particles of ordinary matter as they pass through the field.
30:39The more an object interacts with the Higgs field, the more mass it gains.
30:45Without the Higgs field and the Higgs boson, there is no mass.
30:52The Higgs field is a beautiful idea, but does it really exist?
30:57There's only one place to find out, at the biggest and most advanced machine ever built,
31:04the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
31:07Joe Incandela hopes to prove the field exists by smashing a Higgs boson out of the shadows.
31:15So I actually need all of you, including the cameraman, to go through when the other door
31:18is open.
31:19Just go all the way through.
31:20There you go.
31:22Going down 90 meters, which is about 300 feet, about 25 stories.
31:28It took a couple of years, actually, to engineer the layout of just the cables, and there's
31:34enough cables to go from here to Moscow.
31:37And this takes us to the detector itself.
31:45So here we are.
31:47Like something out of a James Bond film.
31:51Yeah, only this is real.
31:56The LHC fires two beams of protons around a 17-mile concrete-lined tunnel, which collide
32:03at the highest energy ever created by science.
32:12It's equivalent to shooting knitting needles from either side of the Atlantic and having
32:16them hit head-on in the middle.
32:20The collisions shatter the protons into a spray of new particles, including, perhaps,
32:27the Higgs boson.
32:30Joe's team of 3,800 scientists spend five years searching for the trail of particles
32:37the Higgs should leave in its wake.
32:43On March 14, 2013, the LHC delivers.
32:49It was an electric atmosphere.
32:51I mean, the 20-year-old physicists had camped out overnight in the hallways to get good
32:55seats in the lecture hall, and the 80-year-old physicists, who had invented the idea back
33:00in the 60s, they were flown in from all over the world.
33:03And, you know, secrecy was important.
33:05So it was like, this is the one seminar you're not going to want to miss in your lifetime.
33:11I think we have it.
33:13The discovery of the Higgs boson is one of the final keys to our understanding of the
33:18Big Bang.
33:19It was a very emotional moment.
33:21I mean, people got choked up.
33:24Thanks to Peter Higgs and the efforts of scientists around the world, we understand a key moment
33:30of the first second.
33:32We now have all the building blocks to make a universe.
33:38A thousand years from now, when they're writing the textbooks, they will remember
33:42the moment when we found the Higgs boson.
33:45All the matter around us, all the human beings and all the people, all the stars and the
33:49planets in the sky, when the Higgs boson was the missing piece, it's what really makes
33:54it get up and go.
33:55Without this Higgs mechanism, the Higgs field, that formation of mass, you'd have no atoms.
34:00Without atoms, there's no structure.
34:02We're not here.
34:03That's where this other name for this particle came from, as a god particle, in a sense.
34:09We would not exist without it.
34:11Stars, planets, and people would be impossible without the Higgs field and the Higgs boson.
34:18But these new discoveries may be responsible for much more than keeping our feet on the
34:23ground.
34:25When the Higgs field pops into existence during the first second of the universe, some scientists
34:31believe it may have triggered the splitting of the super force.
34:35Without the Higgs boson, we can't exist.
34:38And we think that a series of Higgs bosons were responsible for breaking the symmetries
34:44of the super force so that the four forces could emerge.
34:49That's why when we found the Higgs boson, champagne bottles were being opened up in
34:54all the physics laboratories and we were all having a grand party.
34:58Next, two final forces split off.
35:03Without the weak nuclear force, the stars would not shine.
35:08The electromagnetic force is the force that governs almost everything that we do, even
35:13the chemistry of our own bodies.
35:16The weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force now stand alongside the super force.
35:23The weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force now stand alongside the strong nuclear
35:29force and gravity to shape the universe we live in.
35:34With these four forces, we have a universe that can create our home.
35:45The laws of physics which govern our universe are at heart these fundamental forces.
35:51These forces drive the evolution of the universe.
35:56We're nearing the end of the universe's first second.
36:01The cosmos, now an inferno of radiation and matter,
36:06has given birth to the four fundamental forces of nature.
36:13But a mysterious form of matter threatens to destroy it all
36:18before the first star has a chance to shine.
36:32The first second, the most important second in the history of the universe, is nearly over.
36:40The universe is now 20 light years across, a fireball of light and matter.
36:46But an almighty battle begins to rock the cosmos.
36:52Fundamental particles, the building blocks of atoms, fill the early universe.
36:59But they must survive a war, a war whose outcome will determine our future.
37:06Because matter has an evil twin, anti-matter, and the two are mortal enemies.
37:18In many ways, they're opposites of each other.
37:20And what that means is if you take a lump of matter and a similar lump of anti-matter
37:24and slam them together, they will be totally converted into energy.
37:28And according to Einstein's E equals mc squared, it's a lot of energy.
37:36But matter and anti-matter simply can't coexist.
37:42They annihilate each other on contact.
37:46This cosmic carnage rages as billions of times more matter than we see today
37:52simply disappears as matter and anti-matter collide.
37:57The fate of the universe hangs in the balance.
38:01You have to understand the universe shouldn't be here.
38:04It should have been half anti-matter and half matter, and we should have all annihilated.
38:09We do not understand why we even exist.
38:14At the end of this epic war, matter wins out by the slimmest of margins.
38:21But why?
38:24The question is why in the universe as we see it, there are so many more particles
38:29than anti-particles.
38:30The galaxies and the stars that we see in the sky, these are all made of matter.
38:34They are not made of anti-matter.
38:38Somehow, the balance between matter and anti-matter was slightly skewed from the beginning.
38:48For every billion particles of matter and anti-matter that were being created by energy,
38:53one extra particle of matter and that very small asymmetry of one part in a billion
39:01is enough to account for all the galaxies and stars we see in the universe today.
39:07Could this have turned out differently?
39:11What if anti-matter had won the war?
39:15If anti-matter had won instead of matter, the universe would probably look the same today.
39:20In fact, you know what?
39:21We'd be made of anti-matter and we'd call it matter.
39:25Anti-lovers could sit in cars, anti-cars looking at anti-moons,
39:30making anti-love and it would all seem exactly the same.
39:35So why was there more matter than anti-matter?
39:38Why was the universe built out of balance?
39:45Professor Tara Shears at the Large Hadron Collider wants to find out.
39:49What we're really interested in is how different the amounts of matter and anti-matter are
39:54and whether they match up to our understanding of how different
39:58matter and anti-matter should be, because that's what we don't understand.
40:04The LHC results show that the difference between anti-matter and matter is smaller than expected.
40:11To explain why, scientists need to know what's tipping the scales in matter's favour.
40:19I really hope that we're going to make a measurement here sometime in the future which
40:23is going to just show us the light, show us what else there is out there in the universe
40:30that's going to make it all make sense.
40:33We still don't completely understand the first step of the LHC.
40:38We still don't completely understand the first second of the cosmos.
40:43But the fact that we know so much already
40:46speaks volumes about the determination and ingenuity of our scientists.
40:55As a civilization, we are extending our understanding of where we are in the universe.
41:02And that's extremely important. This is why we really love doing what we do.
41:08The first second is over.
41:13The universe already contains the building blocks of everything we see today.
41:20What we understand from the first second tells us a lot about what's going to happen
41:25for a long time after that.
41:28The first second of the universe is amazing in its potential. Here we had a universe with just
41:34these fundamental forces and these very elementary constituents of matter.
41:39And what would they yield? They would yield an entire universe.
41:43They would yield the works of Shakespeare and the music of 50 Cent.
41:51We have gone so much further than anyone believed we could have.
41:55And I don't see why the origin of the universe will be any different.
41:59It might take five years. It might take 500 years.
42:03But I really believe that one day we will understand mathematically how our universe began.
42:10In the next few minutes, the universe cools enough for protons and neutrons to form the
42:17first atomic nuclei. Another 380,000 years must pass before the first atom appears.
42:27In hundreds of millions of years, those atoms clump to form the first stars and galaxies like
42:34the Milky Way. More than 9 billion years after the Big Bang, our sun and our planet, Earth, is born.
42:48Their fate sealed in the first second of the Big Bang.