Original subtitles

The most momentous second in history, the first.

In that first moment of creation, in the first second,

space and time, matter and energy,

everything was set into motion.

Space and time burst into existence,

giving birth to the universe.

More things happened in that first second

than will probably happen

in the entire future history of the universe, no matter how long it lives.

This violent first second will define everything, including you.

So that very first second, understanding that

is the key to understanding the universe itself.

Look up at the night sky,

at our universe...

...an awesome spectacle,

Stunning, exhilarating, humbling.

And look at all the world around us,

bursting with life,

with natural wonders,

with those we love.

All of this, everything we see,

comes from one miraculous moment the big bang.

The big bang was more than just a creation of matter.

It was the creation of the universe,

which means the creation of space and time.

Creating time, space, and everything is a pretty neat trick.

Obviously it happened.

But so far, physics hasn't figured out how.

We don't know why it banged. We don't know what banged.

We don't know how it's banging.

All we know for sure,

all of existence suddenly burst into life.

This is the beginning of the first second

when time itself is set to zero.

It's the moment when everything we see,

all hundred billion galaxies,

each of which contains a hundred billion stars,

all of that material was compressed in a region which was infinitely small.

In its first second,

the universe evolves more radically

than in the 13.8 billion years that follow.

The first second of the universe

was the most important second the universe ever had.

And it went through more stages in that first second

than it has in all the time since.

So much happens so quickly

that scientists need a whole new concept of time.

For human beings, one second can seem like a very short time.

But for the universe, an incredible amount can happen.

We measure our lives in hours, minutes, and seconds.

But they're useless at the time scale of creation

because the big bang unfolds almost instantaneously.

We have taken our understanding

of what the universe was like

back from one second to a tenth of a second,

a hundredth of a second, a thousandth of a second,

a millionth of a second, a billionth of a second,

all the way back to a time where the laws of physics,

as we now know them, break down.

That far back, time must be measured

in unimaginably tiny slivers know as planck time.

One way of understanding

how much actually happened in the first second

is to think in units of the planck time,

the planck time being 10 to the minus 43 seconds.

There's a billion billion billion billion billion

planck times in one second.

There are only a billion billion seconds

in the entire history of the universe.

That's far fewer seconds in all of history

since one second to today

than there were from the planck time for the first second.

By breaking time up into such tiny fragments,

we can imagine the birth of the universe moment by moment.

In the beginning, space and time are wrapped up

in an infinitesimally small speck of pure energy.

As the planck time clock starts running,

this knot of space and time somehow bursts into life.

the big bang wasn't An explosion in space.

it was an explosion of space.

as the hands of our cosmic clock approach the first planck time,

all of space expands.

The universe emerges everywhere at once.

The wonderful thing is it happened right here

at the end of your nose.

And it happened 5 billion light-years away.

Every single point in space was involved in the big bang.

So it's not as if it's a ball that you can stand outside of.

Everywhere you are is inside of the big bang.

In this very first instant of creation,

some scientists believe that a single pure force,

a super force, rules everything in the universe.

We think that the original universe was a state of perfection,

a single unified force that existed at the instant of the big bang.

As the first planck times pass by,

something causes the super force to split...

...shattering the state Of perfection.

As the universe cools, these different forces freeze out.

That means they behave differently.

Think, for example, in terms of steam.

If i have steam and i cool it, it turns to a liquid.

If i cool it again, it turns to a solid.

So in the same way, as the universe began to cool,

the different forces broke off from each other.

When the super force splits,

a new force emerges to drive and shape the cosmos gravity.

It will mold matter into planets, stars, galaxies.

If gravity were a little bit stronger,

perhaps we would have had a big bang which would stop,

and then it would re-collapse immediately into a big crush.

Life would be impossible.

If gravity were a little weaker,

then we would have a big bang that just keeps on going,

and the universe would freeze to death.

But gravity breaks away from the super force

at exactly the right strength

to create galaxies, stars, and life itself.

So our universe in some sense is fine-tuned.

We're just right to have a universe that expands slowly,

making it possible to create dna and life as we know it.

Gravity may be the perfect strength

for our universe,

but it's not the only force that will govern the cosmos.

By the 10 millionth tick of the planck time clock,

another stupendous event will begin the wildest growth spurt

in cosmic history.

The first second of the universe has barely begun.

And the shortest possible units of time, planck times,

are flying by in their millionths.

The universe is a super-hot ball of radiation,

billions of times smaller than an atom,

and dense beyond imagination.

Gravity has begun shaping the future of the cosmos.

But as the universe expands, temperature drops.

Another force arrives on the scene, a strong force.

Without the strong nuclear force,

the nuclei of the atoms themselves would all disintegrate.

Three forces

gravity, the strong force, and the fractured super force

rule the universe as it hurdles towards its next milestone,

an event that sets out the blueprint for the galaxies

that fill the cosmos today.

We think this event happened

because it explains a longstanding mystery.

Everywhere we've looked in the universe,

its billions of galaxies are spread evenly,

the same number in every direction.

Nobody could explain why.

All of these parts of the universe must have at one point

been in contact with each other.

It's kind of like having two people

who live on opposite sides of a country

getting up at the same time,

eating the same breakfast, dressing the same way,

even when they don't talk to each other.

There must be something common in their past that links them.

This problem needed a solution.

And in 1979, a young cosmologist named alan guth proposed one.

He called it inflation.

This was very exciting.

I suddenly realized that this might be the key

to a very important secret of the universe.

But at the same time, i was, of course, very nervous because it was all new.

And i was shaky about whether or not it was right.

Guth speculated that the infant universe

went through a phenomenal growth spurt.

Cosmic inflation was a moment in the history,

the very early history, of the universe

when the expansion suddenly accelerated.

It got huge for the briefest moments of time.

Just 10 million planck times after the big bang,

a tiny volume of space suddenly starts to expand

much more quickly than before.

This inflation is so rapid that it turns chaos into order,

spreading the constituents of our universe

evenly throughout space and fixing their positions within it.

As the universe cooled down in those earliest moments,

it increased in volume by a factor of 10 to the 90th,

in a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.

It's like a grain of sand

swelling to larger than the sun faster than the speed of light.

Well, have we violated einstein's laws?

Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

And here is one of the real subtle points about the big bang.

Space can expand so much that two objects appear to move apart

faster than the speed of light.

But they're not moving.

It's the space in between them that's growing.

Guth's audacious idea, the inflationary universe,

could push the limit of our understanding back

to the very first moments of the very first second.

But how could we ever test it?

How could we peer into the birth of creation?

Tv static holds a clue.

1% of the static on this screen

Comes from light from the big bang.

In 1964, astronomers arno penzias and robert wilson

were listening to radio signals from space.

But in every direction,

they were picking up a background hum.

Puzzled by the hum, they suspected they knew the culprit

and swept the entire receiver free of pigeon dropping,

but to no avail.

If anything, the background got even greater.

And according to legend,

when they gave a talk at princeton,

one physicist raised his hand and says,

"either you are listening to the effects of bird dropping

or the creation of the universe."

What penzias and wilson had stumbled upon

was the afterglow of the fireball

created by the big bang.

As the universe expanded, it cooled.

After a few hundred thousand years,

it was just protons and electrons flying around.

But at some point, the universe cooled enough

that when an electron and proton got together

all over the universe, essentially all at once,

the universe became transparent.

Think of a gigantic fog that suddenly lifts.

Before the fog lifts,

you can only see a few feet in front of you.

Then suddenly everything becomes clear.

That's what happened 380,000 years after the big bang.

Ever since that moment,

380,000 years after the big bang,

this light has traveled uninterrupted through space.

Scientists call it the cosmic microwave background.

If you were to write down a handful

of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time,

one of them might be the discovery of dna.

Another one might be

the discovery of a cosmic microwave background.

That's how big this discovery was.

The cosmic microwave background

first lit up the universe

380,000 years after the big bang.

But it bears the imprint of a time much earlier than that,

a time when inflation was transforming the cosmos.

If the secrets to inflation are anywhere, they're hidden here.

Scientists needed to take a closer look.

The infant universe

is 1 trillion trillion trillionths of a second old.

It abruptly inflates in the greatest growth spurt in history.

And the universe expands faster than the speed of light.

The secrets to this expansion

are hidden in the cosmic microwave background,

the first-ever light to shine through the cosmos.

To reveal these secrets,

scientists need the best picture of this light they can get.

Ignition.

Lift-off.

May 2009, the european space agency

launches the planck satellite.

It orbits the sun,

scanning the temperature of the entire visible universe.

It's so sensitive, it can measure the temperature

of the cosmic microwave background

to within a millionth of a degree.

The blue spots in the map are cold spots.

They would evolve and become large empty voids.

The red spots in the map, those are hot spots.

They're gonna form clusters of galaxies.

This map is a blueprint

for how our universe is gonna form and evolve.

When we look at this map, we're also looking back in time

and seeing the echoes of creation.

The tiny variations measured by planck

go on to form the galaxies that fill the universe.

And inflation explains them perfectly.

But scientists need a smoking gun,

something out of science fiction gravitational waves.

One of the tests is that we might be able to see

the gravity waves that were produced

at the very end of inflation.

Gravitational waves stretch and contract spacetime itself.

They travel through the universe like ripples in a pond.

Scientists believe that the violence of inflation

sent these waves reverberating throughout the cosmos.

If we could see them, it would be case closed.

Scientists would know that inflation was real.

March 2014,

30 years since alan guth came up with inflation,

a telescope at the south pole shakes the world.

Today, scientists announce they have discovered

what was going on in the earliest moments of our universe

right after the big bang.

This is the most exciting scientific result

of my career.

Inflation was an incredibly violent process,

different parts of the universe

all expanding at somewhat different rates,

but all faster than the speed of light.

And this difference in expansion rate

produced gravitational waves.

And these gravitational waves

produced a signature on the microwave sky

that we've now seen.

It's something i am so happy that's happened in my lifetime.

The data is an almost perfect fit for inflation.

What we're finding

is that the very simplest models of inflation

are agreeing beautifully

with what observations are being made.

And that's incredibly gratifying

and provides, i think, very strong evidence

that inflation really happened.

Inflation explains why galaxies

are spread so smoothly across the cosmos.

In the tiniest fraction of a second,

it transforms a minute and uniform bit of space

into the entire visible universe.

And the implications are stunning.

Maybe it wasn't just the visible universe

that grew under inflation.

Some scientists now believe that other regions of space,

too distant for their light to ever reach us,

underwent inflation, too, and are still inflating now.

One of the profound things about inflation is once it starts,

it's hard to stop it.

Inflation never stops everywhere. It stops in places.

And every place where it stops, one produces a universe.

Inflation seems to go on

producing other pocket universes, literally forever.

Indeed, inflation makes our big bang

and then goes on and makes lots of other big bangs

and creates this big collection of universes, the multiverse.

Our universe may be just one

of an infinite collection of universes in a multiverse

much, much larger than we ever imagined.

And some scientists argue

that not only are there multiple universes out there,

they think every possible universe must exist.

People, identical to us,

would live out every possible parallel life

in every possible parallel world...

..a mind-blowing outcome.

Now that we have such strong evidence for inflation,

it's time to take ideas like the multiverse really seriously.

Let's reset.

The universe is less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old,

and the seeds of its galaxies have already been sown.

But everything is still pure energy.

So where does all the matter,

the stuff of stars and you and me, come from?

We're on a journey through the first second of time.

The universe is a trillionth

of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old.

The temperature is a thousand trillion trillion degrees.

The infant universe inflates far faster than the speed of light,

pumping vast amounts of energy into space.

But the cosmos is still just the size of a baseball.

Inflation says that, for a brief period, empty space gets energy.

And it turns out the universe keeps dumping energy into space

to produce everything we see.

And so, apparently you produce an incredible amount of stuff

from nothing without violating the laws of physics.

It's almost magic, but that's the keyword, almost.

It's allowed by the laws of physics.

As inflation ends, the brightest flash in history

floods the cosmos with radiation.

During the first second of the universe,

it was unimaginably hot and dense.

It was basically a ball of energy.

It's not a place you'd want to stand in.

You'd vaporize pretty quickly.

Everything's zipping 'round at the speed of light.

This universe full of radiation

is nothing like our universe today,

full of stuff, material stuff.

Because it was so hot, atoms didn't exist.

Matter as we know, it didn't exist.

The universe was a dense soup of radiation.

The earliest universe is a chaos of pure energy.

But how does it transform into a universe full of matter?

To answer that question, we have to turn to einstein

and a very famous equation e=mc squared.

Before einstein, people said "matter is matter,

energy is energy, and never the twain shall meet."

Along comes einstein and says, "not so fast.

they really are the same thing."

Einstein realized that matter is just concentrated energy.

This insight transformed our understanding of the universe

and allowed us to unleash devastating destruction...

..in atomic bombs.

Energy, "e," that can turn into m, matter, and vice versa.

Even a small teaspoon of matter would be enough

to unleash the power of hundreds of hydrogen bombs.

While atom bombs convert matter into energy,

in the big bang, energy starts to turn into matter.

But it's nothing like the matter that makes up the world we live in.

So what does this primal matter look like?

This is brookhaven national laboratory in long island,

home to the relativistic heavy ion collider, or rhic for short.

Here, they re-create the matter

that filled the embryonic universe

one-millionth of a second after the big bang.

In a sense, rhic really is a time machine.

We're reproducing the conditions

that existed in the early universe

on the order of one microsecond after the big bang.

Rhic fires gold nuclei around a 2 1/2-mile circular tunnel

78,000 times a second at almost the speed of light.

Then it smashes them together in the giant star detector.

Imagine smashing two cars together in a head-on collision

and working out what the cars looked like

by analyzing the debris thrown off.

That's what the team at rhic is doing.

They're hunting for the building blocks of protons

by smashing them to pieces.

Each collision that you see here,

you can see that they're different.

Some collisions have more tracks coming out of them.

The curved lines represent

in fact, they are the particles that come out of the collision.

And you can see each collision

generates a different number of particles

depending on the violence of the collision.

What mike and his team see is a spray

of the most fundamental particles of all quarks.

Quarks are normally bound inside protons and neutrons.

But give quarks enough energy, and they break free.

We expected these quarks,

once they're liberated from the protons and neutrons,

not to interact much with each other,

just to stream out into our detector.

What we found was the most perfect fluid

that was ever discovered, ever measured on the planet.

So it actually flows much more easily than water does.

This was absolutely surprising.

And rhic shows us

that the perfect fluid of elementary particles

occurs at just one-millionth of a second into the big bang.

But, like everything in the first second,

it doesn't last for long.

As the universe expands, it cools.

And something called the strong force makes its presence felt.

The most important characteristic of the strong force

is the confinement of quarks inside protons and neutrons

that we see as today.

When the temperature of the universe

drops to 2 trillion degrees,

the strong force clumps quarks together in groups of three,

making protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atoms.

The universe begins to take the form we know today.

But as matter is bursting into existence

all across the universe, there's still something missing.

Somehow this matter has no mass.

The universe is hurtling through its first second of existence.

It begins a hundred billion billion times

smaller than a proton.

After surging through a burst of expansion, called inflation,

faster than the speed of light, the entire cosmos

has grown to about the size of our solar system.

And matter is bursting into existence.

But this matter is strange.

It has no mass.

The matter in today's universe has mass.

On earth, we feel it as weight.

In space, objects can feel weightless,

but they still have mass.

If this astronaut had no mass, he'd be in big trouble.

You can't actually slow something down

if it doesn't have any mass.

If somebody doesn't have any mass,

it has to move at the speed of light.

There's no way of stopping it.

So a universe that's full of matter

but matter which has no mass

is one in which it just looks like a big ball of light.

The early universe had no mass,

just elementary particles fizzing at the speed of light.

But today, our universe is full of planets and stars

that clearly have mass.

So where does this mass come from?

Apparently there's some field

that permeates the entire universe,

and different elementary particles

will interact with it in different ways.

And it's the interaction of the particle with the field

that gives the particle its property that we call mass.

Scientists call it the higgs field, after peter higgs,

one of the first scientists to propose it in the 1960s.

The higgs field is invisible.

It stretches throughout space and is accompanied

by a fundamental particle called the higgs boson,

which interacts with particles of ordinary matter

as they pass through the field.

The more an object interacts with the higgs field,

the more mass it gains.

Without the higgs field and the higgs boson, there is no mass.

The higgs field is a beautiful idea.

But does it really exist?

There's only one place to find out

at the biggest and most advanced machine ever built,

the large hadron collider at cern.

Joe incandela hopes to prove the field exists

by smashing the higgs boson out of the shadows.

So i actually need all of you, including the cameraman,

to go through when the other door is open.

Just go all the way through. There you go.

We're going down 90 meters,

which is about 300 feet, about 25 stories.

Took a couple years actually to engineer the layout

of just the cables.

There's enough cables to go from here to moscow.

And this takes us to the detector itself.

So here we are.

Like something out of a james bond film.

Only this is real.

The lhc fires two beams of protons

around a 17-mile concrete-lined tunnel,

which collide at the highest energies ever created by man.

It's equivalent to shooting knitting needles

from either side of the atlantic

and having them hit head-on in the middle.

The collisions shatter the protons

into a spray of new particles,

including, perhaps, the higgs boson.

Joe's team of 3,800 scientists spend 5 years

searching for the trail of particles

the higgs should leave in its wake.

On march 14, 2013, lhc delivers.

It was an electric atmosphere.

I mean, the 20-year-old physicists had camped out

overnight in the hallways to get good seats in the lecture hall.

And the 80-year-old physicists,

who had invented the idea back in the '60s,

they were flown in from all over the world.

And, you know, secrecy was important,

so it was, like, this is the one seminar

you're not gonna want to miss in your lifetime.

I think we have it.

The discovery of the higgs boson

is one of the final keys to our understanding of the big bang.

It was a very emotional moment.

I mean, people got choked up.

Thanks to peter higgs

and the efforts of scientists around the world,

we understand the key moments of the first second.

We now have all the building blocks to make the universe.

A thousand years from now, when they're writing the textbooks,

they will remember the moment when we found the higgs boson.

All the matter around us,

all the human beings and all the people,

all the stars and the planets in the sky

and the higgs boson was the missing piece.

That's what really makes it get up and go.

Without this higgs' mechanism, the higgs field,

that formation of mass, we'd have no atoms.

Without atoms, there's no structure.

We're not here.

That's where this other name for this particle came from,

as a god particle in a sense.

We would not exist without it.

Stars, planets, and people would be impossible

without the higgs field and the higgs boson.

But these new discoveries may be responsible

for much more than keeping our feet on the ground.

When the higgs field pops into existence

during the first second of the universe,

some scientists believe it may have triggered

the splitting of the super force.

Without the higgs boson, we can't exist.

And we think that a series of higgs bosons were responsible

for breaking the symmetries of the super force

so that the four forces could emerge.

That's why when we found the higgs boson,

champagne bottles were being opened up

in all the physics laboratories.

And we were all having a grand party.

Nearing the end of the first second,

two final forces split off.

Without the weak nuclear force, the stars would not shine.

The electromagnetic force is the force

that governs almost everything that we do,

even the chemistry of our own bodies.

The weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force

now stand alongside the strong nuclear force and gravity

to shape the universe we live in.

With these four forces,

we have a universe that can create our home.

The laws of physics which govern our universe

are, at heart, these fundamental forces.

These forces drive the evolution of the universe.

We're nearing the end of the universe's first second.

The cosmos, now an inferno of radiation and matter,

has given birth to the four fundamental forces of nature.

But before the first star has a chance to shine,

a mysterious form of matter threatens to destroy it all.

The first second,

the most important second in the history of the universe,

is nearly over.

The universe is now 20 light-years across,

a fireball of light and matter.

But an almighty battle begins to rock the cosmos.

Fundamental particles, the building blocks of atoms,

fill the early universe.

But they must survive a war,

a war whose outcome will determine our future

because matter has an evil twin, antimatter.

And the two are mortal enemies.

In many ways, they're opposites of each other.

And what that means is, if you take a lump of matter

and a similar lump of antimatter and slam them together,

they will be totally converted into energy.

And according to einstein's e=mc squared,

it's a lot of energy.

Matter and antimatter simply cannot co-exist.

They annihilate each other on contact.

This cosmic carnage rages as billions of times more matter

than we see today simply disappears

as matter and antimatter collide.

The fate of the universe hangs in the balance.

You have to understand the universe shouldn't be here.

It should have been half antimatter and half matter,

and we should have all annihilated.

We do not understand why we even exist.

At the end of this epic war,

matter wins out by the slimmest of margins.

But why?

The question is, why in the universe, as we see it,

there are so many more particles than antiparticles?

The galaxies and the stars that we see in the sky,

these are all made of matter.

They are not made of antimatter.

Somehow, the balance between matter and antimatter

was slightly skewed from the beginning.

For every billion particles of matter and antimatter

that were being created by energy,

one extra particle of matter

and that very small asymmetry of one part in a billion

is enough to account for all the galaxies and stars

we see in the universe today.

Could things have turned out differently?

What if antimatter had won the war?

If antimatter had won instead of matter,

the universe would probably look the same today.

In fact, you know what?

We'd be made of antimatter, and we'd call it matter.

Anti-lovers could sit in cars, anti-cars,

looking at anti-moons, making anti-love,

and it would all seem exactly the same.

So why was there more matter than antimatter?

Why was the universe built out of balance?

Professor tara shears at the large hadron collider

wants to find out.

What we're really interested in

is how different the amounts of matter and antimatter are

and whether they match up to our understanding

of how different matter and antimatter should be

because that's what we don't understand.

The lhc results show

that the difference between antimatter and matter

is smaller than expected.

To explain why, scientists need to know

what tips the scales in matter's favor.

I really hope that we're gonna make a measurement here sometime

in the future which is going to just show us the light,

show us what else there is out there in the universe

that's going to make it all make sense.

We still don't completely understand

the first second of the cosmos.

But the fact that we know so much already

speaks volumes about the determination and ingenuity of our scientists.

As a civilization, we are extending our understanding

of where we are in the universe.

And that's extremely important.

This is why we really love doing what we do.

The first second is over.

The universe already contains everything we see today.

What we understand from the first second tells us a lot

about what's gonna happen for a long time after that.

The first second of the universe

is amazing in its potential.

Here, we had a universe with just these fundamental forces

and these very elementary constituents of matter.

And what would they yield?

They would yield an entire universe.

They would yield the works of shakespeare

and the music of 50 cent.

We have gone so much further

than anyone believed we could have.

And i don't see why the origin of the universe

will be any different.

It might take 5 years. It might take 500 years.

But i really believe that one day

we will understand mathematically

how our universe began.

In the next few minutes,

the universe cools enough for protons and neutrons

to form the first atomic nuclei.

Another 380,000 years must pass before the first atom appears.

In hundreds of millions of years,

those atoms clump to form the first stars and galaxies,

like the milky way.

More than 9 billion years after the big bang,

our sun and our planet, earth, is born...

...their fate sealed in the First second of the big bang.

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