“And everything, right,” I said, to stop him. “I get the picture. It’s big.”
“Ah,” he said, in satisfaction, “but you see, you don’t. It isn’t big. I’ve taken a few liberties, you see. I’ve magnified it a lot, because the Big Bang wasn’t very big at all. How big would you say that fireball was?”
“I have no way of telling. A thousand light-years across?”
He shook his head and said thoughtfully, “I don’t think so. Smaller. Maybe before the Bang it had no size at all, because space hadn’t been invented yet, and it’s not far from that now. But it’s definitely small. And yet it contained everything. Have you got that so far?”
I just looked at him, and he relented. “I know this is dreary for you, Robin, but I want to make sure you understand. Now, about the ‘bang.’ There wasn’t any sound, of course. There wasn’t any medium to carry sound. For that matter, there wasn’t any place to carry it to; that was just another little liberty I took. More important, the Big Bang wasn’t the kind of explosion that starts from a firecracker and spreads out into the air as the gases expand, because—”
“Because there wasn’t any air, right? Or even space?”
“Very good, Robin! But there’s another way in which that bang was different from all other bangs. It didn’t expand like a balloon or a chemical or a nuclear explosion. It was something quite different. You’ve seen those Japanese paper flowers that you put into an aquarium? As they soak up water, they expand? It was more like that, Robin. But what crept in between the parts of the original-thing, whatever you want to call it, primordial atom or whatever-wasn’t water. It was space. The universe didn’t explode. It swelled. Very fast and very far, and it’s still doing it.”
I said, “Oh.”
Albert looked at me searchingly for a moment. Then he sighed, and the burst began to go on bursting.
It surrounded us. I thought it would consume us. It didn’t, but we were drenched in a sea of terrible light. From the middle of it came Albert’s voice.
“I am going to back us away some light-years,” he said. “I don’t know how many, just enough so we can see it at a respectable distance.” The great ball of fire contracted and fled from us until it was no larger than the full Moon.
“Now, the universe is pretty old,” he said. “About a hundredth of a second. It’s hot. The temperature is around ten-to-the-eleventh degrees Kelvin, and it’s dense. I don’t mean dense as matter is dense. There wasn’t any matter. It was too dense for that. The universe was a mass of electrons, positrons, neutrons, and photons. Its density was about four times ten-to-the-ninth times as dense as water. Do you know what that means?”
“I think I know how dense dense is, but how hot is hot?”
Albert said reflectively, “There’s no good way to tell you, because there isn’t anything that hot to compare it with. Now I have to use one of those terms you hate. The whole thing was in ‘thermal equilibrium.”
“Well, Albert,” I began.
“No, listen to me,” he snapped. “That just means that all those particles were interacting and changing. Think of it like a billion trillion light switches, all going on and off at random. But at any time there are as many going on as there are going off, so the total balance is always preserved; that’s equilibrium. It wasn’t light switches, of course. It was electrons and positrons annihilating each other to produce neutrinos and photons, and so on; but as many events went one way as went the other. Result, equilibrium. Even though inside that state of equilibrium everything was constantly bouncing around like crazy.”
I said, “I guess so, Albert, but you’re taking a hell of a long time over the first hundredth of a second, if we’re going to go eighteen billion years.”
“Oh,” he said, “we’re going to go much farther than that. Don’t anticipate, please, Robin. Here we go.” And the distant puff of flame expanded. “A tenth of a second-now the temperature’s dropped to three times ten-to-the-tenth Kelvin. One second, it’s dropped by another factor of three. Now-here, let me stop it for a moment. This is fourteen seconds after the Big Bang. It has cooled by another factor of three; it’s only three times ten-to-the-ninth Kelvin now. This means that equilibrium is upset for a while, because the electrons and positrons now can annihilate each other faster than they’re recreated in the opposite reaction. We’ll come back to around this point, Robin, because that’s where the answer to your question is.”
“Well,” I said, as tactfully as I could, “actually, if it’s all the same to you, why don’t you just give me the answer now and we can skip the rest of the show?”
“It is not the same to me,” he said severely, “and you won’t understand. We’ll speed up, though. Here we are a few minutes after the bang. The temperature’s fallen by two-thirds again; it’s only ten-to-the-ninth Kelvin. It’s so cool, in fact, that actual protons and neutrons exist—they’ve even begun to combine in nuclei of hydrogen and helium. Actual matter!—or almost; they’re only nuclei, not whole atoms. And all that so-called matter put together is only a tiny fraction of the mass of the universe. Most of it is light and neutrinos. There are a few electrons, but hardly any positrons.”
“How come?” I asked, surprised. “What happened to all the positrons?”
“There were more electrons than positrons in the first batch. So when they annihilated each other, there were electrons left over.”
“Why?”
“Ah, Robin,” he said seriously, “that’s the best question of all. I will give you an answer that I don’t expect you to understand: Since electrons and positrons, and all the other particles for that matter, are only harmonics of closed strings, the numbers that were created are essentially random. Do you want to get into superstring theory? I didn’t think so. Just remember the word ‘random,’ and let’s get on with it.”
“Wait a minute, Albert,” I said. “Where are we now?”
“About two hundred seconds after the Big Bang.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Albert? We’ve still got billions and billions of years to go—”
“More than that, Robin. Much more.”
“Oh, wonderful. And it’s taken us this long to go a couple of minutes, so, really—”
“Robin,” he said, “you can call it off any time you like, but then how can I answer the questions you will certainly keep on asking? We can take a break if you want a little time to assimilate all this. Or, better still, I can just speed things up.”
“Yeah,” I said, staring without pleasure at that fuzzy, blinding glob of everything there was.
I didn’t really want to take a break. What I wanted was for this to be over.
I admit that Albert always knows what’s good for me. What he doesn’t understand is that “good” is an abstract concept, and there are lots of times when what is good for me is something I really don’t want.
I was nearly sorry I’d brought the whole thing up, because I wasn’t enjoying this.
So I knew exactly what I wanted of Albert’s three alternatives. I would much have preferred the first, because I was getting really tired of heat and pressure and, most of all, of sitting nowhere in the middle of nothing. Second choice would have been to take a break and maybe relax a little with Essie.
So I picked the third. “Just speed it up a little, okay, Albert?”
“Sure thing, Robin. Here we go.” The glob swelled menacingly. It still was really nothing but a glob. There weren’t any stars or planets or even lumps in the pudding; it was just an unsorted mass of stuff, very bright. It did, however, seem a little less eye-destroyingly bright than it had been.