by R K vanderHoek

Created on: January 20, 2009   Last Updated: February 10, 2011

How the Universe formed 

"We shall never cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time."  T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Almost any present day explanation of how the universe formed would have to be in reference to the Inflationary Big Bang universal creation hypothesis. The "Big Bang" theory is the number one, often disputed, but, never refuted, scientific hypothesis about the universe we find ourselves existing in and its creation. It is not a legend, a myth, a fable or a fairytale.

The basic concept was first formally introduced in 1931 by a Belgian physicists and Roman Catholic priest named George Lemaitre. Its present day form the, "Inflationary Big Bang Theory ", is the result of the combined efforts of the best minds in cosmology, astrophysics and mathematics in the analysis of observational and other pertinent data, over the past 80 years..

As we approach the second year, in the second decade of the new millennium, research from astronomy and astrophysics tell us that, you and I and everyone and thing that we know, the Earth, the sun, our own "Milky Way" galaxy and all the countless billions of galaxies in super clusters and walls of galaxies, the whole universe, was once compacted into an almost infinitely dense orb of energy-mass, about 13.7 billion years ago. The volume of this primordial universal particle was less than that of an individual atomic nucleus.

Almost immediately after it came into existence, this ultimately dense ball of energy-mass, that was to become our universe, began to inflate and expand outward in all directions at a hyper-luminary velocity.  According to the work of Einstein and others, no matter can attain the velocity of light much less exceed it, but, matter as we know it did not exist in this earliest of epochs, nor did gravity. There was also another force, acting upon our infant universe causing it to explode and inflate at faster than light speed, during the first tiny fraction of a second after its creation. Eventually, positrons, electrons, then compound particles, like protons and neutrons, then basic atoms formed. Simultaneously, with the formation of protons gravity turned on and all matter decelerated to sub-luminary velocities, gravity put the brakes on the run-away faster than light expansion of matter. This was not true for the fabric of space-time whose expansion rate is not restricted by the velocity of light. Distant

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