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Documentary, How the Universe Works, Season 1, "Big Bang,"
"#BigBang,"
"#BigBang,"
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00:00Billions and billions of galaxies.
00:06The universe is so vast, we can't even imagine what those numbers mean.
00:12But 14 billion years ago, none of it existed.
00:18Until the Big Bang.
00:23The Big Bang is the origin of space and the origin of time itself.
00:29We take a journey through space and time.
00:33From the beginning to the end of the universe itself.
00:53This is our world.
00:59Cities, forests, oceans, people.
01:09Everything in the universe is made from matter created in the first seconds of the Big Bang.
01:17Every star.
01:27Every planet.
01:31Every atom.
01:33Every blade of grass.
01:35Every drop of water.
01:37Water is ancient.
01:39The hydrogen atoms in here were born moments after the Big Bang.
01:45Then came everything else.
01:47The Big Bang is the defining event of our universe.
01:53And everything in it.
02:01The secrets of our past.
02:03Our present.
02:05And our future.
02:07Are locked inside this one moment in time.
02:11To unlock the secrets of the Big Bang.
02:13To unlock the secrets of the Big Bang.
02:15We have to travel outside of our own solar system.
02:17And journey beyond even our own galaxy.
02:21As we travel into deep space.
02:31We're actually seeing into the past.
02:33Seeing into the past.
02:37And getting closer to being able to witness the dawn of time itself.
02:43Passing the first infant galaxies and the first stars.
02:47We arrive back at the moment the universe began.
02:53And face the biggest questions.
02:55In all of science.
03:03This is the holy grail of physics.
03:05We want to know why it banged.
03:07We want to know what banged.
03:09We want to know what was there before the bang.
03:11To get the answers.
03:15We've built machines the size of cities.
03:17To simulate conditions.
03:19When the universe was created.
03:25And space telescopes.
03:27To peer deep into our past.
03:35We are getting close to answering the old age questions.
03:39Why are we here?
03:41Where did we come from?
03:43Does the universe, in fact.
03:45Have a beginning or an end?
03:47And if so.
03:49What are they like?
03:51If we find the answer to that.
03:53It would be the ultimate triumph of human reason.
03:57We would know the mind of God.
03:59The origin of the big bang.
04:11Is the greatest mystery of all time.
04:13And the more we learn.
04:15The deeper the mystery becomes.
04:17The deeper the mystery becomes.
04:19We like to think that our universe is unique.
04:21However, now we're not so sure.
04:23Perhaps there is a multiverse of universes.
04:27Another possibility.
04:31Is that our big bang.
04:33Is just one of many big bangs.
04:35But it may be one of just an infinite number of universes.
04:37And there may be other regions.
04:39In that infinite number of universes.
04:41Where a big bang is just happening today.
04:47But there's only one universe we're sure of.
04:49And understanding this one.
04:51Is hard enough.
04:53Is hard enough.
04:59Since the late 1920s.
05:01Everything we know about.
05:03How our universe works.
05:05Has been turned upside down.
05:07It's important to realize.
05:09How much our picture of the universe.
05:11Has changed in the last century.
05:13At the beginning of the 20th century.
05:15The conventional wisdom in science was.
05:17That the universe was static and eternal.
05:19In 1929.
05:21That all changed.
05:22At the Mount Wilson Observatory.
05:24Above Los Angeles.
05:25Astronomer Edwin Hubble.
05:26Discovered.
05:27Galaxies.
05:28Aren't stuck in one place.
05:31Not only are they moving.
05:33But they're flying away from earth.
05:35At incredible speeds.
05:40This was the first real evidence.
05:42Of the big bang.
05:47All galaxies on average.
05:49Are moving away from us.
05:50And stranger still.
05:51Those that were twice as far away.
05:52Were moving twice as fast.
05:54And those that were three times as far away.
05:56Were moving three times as fast.
05:58And so on.
06:00Everything was moving away from us.
06:02It became known.
06:03As Hubble's law.
06:04His discovery is still the starting point.
06:08For exploration of the big bang.
06:10What Hubble convincingly demonstrated.
06:11By seeing the motion of those galaxies.
06:12Is that the universe is expanding.
06:13Theoretically.
06:14An expanding universe.
06:15Must have started.
06:16From a single point.
06:17By measuring.
06:18How fast the universe is expanding.
06:19Astronomers calculated backwards.
06:20And figured out.
06:21When it burst into life.
06:22People ask the question.
06:23How do you know.
06:24That the universe is 13.7 billion years old.
06:25I mean.
06:26Smarty pants.
06:27You weren't there.
06:2813.7 billion years ago.
06:29Well.
06:30When you watch television.
06:31On videotape.
06:33You hit the stop button.
06:34When you see an explosion.
06:35And you can run it backwards.
06:36And of course.
06:37If something.
06:38In that universe.
06:39In that universe.
06:40It's not going to be interesting.
06:41That the universe.
06:42Is increasing.
06:43That the universe.
06:44Is expanding.
06:45Estranomers calculate it backwards.
06:46And figured out.
06:47When it burst into life.
06:48People ask the question.
06:49How do you know.
06:51That the universe is 13.7 billion years old.
06:53I mean.
06:55Smarty pants.
06:56You weren't there.
06:57backwards and see when it actually took place. The same thing takes place with cosmology.
07:03We can run the videotape backwards and then calculate when it all came from a cosmic explosion.
07:15You don't have to be an astronomer to look back in time. If you gaze up at the night
07:21sky, you're seeing stars that are millions of light years away, meaning it took the light
07:27from those stars millions of years to get here. So if you look far enough, you should be able
07:35to see the beginning of the universe. Named for the groundbreaking astronomer, the Hubble
07:45Space Telescope allows us to look deep into the universe, back in time, and closer to
07:52the moment of the Big Bang. But for scientists, winding back the clock to the Big Bang was
08:00only the first step.
08:07When people first hear about the Big Bang theory, they say, well, where did it take place? It
08:10took place over there, it took place over there. Where did it take place? Actually, it took
08:14place everywhere. Because the universe itself was extremely small at that time.
08:25These are only some of the most abstract and difficult concepts there are. So here's a mind
08:31bender. What came before the Big Bang?
08:34The philosophers in ancient times used to say, how could something arise from nothing? And
08:40what's amazing to me is that the laws of physics allow that to happen. And it means that our
08:45whole universe, everything we see, everything that matters to us today, could have arisen out
08:50of precisely nothing.
08:52It's one of the biggest hurdles to understanding the Big Bang. First, you have to buy into the premise
08:59that something was created out of nothing.
09:03It's impossible to describe the moment of creation in human language. All we know is that from what
09:09may have been nothing, we go to a state of almost infinite density and infinite temperature and infinite
09:19violence.
09:23Understanding how nothing turned into something may be the greatest mystery of our universe.
09:31But, if you understand that, you start to understand the Big Bang, when time and space began and a great big explosion created everything.
09:40At the dawn of time, the universe explodes into existence from absolutely nothing into everything.
10:07But everything is actually a single point, infinitely small, unimaginably hot, a super dense speck of pure energy.
10:19The Big Bang was so immense that it brought into existence all of the mass and all of the energy contained in all of the 400 billion galaxies we see in our universe in a region smaller than the size of a single atom.
10:37The entire observable universe was a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter across at that time.
10:44Everything was compressed into an incredibly hot, dense region.
10:49It's not even matter yet, just a point of raging energy. It was the beginning of the universe and everything in it.
10:57Everything was simple. All the forces that we know about today were one and the same. The universe was amorphous. It had no structure.
11:08In that instant of creation, all the laws of physics, the very forces that engineer our universe began to take shape.
11:22The first force to emerge was gravity. The fate of the universe, its size, structure, and everything in it was decided in that moment.
11:41Carlos Frank studies how gravity shaped the universe by creating artificial universes in this supercomputer.
11:53He gives each one a different amount of gravity.
11:58The first one he tried had too little, resulting in, well, nothing.
12:04Gravity, it has shaped our universe.
12:07Or if gravity was weaker than it is, we would have a very boring universe in which everything would be flying apart so fast that there would be no galaxies forming.
12:21Next, he programmed a universe with too much gravity.
12:28If gravity was stronger than we think it is, again, we'll end up with a failed universe.
12:33Everything will end up in black holes.
12:36It has to be just so. It has to be just right.
12:41Lucky for us, the Big Bang got it just right.
12:44The perfect amount of gravity.
12:47In the turmoil of forces after gravity emerged, still a fraction of a second after the Big Bang,
12:54a shockwave of energy erupted and expanded the universe in all directions at incredible speed.
13:03All of space expanded by an unbelievably large factor in a fraction of a second.
13:11We think that in less than a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second,
13:18space expanded by a factor bigger than a million, million, million, million times.
13:25And for the record, that's faster than the speed of light.
13:38But wait, doesn't that break one of the laws of physics?
13:41Even school children know that, quote, you can't go faster than the speed of light.
13:50But actually, there's a loophole there.
13:51You see, nothing can go faster than light.
13:54Nothing being empty space.
13:56Don't worry, this idea gives even the best minds in science a headache.
14:02But it's critical to understanding the early universe.
14:06Scientists think it took less than a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second
14:13for the universe to expand from the size of an atom to a baseball.
14:18That may not sound like much, but it's like a golf ball expanding to the size of the earth in the same amount of time.
14:26That means it was expanding faster than the speed of light.
14:30That's fast.
14:31So many things were happening so fast in the early universe, because everything was so close together,
14:38that we needed a new unit of time to describe things.
14:41It's called Planck time.
14:43To understand just how short a Planck time is, consider this.
14:48There are more units of Planck time in one second than all the seconds since the Big Bang.
14:53The math is mind-blowing.
14:55There are more than 31 million seconds in a year, and it's been 14 billion years since the Big Bang.
15:02So, multiply 31,556,926 by 14 billion, and what you get is a really big number.
15:12It's a time scale that's so small that all human intuition goes out the window.
15:17If we look at our watches and measure one second, we can ask how many Planck times is that?
15:21Well, it is a billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion Planck times.
15:36So, now the Big Bang is only a few Planck times old.
15:41An exploding mass of pure energy expanding faster than the speed of light.
15:46In the next few Planck times, the universe as we know it will be born.
15:53A fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe is so small, it can fit in the palm of your hand.
16:12But, in another tiny fraction of a second, it expands to the size of the Earth.
16:19Then, moving faster than the speed of light, it grows larger than our solar system.
16:26And it's still just a raging storm of superheated energy.
16:30It would be hotter and denser and more violent than anything that we can experience in the universe today.
16:39Even the interior of a star is calm and serene by comparison to the violence of the earliest moments of the Big Bang.
16:47Temperatures were so hot that even the atoms of your body would disintegrate.
16:54So hot, in fact, that the atoms would be ripped apart.
16:57How hot? Trillions of degrees hot.
17:00But, as the universe continues to expand, it also begins to cool.
17:06Dropping temperatures trigger the next stage in the universe's evolution.
17:09The raw energy of the explosion transforms into tiny subatomic particles.
17:19It's the first matter in the universe.
17:24This conversion of energy into matter was predicted by Albert Einstein, years before anyone started talking about the Big Bang.
17:36It's the one scientific equation every school kid knows.
17:44There is one very familiar formula.
17:47That is E equals MC squared.
17:50It says something about the creation of the universe.
17:52It says even if the universe is created just out of pure energy,
17:56that because energy can be converted to matter and matter to energy,
18:00that you can get all of the stuff that we see in the universe from this pure energetic event.
18:04Einstein's little equation had a big impact.
18:08It led to the first nuclear bombs.
18:09In a nuclear explosion, a small amount of matter is converted into an enormous amount of energy.
18:27As the universe was forming, the exact opposite happened.
18:38Pure energy transformed into particles of matter.
18:43You don't need to create matter in the beginning. You just need energy.
18:48And energy alone can lead to the creation of an entire universe.
18:52In just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the building blocks of our universe begin to take shape.
19:03But this first matter is like nothing we see today.
19:08The stuff of matter has been very different over the age of the universe.
19:14What we now think is normal matter was not at all normal in the earliest moments of the Big Bang.
19:19That's because conditions were so extreme.
19:24There were no atoms yet.
19:25But there were tiny subatomic particles.
19:30In the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the universe was so hot and dense, there were great amounts of energy.
19:40And so particles were being created all the time.
19:42And energy and matter were transferring back and forth in this hot, dense soup.
19:47That earliest matter was too unstable to start forming the universe as we know it.
19:59Think of it like this.
20:00Imagine rush hour at Grand Central in New York City as that superheated early universe.
20:07The commuters racing through the main concourse are subatomic particles.
20:12If you look at a crowd of people, a large crowd of people, they may appear random.
20:21That random quirky motion is very similar than what was happening to the particles in the universe in the earliest moments of the Big Bang.
20:31The extreme temperature of the early universe energizes the subatomic particles.
20:37They appear. They disappear.
20:42They race around at incredible speeds.
20:45It's pure chaos.
20:53It's like people.
20:54If they're excited and running around fast to catch trains at a train station, they'll be moving around quickly.
21:01But eventually they calm down and get slower.
21:05That's what's been happening to our universe in a sense.
21:07The particles are moving around very fast and as the universe cools down, the particles move more slowly and in some sense less randomly.
21:17As the universe cools, the particles stop changing back into energy.
21:21Now there are more and more subatomic particles, but it's still a hot, violent place.
21:37All this is happening in fractions of a second, too small to detect.
21:44But the Big Bang is moving into a critical stage now.
21:48A titanic battle between matter and the one thing that can destroy the universe before it even gets started.
21:55Antimatter.
21:56Everything in the universe is made from matter.
22:16From the smallest rock to the largest star.
22:27And all the matter there will ever be was created from the pure energy of the Big Bang.
22:33Einstein's equation, E equals MC squared, says that energy transforms into matter.
22:46But it was just a theory.
22:49Today, science is able to test that theory.
22:52This is CERN in Switzerland, home to the world's largest machine.
23:05It's the size of a city and engineered to recreate the conditions millionths of a second after the Big Bang.
23:13If we want to probe ever smaller scales, paradoxically, we need an ever bigger machine.
23:18There's just no other way of doing it.
23:20So big machines means small physics, means early times, and therefore getting closer and closer to the origin of the universe itself.
23:31This monster machine is called a collider.
23:34It's designed to take us back to those first fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
23:40It's a 12 foot wide, concrete line, circular tunnel, 17 miles around.
23:48The collider makes tiny particles of matter smash into each other at almost the speed of light.
24:01For a split second, those collisions generate turbocharged energy similar to the explosive force of the Big Bang.
24:09And then, that pure energy briefly transforms into matter just like it did nearly 14 billion years ago.
24:20But a monster machine needs a monster detector to see these collisions.
24:29This detector is five stories tall and weighs over 7,000 tons.
24:35And 7,000 tons, to give you a sense of perspective, is the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
24:38But as big as it is, it can't see the actual particles of new matter.
24:45They hang around for just a split second and move so fast, it can only record their trails.
24:50There's a lot of energy in these particles. They move very, very quickly.
24:56And so you need a very large amount of detector in order to be able to map the path of these particles very precisely.
25:04So the detector is so big because you need better resolution.
25:08It works exactly the same as a camera. The more pixels you have, the better the picture.
25:13It's exactly the same here. We just have a five-story camera.
25:15Scientists hope that it will reveal just how energy transforms into matter.
25:25But not just any matter. The kind of matter that emerged 14 billion years ago, at the dawn of time itself.
25:36But the dawn of time was a critical moment in the birth of the universe.
25:39Because pure energy also produced one of the most dangerous things in the universe.
25:45Anti-matter.
25:47That's right. Anti-matter.
25:49It's real.
25:54Anti-matter is the mirror image of ordinary matter.
25:58However, matter has one charge and anti-matter has the opposite charge.
26:02If there was an anti-me, made out of anti-matter, that person in principle could look exactly like me.
26:10Same personality quirk, same everything.
26:13Except, of course, when I decide to shake his hand, at that point we both would blow ourselves to smithereens in a gigantic nuclear explosion.
26:21Matter, with a positive charge, locks horns with its arch-enemy, anti-matter, with a negative charge.
26:31The fate of the universe hangs in the balance of this epic battle.
26:36Equal amounts of matter and anti-matter will cancel each other out. Not good.
26:41A universe with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter is equivalent to a universe with no matter at all.
26:48Because the matter and anti-matter will annihilate back into pure radiation.
26:53And there'll be nothing interesting, no stars and galaxies and people in between.
26:59Like a cosmic game of risk, the side with the most soldiers wins.
27:07The score was very close, but there was a winner.
27:12For every billion particles of anti-matter, there were a billion and one particles of matter.
27:19That was the moment of creation.
27:22The one extra particle of matter in each little volume survives.
27:27Survives enough to form all the matter we see in the stars and galaxies today.
27:31One in a billion might not sound like much, but it's enough to build a universe.
27:44We're the leftovers.
27:45So believe it or not, everything you see around you, the atoms of your body, the atoms of the stars, are nothing but leftovers.
27:54Leftovers from this ancient collision between matter and anti-matter.
27:58Lucky for us, there was enough left over to make all the stars and planets.
28:09And the universe is still less than one second old.
28:16But now, it's swarming with tiny, primitive particles.
28:23The next stage is assembling those tiny particles into the first atoms.
28:28Give or take a couple of Planck times, the universe is nearly a second old and still a very strange place.
28:50But matter has won the battle with anti-matter.
28:58And now, it's time to build the universe.
29:03It's still extremely hot and expanding incredibly fast.
29:08When the universe was a second old, the particles in it were very different than the particles we see today.
29:14There were no atoms, nothing that we recognize in the room around us today yet existed.
29:21Now, all that begins to change.
29:27Temperatures continue to cool.
29:30And as the primitive particles keep slowing down, they start bonding together to form the atoms of the first elements.
29:41The first one to form is hydrogen.
29:43Then, over the next three minutes, the universe begins to create two more elements, helium and lithium.
29:53We went from a universe that was infinitely small to a universe that was light years in size.
30:06In the first three minutes, essentially everything interesting that was going to happen in the universe happened.
30:13Well, not quite. If you were there, you couldn't see it.
30:17When we look at the night sky, we can see literally billions of years into the past.
30:22And we think it's always been that way.
30:25Nope, not true.
30:26380,000 years after the Big Bang.
30:31That's when the universe began to become transparent.
30:34But before then, it was milky.
30:35There is a milky soup of loose electrons.
30:49The young universe has to cool down enough for the electrons to slow down and stick to new atoms.
30:55It took a long time for all of the hydrogen, helium and lithium atoms in the universe to form.
31:04Scientists calculate it took 380,000 years for the electrons to slow down enough so that the universe could start mass producing atoms.
31:14When that happens, the milky fog clears.
31:18The first light escapes and races across the universe.
31:21Nearly 14 billion years later, two young scientists in New Jersey pick it up by accident.
31:32In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were mapping radio signals across our galaxy.
31:40Everywhere they looked, they picked up a strange background hum.
31:44They first suspected their equipment.
31:49Maybe pigeon droppings on the antennae were causing the strange signal.
31:54But after cleaning the antennae, the mysterious hum remained.
31:59So much for pigeon droppings.
32:00Penzias delivered a talk at Princeton University, and according to Lore, one person in the back said,
32:13either you have discovered the effects of bird droppings or the creation of the universe.
32:18It was, in fact, the moment of creation, nearly 14 billion years ago, when those first atoms got their electrons.
32:31That's the moment when the Milky Cloud clears, and the new universe comes into view for the first time.
32:40To capture better images of this critical event, NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite, or COBE.
32:51They pointed it out into space, where it took the temperature of the universe.
32:57By measuring differences in temperature across space, they created the first map of our early universe.
33:04The images were called the face of God.
33:08We got gorgeous pictures, baby pictures, of the infant universe when it was 380,000 years of age.
33:16But there were problems with it.
33:17The picture was very fuzzy.
33:19The COBE results were simply not good enough.
33:26So NASA launched an even more advanced satellite, WMAP, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy.
33:35In 2001, David Spurgle was part of the team looking for a clearer image of the early universe.
33:42It was exciting to go to the Cape.
33:45It was one of these moments where we were sitting there, watching this.
33:49I was there with my family, watching the rocket go off.
33:53It was very exciting when, within about a day, we were able to get our first signal from the satellite
33:58and know it was working and working properly.
33:59This is the most detailed picture of the early universe ever taken, just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
34:12The red and yellow areas are warmer.
34:15The blue and green regions cooler.
34:16And those temperature differences are clues to the future structure of the universe.
34:27We see tiny variations in temperature.
34:29Those tiny variations in temperature reflect small variations in density.
34:34This region has more matter, this region has less matter.
34:36Like a blueprint for the construction of our universe, this image shows us where there's more matter and where there's less.
34:45Regions with no matter will become empty space.
34:50Areas with denser matter will become the construction sites of galaxies, stars and planets.
34:58These are the fluctuations that will grow to form galaxies.
35:06So if it wasn't for those little density fluctuations, you and I would not be here today.
35:12Our universe is now 380,000 years old and trillions and trillions of miles across.
35:21Clouds of hydrogen and helium gas float through space.
35:29It will take another 200 million years before those gases create the first stars.
35:36These first stars ignited the universe into what must have been the most amazing fireworks.
35:42The universe went from the dark ages to an age of splendor when the first stars illuminated the gas and the universe began to glow in majestic fashion.
36:02I wish I could.
36:05It was like Christmas tree lights turning on.
36:07The universe began to light up in all directions until you form the beautiful mosaic we now see today.
36:23More and more stars turn on.
36:26One billion years after the Big Bang, the first galaxy forms.
36:31Over the next eight billion years, countless more take shape.
36:38Then, about five billion years ago, in a quiet corner of one of those galaxies, gravity begins to draw in dust and gas.
36:53Gradually, they clump together and give birth to a star, our sun.
37:01Nine billion years after the Big Bang, our tiny solar system springs to life, and with it, planet Earth.
37:14Everything there is, exists, because of the Big Bang.
37:22And it's still going on.
37:24Our universe is still expanding.
37:27But, it won't just keep going, forever.
37:30Our universe had a beginning.
37:33And it will also have an end.
37:44In the 14 billion years since the Big Bang, galaxies have been created.
37:55Filled with stars, planets, and moons.
37:59And the universe has been expanding the whole time.
38:06We've learned space is quite big, at least 150 billion light years across.
38:11The universe may be infinite.
38:15It might literally go on forever.
38:18The answer is, there doesn't have to be anything.
38:20In principle, the universe could be infinite and there's no outside.
38:24Or it could be closed on itself.
38:26It could be such that if I looked far enough in that direction, I'd see the back of my head.
38:30We may never know if the Big Bang produced a universe that goes on forever.
38:36But we do know that the Big Bang hasn't stopped yet.
38:42The Big Bang is really continuing now.
38:46We're continuing to bang, if you want.
38:48In the sense that the expansion of the universe is continuing.
38:53One of the most astounding discoveries in the last few years
38:56has been the realization that our universe is not slowing down, like we once thought,
39:00but it's actually speeding up. It's accelerating. It's in a runaway mode.
39:06We now believe there's something called dark energy.
39:10The energy of nothing that is pushing the galaxies apart and is killing the universe.
39:15We can't see this destructive force and we have no idea why it exists.
39:24But it could mean the end of everything created in the Big Bang.
39:29If dark energy continues pushing the universe apart, our Milky Way galaxy could become a lonely outpost.
39:38A hundred billion years from now, most of our galactic neighbors will be out of sight.
39:45Stars will burn out. Galaxies will grow dark. Even atoms will tear apart.
39:53The birth of the universe, the Big Bang, was over in a flash.
39:58But the death of our universe will take almost forever.
40:01That great philosopher of the Western world, Woody Allen, once said,
40:09eternity is an awful long time, especially toward the end.
40:17Figuring out how our universe will end is as dark a mystery as the Big Bang.
40:22It could collapse back in on itself, like a balloon when the air is let out.
40:35So would the universe end with a big crunch, a reverse of the Big Bang,
40:39or would it end by expanding out and becoming cold and dark?
40:43If you wish, would it end in fire or ice, or with a bang or a whimper?
40:48If the universe collapses, it might trigger another Big Bang.
41:05Maybe that's already happened.
41:08And we're just one in a long line of universes.
41:13Personally, I believe in continual genesis.
41:18That is, there's a never-ending process whereby universes collide, split apart,
41:24give birth to new universes.
41:26Perhaps with the different laws of physics within each universe.
41:32Maybe this isn't the first time it's happened.
41:35Maybe it's cyclic and it goes round and round again.
41:38Eventually we'll collapse and the whole thing will start over again.
41:39One universe, or many, they all start with a Big Bang.
41:50Everything that makes us human, the atoms in our bodies, the jewelry we wear,
41:56all the things that lead to the tragedy of life and the beauty and the excitement,
42:00love, everything else, arose because of processes that happened 14 billion years ago.
42:06And if we really want to understand ourselves at some fundamental level,
42:13we really have to understand the Big Bang.
42:1914 billion years ago, the Big Bang created time and space.
42:24Our whole vast universe and everything in it, including us.
42:28Some people ask the question, what's in it for me?
42:38The Big Bang gave us everything we see around us.
42:42The distribution of galaxies and stars.
42:45It set into motion the creation of elements that we see in the universe.
42:48And even the laws of physics themselves, we think, were born at the instant of creation.
42:55Everything started with the Big Bang.
43:04One brief moment in time, 14 billion years ago, that contains the answers to our greatest questions.
43:12About our past, our present, and our future.
43:18Each discovery brings us one step closer to understanding how the universe works.
43:24The universe works.
43:25The universe works.
43:26The universe works.
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