Far out cosmology: evolving a universe for life (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, February 11, 2023, 19:28 (649 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw appears to have little recognition God evolves everything; here is how the universe it was done:

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/quantum-reason-neutral-atoms/?utm_campaign=swab...

"In order for you to exist, a lot of things had to happen beforehand. Planet Earth needed to come into existence, complete with the organic ingredients from which life could arise. In order to have those ingredients, we need for many previous generations of stars to have lived-and-died, recycling the elements formed within them back into the interstellar medium. For those stars to live, large quantities of neutral, molecular gas had to collect in one place, collapsing under its own gravity to fragment and form stars in the first place. But in order to make those stars — even the very first stars — we first need the Universe to create stable, neutral atoms.

"In a Universe that begins with a hot Big Bang, this isn’t necessarily so easy! A few minutes after the hot Big Bang, our Universe was filled with protons and a small but important population of more complex light atomic nuclei, an equal number of electrons to the total number of protons, a large number of neutrinos that don’t interact with any of them, and about 1.4 billion photons for every proton-or-neutron present. (There’s also dark matter and dark energy, but like neutrinos, they’re not important to this part of the story.)

"So how long does it take these protons and other nuclei to combine with electrons, stably forming neutral atoms? A whopping 380,000 years. But that’s only because of a very special quantum reason. Without it, things would have taken much longer. Here’s the science behind it.

"In the early stages of the Universe, things were very dense, very uniform, and very hot. That last part — very hot — has two important consequences that we cannot ignore.

"Particles with non-zero rest masses move very quickly, even close to the speed of light, and when they collide with one another, those are high-energy collisions, capable of breaking apart anything that isn’t bound together tightly enough.

"Particles that are massless, like photons, although they always move at the speed of light, possess very large amounts of kinetic energy as well, which means they have very short wavelengths and also initiate high-energy collisions that are capable of breaking apart any bound structures they run into.

***

"In the hot, early Universe, once atomic nuclei have been created, making a neutral atom is easy, but destroying that neutral atom and converting it back into a bare nucleus and free electrons is both inevitable and fast. Neutral atoms are formed, but they aren’t stable in this environment.

***

"As the Universe continues to age, it also expands, which stretches the wavelength of every photon traveling through it. If we want to ask how old the Universe is when only 1-in-1.4 billion photons reaches or exceeds 13.6 eV in energy, that threshold is crossed when the Universe is only a little more than 100,000 years old. But still, when we examine the Universe at that time, the neutral atoms that are formed aren’t stable, but rather get blasted apart again in short order.

***

"...even once the Universe cools sufficiently so that the background photons left over from the Big Bang won’t ionize a hydrogen atom, the newly-formed hydrogen atoms are vulnerable to photons produced by the act of other hydrogen atoms becoming neutral. The key isn’t just to form neutral hydrogen; the key is to form neutral hydrogen that’s stable: that won’t be reionized in short order from the surrounding radiation, even radiation that comes from the production of other neutral hydrogen atoms.

***

"The Universe, as observed by many ground-based instruments, telescopes, receivers, and space-based satellites, became neutral back when the Universe was only ~380,000 years old and was more like ~3000 K in temperature. It’s a gradual process, taking more than 100,000 years to complete, but it happens much more rapidly than simply folding in cosmic expansion and atomic physics would lead you to believe.

***

"If there were no atoms at all, it would take over a billion years to have the Universe become transparent to light. If it weren’t for the quantum mechanical possibility of having a two-photon transition, it would have taken nearly a million years for the Universe to become transparent to form neutral atoms and become transparent to light. But with the actual laws of quantum mechanics and a Universe that expanded and cooled since the hot Big Bang, it’s only a mere 380,000 years until practically all of the atoms within it are neutral and stable, and the (now-infrared) light present within it can simply stream freely through space. It sets the stage for the formation of the first stars, and once gravitation, nuclear fusion, and time all do their things, planets, life, and complex organisms can arise, reconstructing what happened all those billions of years before!"

Comment: ALL OF IT IS EVOLUTION!!! GOD EVOLVES EVERYTHING. It is ALWAYS His pattern of creation. dhw take notice!! Complex quantum rules are skipped so dhw is comfortble.