How universe was made? (Part 2) | Universe and Us (Segment 2)

This is second of the science post from the series “Universe and Us”

In Part-1 we told you how vast is our universe and how little do we know about it.

You can read about that in “How universe was made Part-1”, or just continue reading more about formation of universe.

So let’s get towards this explanatory post “How universe was made Part-2” at once.

Everything we have ever seen, touched, smelled, or stubbed our toes on can be built from three basic building blocks namely quarks (up and down) and electron.

Congratulations to the collective work of millions of human brains that helped us in formation of periodic table.

But while we should feel proud of ourselves as a species, this description is incomplete in two very important ways.

First, there are other particles out there, not just the electron and two quarks.

Only these three particles are needed to make normal matter, but in the past century, particle physicists have discovered nine more matter particles and five other particles that transmit forces. Some of these particles are very strange.

How many other kinds of particles are there?

We don’t Know yet.

While we need only three particles to build stars, planets, comets, and pickles etc it turns out that these things make up only a tiny fraction of the universe. The kind of matter that we consider normal—because it’s the only kind we know. Of all of the stuff (matter and energy) in the universe, this kind of matter accounts for only about 5 percent of the total.

Than what is the other 95 percent of the universe made of?

A full 27 percent is something we call “dark matter.” The other 68 percent of the universe is something we barely understand at all. Physicists call it “dark energy,” and we think it is causing the universe to expand, but that’s about all we know about it.

And it gets worse. Even within the 5 percent of stuff we know about, there are still a lot of things we don’t know.

In some cases, we don’t even know how to ask the right questions that will reveal these mysteries.

It’s like we’ve been studying an elephant for thousands of years and suddenly we discovered we’ve been looking only at its tail!

Learning this, you might feel a bit disappointed. Maybe you thought we had reached the peak of our understanding and mastery of the universe, but the important thing is to see this not as a disappointment but as an incredible opportunity: an opportunity to explore, learn and gain insight.

With this we conclude our first post from the series “Universe and Us”.If you want to explore more, check out the science label section for more web logs.

Citations: We extend our gratitude towards two persons “Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson”, for their book “We have no Idea” without which these entries wouldn’t be possible”