THE COSMIC CHAIN OF EVENTS

Ever wonder why you exist? It all started with tiny, accidental ripples in the early universe. Without these cosmic imperfections, stars, planets, and life would never have formed. Dive in to see how chaos actually created our entire world.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome back to another blog of the Cosmic Series. I guarantee you that this blog is going to explain the complex terms regarding cosmology in the simplest terms possible and hopefully will clear you doubts. So as you know, only if you had read the previous blogs, we are heading into the deep ocean of cosmology in a very specific sequence**.** I started the series from the big bang, then early Universe, formation of atoms and stars. In this blog, I will cover the most fascinating chain of events starting from the Quantum Fluctuations…. ahh man what did I wrote? hahahaaha!…. don’t worry i will make it easy for you!

WHAT ARE QUANTUM FLUCTUATIONS?

Do you Remember, in the first blog of this series I told you that all of us having this doubt in mind what caused the Big Bang? Honestly nobody knows! But most of us use the term Quantum fluctuations for the cause of the big bang. But this is also wrong….how? but first we need to know what do we really mean by quantum fluctuation.

lets break this down into two parts:

1. FLUCTUATION: It simply means Variation or difference among some values or things. Like if we have a record for 4 days temperature as 40 degrees, 30, 50, 20. This variation is called fluctuation.
2. QUANTUM: At the very smallest level, the microscopic level of the physical world even beyond atoms.

ok so lets combine it and see what we get:

Variation at the fundamental level. Actually we think that the space as we know is truly empty but it aint right, In the Quantum Physics, empty space is never empty, it consists of some kind of Quantum Fields and These fields consist of energy and the fluctuation in this very tiny microscopic field is called Quantum fluctuation.

BEGINNING OF THE COSMIC CHAIN

Now lets come to the question, why the quantum fluctuations is not the cause for big bang?

At the of the beginning of the Universe or more precisely I can say that when our Universe was at at its mathematical limit( Basically i had a separate blog regarding this concept mathematical limit, but still I will provide you an insight. Mathematical limit in the context of Universe is if the space starts to shrink down, distances decreases and subsequently the density and temperature increases and we come to a point called as Big Bang singularity or the mathematical limit.)

There were Quantum fluctuations in the energy of the Quantum fields and this is purely a Quantum phenomena. These fluctuations were very small or you can say negligible. Now, if you ask why were there Quantum Fluctuations at all?

Even though this series is about cosmology but to really understand the chain of events and in accordance with first principles, we will dug deep lesss goo!

Imagine a still lake, do you see anywhere ripples there, of course not because the lake is at rest, no disturbance and nothing at all. But now you throw a stone in it, the ripples formed_ and this is classical physics. But in Quantum mechanics the space is never still or its never at rest. There are variations in energy fields and having these variations is purely a law and currently we dont know why these laws are the way they are…..

So there were Quantum fluctuations in these energy fields and suddenly the Space expanded exponentially known as cosmic inflation(the space expanded from atomic size to cosmic size in just a fraction of a second) that we discussed in our first blog. As a result, the distance between the variations in energy fields increased on a large scale. however as i told you, they were very tiny variations but they will a huge role later on. As you can see, Quantum fluctuations was not the actual cause of big bang rather a seed for the formation of the Universe.

ENERGY AND MATTER DENSITY FLUCTUATIONS

Finally, when the particles started to form from the Energy (explained by E=MC^2), they could have form uniform everywhere in the Universe but no the matter or the particles formed with a small variation. This variation came from the energy that was present there. Since we saw how there were the variations in energy on on cosmic distances, this in turn resulted in the matter density fluctuations. So in General, some regions ended up having more matter than others).

The scenario was like, at one place there were 100 particles and at another place there were 103 particles. We will think, “oh man, what can these 3 more particles signify? this is the same actually”. I will tell you the FACT, Right now you are reading this and i am writing it, all of us exist because of those extra three particles.

Basically, Gravity is the main hero here. Gravity is always attractive in nature no matter how far the objects are or what the objects are. These 103 particles started to pull particles and over a long period of time all the particles were at one place.

As we the Universe at that time consisted of helium and hydrogen gases, and these because of gravity formed gas clouds and then Stars, explained in detail in the previous blog.

Now, Imagine if there were fluctuation in the matter. Then particles would have formed and would have formed even and uniform, like 100 particles at one place and another 100 particles another place. There would have not been any denser region at all. Since there would have not been any matter fluctuation, every region pull equally in all the direction, no preferred direction for matter to flow.

In that case, no gas clouds would form and therefore no stars or galaxies would form, then no planets would form, no earth, no life, no you!

ALL OF THIS BECAUSE OF THE QUANTUM FLUCTUATIONS!

From above, we can conclude:

QUANTUM FLUCTUATIONS-—–Acted as the initial seeds**

GRAVITY ——-Acted as amplifier

MATTER DENSITY FLUCTUATIONS-——- Acted as the seeds for galaxies and stars**

CONCLUSION

If multiverses exist then out of a large no. of universes, there maybe one with only gases clouds scattered all around and uniform because there were not the Quantum Fluctuations at the first place, maybe another with all the galaxies and stars which basically is ours. If there is only one Universe thats ours, then the probability of existing our Universe by all the laws, with those fluctuations etc is EXTREMELY VERY SMALL!

Even though we know “HOW” but we lack in “WHY”. we dont know what caused the Big Bang and don’t know why were there the Quantum Fluctuations in the first place.

But the Interesting thing about these Questions is that they keep us going, keep our curiosity alive. By far, this was the most beautiful blog I wrote!

Meet you in the next blog, till then take care.