Updates: July 11, 2026
Original note: May 4, 2016.
Original note: May 4, 2016.
The way this book is written seems to make it very, very difficult for me to understand.
I will see if I can make any sense of it by going through it slowly.
The author says this is the story of a specific atom: oxygen.
Talks about compressing the universe to the size of a baseball, but the chapter doesn't seem to go anywhere. I guess the author is telling us just how strange the universe was at the beginning. I think it's beyond what one's mind can imagine. Again, the best reason for re-reading this book is to help remember the building blocks of nature. Particularly baryons and leptons.
I will see if I can make any sense of it by going through it slowly.
The author says this is the story of a specific atom: oxygen.
Part One: Divine Wind
Chapter 1: The Universe in an Atom
Talks about compressing the universe to the size of a baseball, but the chapter doesn't seem to go anywhere. I guess the author is telling us just how strange the universe was at the beginning. I think it's beyond what one's mind can imagine. Again, the best reason for re-reading this book is to help remember the building blocks of nature. Particularly baryons and leptons.
Chapter 2: The Right Stuff
Matter - antimatter particles: exactly the same except for different charges -- one is negatively charged; one is positively charged. At the moment the universe burst on the stage, antimatter and matter coexisted.
Relates the collisions at the time of the very early universe with the collisions at CERN (large electron-positron (LEP) colliding ring. Also houses the large hadron collider (LHC).
Introduces the idea of matter and anti-matter, and says the "lives of our atom" truly began at the moment when the amount of matter and the amount of antimatter in the universe started to differ.
The story of cosmic background radiation (CBR) ... again.
Introduces the idea of matter and anti-matter, and says the "lives of our atom" truly began at the moment when the amount of matter and the amount of antimatter in the universe started to differ.
The story of cosmic background radiation (CBR) ... again.
1931: Paul Dirac -- wrote down in 1931, attempting to tie together relativity and quantum mechanics, an equation implied matter-antimatter duality ... but at the time, no looked closely/seriously at the equation. A positron was first observed within two years of Paul Dirac writing that equation.. p. 24.
The famous Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, 1947, cosmic background radiation (CBR) story .... again.
This radiation bath is made up at a fundamental level of individual particles, or quata, called photons. Photons have no rest mass, and thus travel at the speed of light, a characteristic of all radiation. Page 26. One billion photos for each particle of matter in the universe.
Our particular location in space: lots of matter. Unusual. It just happens to be. The universe is bathed in radiation.
Universe, ratio: one proton to 1 billion photons. p.26.
Where did the background radiation come from? If matter/anti-matter had been equal, the only thing in the universe would have been energy. Instead, in a ratio of 1 to 1 billion: 1 proton to every 1 billion photons. Page 26 - 27 gets one started.
One particle of matter to every 1 billion "particles" of energy.
Had there been no protons, there would have been no atoms; there would have been no visible universe.
Why the asymmetry between matter/anti-matter?
Conservation of energy. If the universe started with no net electric charge in the universe, it has to remain with no net electric charge.
Gauge symmetry: explains why photons alone of all elementary particles have no mass. Page 28: gauge symmetry, Hermann Weyl.
- gauge symmetry: a hidden symmetry in nature
- discovered in the early 20th century
- name of this symmetry coined by Herman Weyl
- gauge symmetry forms the basis of all four forces we know today
- two long-range forces: gravity, electromagnetism
- two short-range forces: strong and weak forces; operate at the nuclear level
One of the basic building blocks of nature is unstable: "free" neutrons -- half-life ten minutes
Mass of proton / neutron differ by 1 part in 1,000. Without this difference in mass, life could not exist. "The bad news" is this: this small difference in mass means neutrons are unstable and can decay.
A free neutron decays into: a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino.
Think about that: if neutrons did not decay ... would whatever there was after the Big Bang, that's where we would be? Stable universe with no changing? No life?
The free neutron is just slightly heavier than the sum of its parts, the proton, the neutron, and the antineutrino, and thus just barely able to decay into those particles.
Bottom of page 29, why the nuclear proton-neutron is stable. At the nuclear level, the neutron is slightly lighter than it would be if it were free.
None of the four known forces account for the stability of the proton. The author suggests that the stability of the proton is a "complete accident."
Lifetime of protons: proved, discussed, bottom of page 30.
Ends the chapter leading us to the next chapter in which the author says that recent discoveries in physics have explained how one can start with nothing (Big Bang) and with something (life as we know it today).
"What's more, this mechanism could preserve the long-term stability of matter today. I think it is far to say that this is one of the great, largely unheralded, surprises in modern physics. And without it, our atom is literally nowhere.
Chapter 3
Time's Arrow
Four forces -- from CERN (link here):"There are four fundamental forces at work in the universe: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. They work over different ranges and have different strengths. Gravity is the weakest but it has an infinite range. The electromagnetic force also has infinite range but it is many times stronger than gravity. The weak and strong forces are effective only over a very short range and dominate only at the level of subatomic particles. The weak force is weaker than the strong force and the electromagnetic force, but it is still much stronger than gravity. The strong force, as the name suggests, is the strongest of all four fundamental interactions."
The four forces
- Strong: force holding quarks; strongest of al four fundamental interaction
- EM: very weak, but way stronger than gravity; and, is also infinite
- Weak: accounts for radioactivity
- Gravity: weakest but infinite range
Weak force on quarks
- Proton --> Neutron (Beta-Plus)
- Neutron --> Proton (Beta-Minus)
Strong nuclear force:
- fundamental strong force: gluons, hold together quarks to make protons / neutrons
- residual strong force: mesons, pull protons / neutrons closely together inside nucleus
- direct "combat" with EM force the residual strong force is incredibly powerful at very short ranges (around 10^-15 meters), completely overpowering the electromagnetic repulsion between protons. However, it loses its grip over distance, whereas the electromagnetic repulsion between protons acts over the entire nucleus.
As many times as I've looked at that chart of the standard model, I didn't realize that -- that is amazing -- electrons are elementary particles but protons and neutrons are not.
Weapons physicists
- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakkhavro: Russian
- Edward Teller: American
Sakharov asked the prescient question: how could the universe generate a matter-antimatter asymmetry if none existed at the beginning?
The nut: we are concentrating on an asymmetry between the fundamental particles making up the bulk of visible matter, protons and neutrons (and their anti-particles). Proton and neutrons are baryons. Sakharov realized there needed to be interactions that could independently change the number of baryons in the universe. [Baryons and mesons: made up of quarks; baryons made up of 3 quarks; mesons made up of two quarks.] That interaction had to be very, very weak otherwise it would continue today.
More importantly, Sakharov determined that two additional subtle conditions must also exist:
But things moved quickly.
The nut: we are concentrating on an asymmetry between the fundamental particles making up the bulk of visible matter, protons and neutrons (and their anti-particles). Proton and neutrons are baryons. Sakharov realized there needed to be interactions that could independently change the number of baryons in the universe. [Baryons and mesons: made up of quarks; baryons made up of 3 quarks; mesons made up of two quarks.] That interaction had to be very, very weak otherwise it would continue today.
More importantly, Sakharov determined that two additional subtle conditions must also exist:
- a departure from "thermal equilibrium"
- time had to have a direction
But things moved quickly.
Murray Gell-Mann: the father of quarks. Proposed and discovered quarks -- page 39.
An arrow time: would move at a different rate of speed. page 39. Experiments with a new type of elementary particle in the 1960s -- the kaon. See last full paragraph on page 40.
Also, from first principles, scientists were able to explain precisely how our oxygen atom came to exist --page 40.
Page 41: huge force between quarks -- unable to understand the nature of the strong interaction.
1973: quantum chromodynamics -- explains the strong force; analogous to quantum electrodynamics, the quantum version of electromagnetism.
The interaction (the strong force) between quarks gets weaker the closer they approach each other.
1975: while the strong force gets weaker with decreasing distance, the EM force and the newly understood weak force get stronger with decreasing distance. Perhaps these forces all converge --> grand unified theory (GUT).
1960's: the weak force that governs beta decay had been discovered.
Mid-1970s: physicists determined that the strong force and the weak force could be combined wiht the EM force into a simple mathematical framework. Many things explained, including why all elementary particles have electric charges that are integer multiples of the charge on the electron. The resulting theory: GUT.
The problem: this happened on a scale 15 orders of magnitude smaller than physicists could measure: not testable.
Page 43: the picture of "our" atom's birth. One extra quark produced in the early universe for every 1 billion quarks and antiquarks would be enough to account for all the matter we observe in the universe today: one billion photons were discovered in the cosmic radiation background for every proton in the universe. - page 43. Middle of page.
Break, break.
That extra one quark was all the difference that the universe required for matter.
But has not been "proved" through tests. That's what they are doing in Japan with that tank of water deep underground: looking for a proton to decay.
Two quarks need to get close enough for the proton to go "poof." -- p. 46.
To get 10^30 protons: a tank of water with that many protons.
What signal do you search for: proton-decay --> two quarks convert into an antiquark and a positron.
Has never been seen.
To get 10^30 protons: a tank of water with that many protons.
What signal do you search for: proton-decay --> two quarks convert into an antiquark and a positron.
Has never been seen.
A single gold-plated proton-decay event would point all the way back to the origin of matter. Page 46. To date, no one has captured a photon-decay event!
By the 1980's large underground water experiments had ruled out the original GUT model and its predictions of proton decay.
Page 47 -- sumpersymmetry -- it predicts that every known particle in nature should ahve a new partner, a super-particle -- sparticle, if you will, none of which have been observed.
Page 47 -- sumpersymmetry -- it predicts that every known particle in nature should ahve a new partner, a super-particle -- sparticle, if you will, none of which have been observed.
But technically, some would say, half of all particles explained by supersymmetry have been seen.
So, physicists had to come up with another explanation. They came up with supersymmetry. But supersymmetry requires that every known particle in nature should have a new partner -- and none of these have been observed.
It turns out, those large water containers: useful for detecting neutrinos. Page: 48 -- the field of. neutrino astronomy has been inaugurated.
Neutrinos come from beta-decay (neutron decay) and by nuclear reactions inside the sun and stars.
1987: 19 neutrino events in a ten-second interval -- traced back to a star that had exploded more than 100,000 light-years away on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy -- p. 48.
So, even though GUT has not been confirmed and supersymmetry seems a stretch, the author presses on, suggesting that the oxygen atom was created at the time of the Big Bang (or shortly thereafter).
A new accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory: RHIC -- relativistic heavy ion collider. Purpose: to look for quarks and see behavior of quarks that might have existed at the time of the Big Bang (or shortly thereafter).
Another reactor, near Williamsburg, VA, also looking for quarks.
After the Big Bang, by 10 billion degrees (cooled way down), essentially all the protons now existing had been formed -- before that, still quarks.
It took the universe about 1 second to cool from primordial baseball era (how this book began) to a temperature of 10 billion degrees.
Author calculates number of collisions:
Impossible, so far, to create a single, isolated quark.
Page 54 -- quarks coming together -- definition of protons/neutrons arbitrary.
As long as "our" 16 protons and neutrons were electronless, the intense pressure of radiation stopped them from responding to the growth of the background density enhancements. Once the particles formed neutral atoms the gravitational attraction of the underlying clumps began to make itself felt. The 13 atoms -- 12 hydrogen atoms and 1 of helium -- that would one day join together to form our oxygen atom, became caught up in an expansion within an expansion, from which there would be escape. But for 100 million years they rested.
It turns out, those large water containers: useful for detecting neutrinos. Page: 48 -- the field of. neutrino astronomy has been inaugurated.
Neutrinos come from beta-decay (neutron decay) and by nuclear reactions inside the sun and stars.
1987: 19 neutrino events in a ten-second interval -- traced back to a star that had exploded more than 100,000 light-years away on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy -- p. 48.
So, even though GUT has not been confirmed and supersymmetry seems a stretch, the author presses on, suggesting that the oxygen atom was created at the time of the Big Bang (or shortly thereafter).
Chatper 4
Nature or Nurture
A new accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory: RHIC -- relativistic heavy ion collider. Purpose: to look for quarks and see behavior of quarks that might have existed at the time of the Big Bang (or shortly thereafter).
Another reactor, near Williamsburg, VA, also looking for quarks.
After the Big Bang, by 10 billion degrees (cooled way down), essentially all the protons now existing had been formed -- before that, still quarks.
It took the universe about 1 second to cool from primordial baseball era (how this book began) to a temperature of 10 billion degrees.
Author calculates number of collisions:
- the sun's 5 billion years of burning: 10^55 collisions in each cubic centimeter
- the first second from Big Bang to 10 billion degrees: 10^89 collisions
Impossible, so far, to create a single, isolated quark.
Page 54 -- quarks coming together -- definition of protons/neutrons arbitrary.
Chapter 5
Ten Minutes To Die
Neutrons and protons were forming nuclei of hydrogen and helium but no electrons surrounding these protons and neutrons, thus no atoms yet.
Chapter 6
One Hundred Million Years of Solitude
The chapter begins with, "the electron is the lightest particle on Earth."
Almost no weight; yet may be the ost important particles in nature.
When
the universe was about 1 billion degrees in temperature, the number of
electrons and its antiparticle, the positron, were about equal in
number. Page 65 -- first page of this chapter.
100,000 years old -- still just electrons, protons, neutrons, but no atoms.
Once neutral atoms became the stuff of matter, gravity finally and completely took over the show. Page 74.
Now, suddenly imperceptial clumps of matter could begin to respond to the demands of gravity. The key role the electrons played -- p. 75.
The universe at 300,000 years old. Now, for another 100 million years, nothing of observable significance would happen. The universe would simply expand.
As long as "our" 16 protons and neutrons were electronless, the intense pressure of radiation stopped them from responding to the growth of the background density enhancements. Once the particles formed neutral atoms the gravitational attraction of the underlying clumps began to make itself felt. The 13 atoms -- 12 hydrogen atoms and 1 of helium -- that would one day join together to form our oxygen atom, became caught up in an expansion within an expansion, from which there would be escape. But for 100 million years they rested.
Chapter 7
Things That Went Bump In The Night
For the newly born atoms in the emerging darkness following the Big Bang, the struggle beteen pressure and gavity was about to begin in earnest. It would continue for all eternity, governing the ultimate destiny of every object in the univers. The outcome as never in doubt. Gravity will eventually win.
Sirius -- Egyptian Nile floods begin. Page 78.
Unlikely events are nevertheless bound to occur. Page 79.
Bottom of page 79, the author goes from 16 particles (the nucleus of oxygen) to 8 hydrogen atoms (one proton / one neutron = 16 particles and one helium atom -- to eight hydrogen atoms and one helium atom.
Wow, the density of these 9 atoms -- would stretch from the sun and the center of the Milky Way.
Discusses the misnomer the term gravitational collapse.
Long discussion on gravity -- this chapter. Three forces earlier; gravity the fourth force -- couldn't have gravity until we had mass/matter.
I guess it's all about clumps of matter in an expanding universe.
Formation of stars. Page 82.
I think I will quit here for now. I'm just reading words and not understanding what the author is saying.
Part Two: The Voyage
Chapter 8
First Light
First Light
Describes nucleosynthesis due to gravitational collapse of massive protostars.
Big Bang (p. 100) had produced only:
- hydrogen (nucleus; P)
- helium (nucleus: P+N)
- "a dash of lighter elements": lithium (#3)
- 10 million years of hydrogen burning
- 1 million years of helium burning
- 100,000 years of carbon burning
- 10,000 years of oxygen burning
- 1 single day, the rest: silicon --> iron (along the way deuterium, He-3, lithium, beryllium)
Chapter 9
A Pretty Big Bang
A Pretty Big Bang
Page 122:
500 million years after the Big Bang: 8 of the initial protons and one (1) nucleus of helium (2N, 2P) have fused to form carbon.
So, again the numbers confuse me -- "8 of the initial protons and one nucleus of helium" fuse to form carbon? That's 10 protons and 2 neutrons -- 12 nucleons -- oh, that makes sense -- if the initial 8 protons flipped back and forth between protons and neutrons. Was this a typo? Did the author really mean to write 8 of the initial nucleons?
Then long discussion on carbon. How unique it is with ability to bond with other atoms.
This is amazing. In the expanding dust bubble, oxygen atoms created in the explosion combine with C to form carbon monoxide. Ten CO molecules exist in the gas cloud for every million or so hydrogen atoms. Nevertheless, carbon monoxide and water represent the dominant molecular components in the gas, next to hydrogen.
And then the process begins: first CO, then CO2; then methanol (CH3OH); and then ethanol (CH3CO2)OH; and, so on.
Carbon molecule even reacts to form CH2O (formaldehyde), when then reacts with ammonia and other nitrogen-bearing compounds on the dust surface until it finds itself part of the structure NH2CH2COOH -- glycine -- glycine is the lowest-carbon-number amino acid associated with self-reproducing life.
And we're only about halfway through the book.
On page 133, the author begins the story of the oxygen molecule: "The stage is now set for the ultimate formation of the atom we find today on Earth. Over the next 3 billion years -- the author doesn't specify when this began, but it appears it must have been about 500 million years after the Big Bang -- over the next 3 billion years, our carbon atom and the new helium atom, adrift in the evolving galactic sea of stars, will somehow find each other (C: 6P, 12 nucleons; He: 2P, 4 nucleons; oxygen: 16 nucleons).
Over the course of the first 5 billion years (p. 134) in the life of our galaxy, more than 100 million stars end their lives in supernova explosions....everything to the dustbin of history.
Author's sense of drama suggests that oxygen was formed in the very last supernova whose products directly created our very own solar system.
A supernova explosion: most likely the third most abundant element would have been oxygen; followed closely by carbon (16 nucleons vs 12 nucleons). In some supernovae, carbon slightly beats out oxygen, as in the explosion that produced the carbon progenitor of our atom adrift in the galaxy. But as oxygen on average beats out carbon in the census of elements now existing in the universe, it is reasonable to assume that this last supernova we will focus on went with the flow, and produced more oxygen than carbon.
"Let us imagine that the oxygen atom that is the hero our story achieved its final form just in time....." Again, "just in time." Fortuitous, huh?
See last paragraph, p. 135, in which the author recapitulates the story:
- Big Bang: 16 particles
- in the first moments after the Big Bang: 13 particles, becasue one nucleus of helium formed (2P, 2N = 4 particles, becomes 1 "particle" -- 16 - 4 = 12 +1 =13 particles.
- a few hundred million years later: 7 particles, as a third helium is formed (12 nucleons - 8 nucleons = 4 particles plus 3 helium (6 nucleons): so 7 particles (4 free-nucleons; three helium nuclei)
- 5 particles quickly occur as the 3 helium atoms merge to become carbon
- in this configuration, 1 carbon and 4 hydrogen nuclei, they persist for billions of years
- finally, 2 particles, the nucleus of carbon and the nucleus of helium are brought together from originally disparate parts of the universe, with completely different individual histories, to make a single nucleus, the nucleus of oxygen.
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