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Nov 21, 2021

How Did the First Atom Form? Where did it come from? | Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics, quantum physics

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Background videos:
Fundamental forces: https://youtu.be/669QUJrF4u0
Electroweak theory: https://youtu.be/u05VK0pSc7I
Is Big Bang hidden in gravity waves: https://youtu.be/VXr1mzY2GnY
Cosmic Microwave background: https://youtu.be/XcXCrFIivyk.

Errata:
12:26 — Helium-3 has 2 protons and 1 Neutron.

Chapters:
0:00 — How many atoms are there?
1:01 — We don’t know what happened at or before t=0
3:34 — Cosmic inflation.
5:27 — What we do know.
8:29 — How protons and neutrons formed.
10:41 — How charged nucleons formed.
13:47 — How neutral atoms formed.
15:24 — How to learn more about atoms.

Summary:
Where did the first atom come from? The short answer is the big bang. In the early universe there was an immense amount of energy, The energy condensed, atoms formed. But there’s a lot more that happened, which will be explained here.

The big bang is often thought of as the theory explaining the beginning. but it’s not. We don’t know when the universe actually started, or whether it did. Our best theory of the early universe is the standard model of cosmology, We can only go back to one Planck time, about 10^−43 seconds. This is the smallest unit of time that can theoretically exist according to quantum mechanics. We don’t know what came before this.

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