Primordial Beach Ball

A trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang that initiated our universe, all of the cosmos was about the size of a beach ball. (That fraction of a second is something like 10^-36 second after Time Zero, for those who grasp scientific notation.) What happened before that unimagineably tiny fragment in time, physicists are baffled about; but after that point in time, they have a pretty good handle on the universe’s subsequent expansion and behavior. The so-called “standard model” of cosmology does a fine job of describing that succeeding behavior.

It’s virtually impossible for us normal folks to wrap our heads around how all of the universe’s hundreds of billions of galaxies—each of which contains hundreds of billions of stars—could once have been squeezed into something like a beach ball. If nothing else, this fact is a testimony as to how empty matter really is: every atom is almost wholly empty space containing an infinitesimal amount of matter, in the form of ephemeral protons and electrons. So once upon a time (10^-36 second after the Big Bang, that is) all those countless atoms found themselves confined to the primordial Beach Ball.

At that moment, the inside of the beach ball was, in fact, more like a mush of elementary particles, than a sea of individual atoms. It was so opaque and dense that light could not escape, which is why astrophysicists are not sure what happened up to that point, since whatever transpired, did so in utter darkness. The subsequent expansion of the beach ball sort of happened after the divine command, “Let there be light,” was uttered.

The nature of the universe at this early moment is the subject of intensive ongoing research. Many PhD theses get spawned by these studies. It may soon be known how the primordial Beach Ball became inflated from an earlier baseball—or maybe even a golf ball, or...