How universe was made? (Part 1) | Universe and Us (Segment 1)

This is first of the science post from the upcoming science post series “Universe and Us”.

Hope these will help to wake the little scientist inside you and you’ll enjoy our work. Without further ado let’s just dive straight into our first post, How universe was made.

If you are a human being, then you probably can’t help but be a little curious about the world around you.

It’s not a new feeling. Since the dawn of time, people have wondered about the answers to some basic and very reasonable questions about the world around us.

What is the universe made of?

Are big rocks made of smaller rocks?

Why can’t we eat rocks?

What is it like to be a bat?

The first question, “What is the universe made of?” is a pretty big question.

It’s like asking what your house and everything in it are made out of.

Say you were the first person to ever try to answer the question “What is the universe made of?” A good approach would be to try the simplest idea first.

For example, you might say that the universe is made of the things we can see in it, so you could answer the question by making a list.

But your list is going to be a so long that it will take years to complete everything in universe.

That is precisely the triumph of the periodic table of the elements (the one with oxygen, iron, carbon, etc.).

It describes every object that humans have ever seen, touched, tasted or thrown at each other.

It reveals that the universe is organized under the same principle as Legos.

With the same set of tiny plastic blocks, you can make toy dinosaurs, airplanes, or pirates or create your own hybrid animal.

Just like Legos, a few basic building blocks (the elements) allow you to construct many things in our universe: stars, rocks, dust, ice cream etc.

This organizing principle, where complex objects are really arrangements of simple objects, allows us to gain a deeper understanding by uncovering those simple objects.

But why does the universe follow such philosophy?

As far as we know, there is no reason why such a simplification is even possible. As far as the first cavemen and cavewomen scientists knew, the world could have worked in lots of different ways. All that cave scientists had to base their ideas on was their experience.

They could easily have thought that in universe, rocks have been made out of elemental rock particles. Air could have been made out of elemental air particles. Elephants could have been made out of elemental elephant particles

In that hypothetical universe, the table of the elements would have a nearly infinite number of items.

Or, even weirder, we could have lived in a universe where things are not made of tiny particles at all. In such a universe, rocks would just be made of smooth rock-stuff that can be cut into smaller and smaller pieces forever.

In the universe we know and love, the things around us appear to be made out of tiny particles. After thousands of years of thought and research, we have a very fine theory of matter. We have surpassed the periodic table and peered inside the atom.

Matter as we know it is composed of atoms of the elements listed in the periodic table. Each atom has a nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons.

The nucleus contains protons and neutrons, each of which is built from up quarks and down quarks. So, with up quarks, down quarks, and electrons, we can build any element from the periodic table. What an achievement!

This was just a brief introduction about our vast universe.

There was a lot more information related to this topic which we will discuss in upcoming part of this series.

So, Stay tuned for that

Citations: We are truly grateful to Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson for their book “We Have No Idea” that made the publication of this post possible to us. Keep spreading the love and sharing the wisdom.