I will start with the most interesting part right away. Your hands and your head live in different times. Your head lives in the future compared to your hands.
“Lol, are you fucking insane?”
Yes, long ago, but thats not the point.
The point is gravity. Or more precisely, how gravity affects time. The closer you a to a massive object, like the Earth in our case, the slower time flows. Thats what Grandpa Einstein said. And it always works.
But the difference is so insanely tiny that a normal human, whose life mission is just to exist on this planet, fuck, and feed offspring, has absolutely no reason to notice any of this. Only nerds like scientists torture themselves with this crap and fry their brains, which, by the way, age faster.
Far from Earth and far from any massive objects, a human life would be extremely short. Mass doesnt create the concept of time itself, but it affects time in a way that makes us actually able to live and perceive it.
The last post about the Universe. Im so damn tired of this topic. After the first three minutes the Universe finally cooled enough to do anything remotely useful, or at least what passes for useful at that point. Protons and neutrons started sticking together into the first nuclei.
The result was basically a three item menu: hydrogen, helium and a tiny hint of lithium.
This set🍣🍙🍘 became the foundation of all chemistry for the next 13 billion years. Even now cosmic rays still contain exactly this set that formed back then. Not only those three species, but you get the idea.
After that everything just shut off. The temperature dropped too much, the reactions stopped and the cosmos simply froze in place. Tens of thousands of years passed in a kind of dead pause where nothing happened except cooling.
The nuclei existed, the electrons existed, but they could not attach to each other yet because it was still too hot. Hot particles cannot stop and form anything stable.
Only after 380 thousand years did the temperature finally drop enough for electrons to stick to nuclei and for the first atoms to appear.
Light stopped crashing into everything and could finally travel freely. That ancient light is still flying around and we see it today as the cosmic microwave background.
After that came a huge dark pause. The Universe waited for gravity to drag gas together into the first stars. That happened only hundreds of millions of years later. And that is it. All the real action ended in the first minutes, just like I said. The rest is not that interesting and I have already talked about stars and everything else many times.
Honestly Im so fucking tired of posting about the Universe.
I already covered the first fractions of a second and that was the only interesting part.
After Higgs there is just a long string of boring phases............
First came the lepton era which was basically hot diarrhea made of electrons, positrons, neutrinos and photons.
A bit later the temperature dropped and during the hadron era the first protons and neutrons finally appeared.
Then electrons and positrons almost completely wiped each other out, leaving a tiny leftover of electrons and even more light from their annihilation.
Neutrinos at some point just got sick of everything, flew off to Bali in spirit and stopped interacting with anyone.
And none of this really matters because the only thing worth talking about happens 3 minutes after the beginning when primordial nucleosynthesis starts and the first nuclei begin to form.
I will talk about that next time and then we are done because holy shit even I am bored at this point.
At around the 10⁻¹² second mark, the Higgs showed up and handed everyone their fucking mass.
Before that, particles were massless, just like photons.
Everything was way too fast, way too light, and way too full of itself. None of the rules we have now worked back then, obviously. Quarks were flying around like insane sparks, electrons were just blobs of energy. W and Z bosons (two of the most important bosses today, by the way, real heavy hitters), and photons, just like now, were outrunning everyone and looking down on the rest. Selfish....
And the weak and electromagnetic interactions were inseparable, like two broke friends smoking in the kitchen because the other forces had already left the party (gravity and the strong force fucked off long ago). And then the temperature dropped to 10¹⁵ degrees (it had been slowly cooling from 10²⁸), and the vacuum suddenly decided it was done being this way, time to change its life!💪
And just like water instantly turning into ice, except instead of water it was the structure of space itself, and instead of ice it was a syrup that suddenly made it hard to move. That’s the Higgs field.
The Universe got flooded with this cosmic syrup, and every particle, trying to move through it, started to gain mass. The more a particle got stuck in that syrup, the heavier it became. W and Z bosons sank into it so deeply they instantly turned into heavy giants barely able to move. Quarks immediately felt the resistance, finally becoming something that resembled real material objects, the inheritance ran out, basically. The electron got its slice of mass too and became a normal particle you could later trap inside an atom.
Photons, of course, stayed special little narcissists: they pass through the Higgs like it’s not even there, which is why they’re still massless today.
The funniest part is that because of the Higgs, the weak and electromagnetic forces finally broke up. Lol like a wife showing up to drag her drunken husband home and beat his ass on the way out🤡 As long as all particles were massless, the weak and electromagnetic interactions were a perfect pair. But once W and Z (the carriers of the weak force) got heavy, and the photon (carrier of the electromagnetic force) stayed light, the symmetry snapped, and that was it.
The Universe finally stopped being a uniform mush and started looking like something we can actually describe with normal words. From that moment particles had personalities, identities, properties. The world became “our” world.
The Higgs basically did what no one else had the guts to do: it gave the Universe weight.
It created the conditions that let particles slow down, interact, collide, form protons, neutrons, atoms, and everything that comes after. Without it, that early feral crowd would’ve kept flying forever at the speed of light.
So yeah, the birth of the quark stuff happened between 10⁻³² and 10⁻¹² seconds.
Holy shit, that’s a "whole 20 orders" of magnitude, quite a ride😮💨
And yeah, the quarks were massless back then, since the Higgs hadn’t shown up yet...
Also, I forgot to clarify last time: the strong force had already split off from the other two (the weak and the electromagnetic) at the 10⁻³⁶ s.
The funny thing is the strong force’s job is basically to hold quarks by the balls with gluons, but at such insane energies, nothing could really be “held” together anyway.
Apparently, the Universe just decided to leave for the airport 10 hours early.
But honestly, the reason is simple and kinda dumb: that’s just how the equations work. 😁 No deeper explanation has shown up yet.
And here’s an extra clarification: in particle physics, “particles” aren’t little balls. They’re excitations of fields.
So there’s this quark field, which appeared as part of the overall energy released by the inflaton (oh god, here she goes again talking about that smart physics crap…)
IN SHORT:
The inflaton kicked the bucket and distributed its inheritance in the form of pure energy, and a portion of that went to the quark field. That field then started popping out quarks.
But there were all the other fields too, and the inheritance applied to all of them at the same time.
It’s just that the quarks went partying first, so they stood out. The other particles were more like background extras, flying around without much interaction.
That’s why there isn’t much focus on them in cosmological models of that era.
Next, I’ll talk about Higgs, specifically what was going on with it back then, because I’ve already mentioned it briefly before.
From 10⁻³⁶ to 10⁻³² seconds X and Y bosons fucked off, antimatter and matter stopped annihilating each other, and the Universe was left like this: a huge chunk of emptiness filled with a fuckton of energy, but no particles, no light.
All that energy sat in one fucking field, physicists call it the inflaton. Well, that’s not even certain. A field that literally stretched the Universe until it said "stop it, please".
And not just stretched it, but inflated it, so that every microscopic point increased by 10²⁶ times(I can show how exactly they calculated it) If you had an atom, during that time it would have become the size of an entire galaxy. That’s inflation, not an explosion, just space itself growing faster than light can travel. You can’t pull that shit off now.
Imagine a balloon. On it dots are future galaxies. When you blow up the balloon, the dots don’t move, the distance between them just grows. And the dot you drew with a marker also stretches.
Before inflation, everything was like cheesy gunk under the foreskin, all lumpy. Oh my god it's so disgusting analogy🧀 And inflation smoothed everything out. Temperature and density became almost the same in all directions. That’s why the cosmos looks so even and symmetrical now, even though it started as pure chaos. But the inflaton got fucking tired in the end. Do more cardio, lol
It got too lazy to keep the Universe puffed up and “rolled down” into a calm state. Like falling from the children's slide🛝 All the energy it held inside got released and turned into heat, photons, quarks, antiquarks and other shit.
So, let’s fucking continue. Now we’re talking about the time between 10^(-43) and 10^(-36) seconds. First question: why the hell even bother with such microscopic fractions of a second?
Because physics was changing insanely fast back then, and every tiny stage matters. I want to build you the whole puzzle piece by piece.
Today I’ll tell you about the reason why we even exist. Because it’s not as simple as “the universe appeared and here you are.” Nope. In those microscopic fractions of a second everything could’ve just self-destructed and that would’ve been the end of it. No people, no posts, no phones, no fucking letters.
After the Planck-level madness the universe cooled down a bit. Just a little. From a temperature where the laws of physics themselves were melting to a temperature of only about 10^28 degrees. Yeah. 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000 degree
if I didn’t fuck up the zeros.
At that moment space and time were already stable, but there was still no matter as we know it. Everything around was a boiling field of pure energy. Or maybe those esoteric weirdos were right all along, who knows. LOL
All three forces that today are different: strong, weak and electromagnetic were the same damn thing back then. Physicists actually call this the Era of Grand Unification. Don’t laugh, that’s literally the name.
There were no electrons, no quarks, no photons, only that single unified field. And that field had its own carriers: so called X and Y bosons (well not only them, but let’s not complicate it). These bosons were hypothetical bridges between matter and antimatter. hypothetical, because we still haven’t proven they really existed.
They could turn quarks (which later became protons and neutrons) into leptons (which later became electrons and neutrinos) and back again. In today’s world that’s impossible, the laws forbid something like an electron turning into a quark. But back then it happened all the time.
Matter and antimatter were constantly flipping back and forth. The only difference between them was that they were mirror images of each other. They were literally dark twins.
The difference between this era and the Planck one is that here physics already exists but structure does not yet. Spacetime stopped twitching like foam in a schizophrenic seizure and gravity had already separated as its own force. But the particles still had no individuality, everything was still mixed together.
By the time 10^(-36) seconds hit everything started to go to shit and that’s the key moment. If not for that “mistake”, we wouldn’t exist.
When the temperature dropped, symmetry broke. That means the laws of physics themselves briefly failed. Like one clumsy particle tripped over its own shoelaces....and that accident is the reason we exist. Let’s thank the dude.
The X and Y bosons disappeared, too heavy to survive. The temperature dropped a bit more and they just fucked off. Froze up like cowards… that would totally be me if I were a boson. Born in Siberia, still afraid of the cold.
And this is where the difference between matter and antimatter appeared. Because of tiny quantum irregularities, after those bosons decayed, there was just a little more matter left. Less than one part in a billion.
And that microscopic imbalance eventually became everything we see today: galaxies, stars, humans, assholes.
I start to tell you the fucking amazing story of how the Universe was born.
And of course, I’ll start with the real mind-fuck, the very first moments of the Universe, before the first 10^(-43) seconds.
To give you a sense of scale: 10^(-6) is one millionth of a second, six zeros after the decimal, 0.000006.
Now imagine 10^(-47). That’s 46 zeros after the decimal.
OK I WILL WRITE
0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 SECOND
Yeah. That kind of shit, buddy.
That instant is called the Planck epoch.
It’s called that because everything that happened back then was on “Planck scales” - the smallest possible lengths and times that even make sense to talk about in physics.
You remember when I told you about h, the Planck constant?
It’s the same idea here.
space stops being smooth, time stops flowing evenly, and the laws of physics as we know them just stop working.
That’s what “Planck conditions” mean.
For example, there’s something called the Planck time. It's such a ridiculously short moment that light can only travel the tiniest meaningful distance, called the Planck length.
Smaller than that, well, your ex’s dick (or your ex’s boobs). It doesn’t even make sense to say “before” or “after,” because the very concept of time and space just stops existing altogether.
So physicists say: everything that happened before 10^(-43) seconds after the Big Bang belongs to the Planck epoch, because at that point only Planck-scale physics applied, and we’d need new laws, quantum gravity, to describe it.
No one knows what that really is, but damn, it sounds cool, right?
Space-time was a fucking mess. Nothing made sense. There was no up or down, no left or right, no clue whose dick or where.
There were no particles yet just some compressed, incomprehensible something, extremely dense.
but impossible to “hold” because gravity didn’t even exist properly yet.
Well, technically, all four forces were mixed together: gravity, electricity, and the nuclear ones. It was like you could mix your ass with your face and call it a theory. But not for long.
That orgy ended when gravity finally split off from the rest.
And why the hell is it so important? Planck’s constant is like the lower limit of the Universe, the step of its pixel. Everything you see, hear, touch, even think, yeah, fucking think. you think in quanta.... Everything is quantized by this microscopic dude h.
Here’s the formula where it all started: E = h*ν
The energy of radiation is proportional to its frequency. Tiny, almost zero. But it’s exactly what separates the continuous "classical" from the discrete "quantum".
Planck’s constant says: Energy cannot change however you want, you uneducated asshole, there are rules. No “a bit more” or “a bit less”. There is a minimum quantum: hν and it doesn’t give a fuck. Any radiation, any field oscillation exists only in multiples of this constant.
Before Planck, physicists thought energy could be emitted in infinitely small amounts. But then theory predicted that hot bodies would radiate infinite light (the ultraviolet catastrophe).
Planck said: “No, guys, this is all bullshit, let’s start over.” Radiation is not a continuous flow of energy but a set of “energy portions”. That’s how the quantum of light(!) was born- the photon.
Every time an electron jumps between levels in an atom: ΔE = h*ν
If h were bigger, quantum effects would be visible at the macro level, and your coffee cup would be in a superposition of “full” and “spilled” at the same time, we’d lose our minds for sure, well, we kind of already did.
If h = 0, there would be no quantum mechanics at all. The world would be smooth, classical, and there’d be no uncertainty.
The world doesn’t update smoothly, it blinks. Ping. Oh wow, we live in a computer simulation…
(!) - this thing looks like pussy upside down, no?🤔
Now let’s dig a bit deeper into the structure of particles.
Spin is basically like a built-in quantum magnet.
In the Stern-Gerlach experiment(on the pic), electrons are sent through a magnetic field. Before the experiment, the logic was: if each electron has its own little arrow, the beam should smear into a stripe. Arrows could point in any direction, full 360°.
But in reality the beam always split into just 2 spots. Everyone freaked out, again physics didn’t match the expectation, lol. Turns out electrons only ever give two outcomes: spin up or spin down. No “in between.”
And here’s the crazy part: before you measure, the electron sits in a superposition - both up and down at the same time.
So its wave function actually holds both possibilities:
Ψ = ( ψ_up ) ψ_down
You put up a magnet, and it decides right there where to go. You never can know before, only probability, remember last Post?:)
Of course, spin is not the only property of a particle. Its position in space is described by other parts of the wave function too.
An ordinary person thinks: if a particle is small, it spins like a ball. But no. Spin is not rotation. It is a built in property of matter, like gender that cannot be changed: for the electron it is always 1/2 for the photon it is always 1 for the Higgs boson it is 0
Now the trick, you will freak out: The electron has spin 1/2. This means that to return it to the same state you need to rotate it not by 360° but by 720°. Yes, this bastard requires two full turns to “feel the same again”.
Imagine a chair: you rotate it once around and it is still “not the same”. Another full turn and only then it matches.
Welcome to quantum reality where geometry goes to fuck...
Remember the Möbius strip? Yes, it is very similar to this example.
There is also the Pauli rule: no two electrons can sit in the same quantum “bed” if they have the same spin. Yes, same sex relations are forbidden here... If not for this rule, we would not have chemistry atoms planets and you would be reading this post out of a black quantum mush.
But the Pauli rule works only for fermions that is particles with fractional spin. 1/2 3/2 and so on. Matter is made of fermions so structure is needed.
And bosons do not give a fuck at all they do not form familiar matter. That means our whole body is made of fermions. Quarks also have fractional spin.
And next time I will tell you about wave functions and how spin is related to this. Maybe later about symmetry groups too...
Stars send us light for millions of years. This light arrives as almost perfectly flat "wavefronts", basically like parallel lines. But in the last 100 km, in the Earth’s atmosphere, everything goes to shit....(Yes, as you told yesterday, smart asses😌😌)
The atmosphere is not fucking uniform, there are different temperatures and densities. Where the air is warmer, it’s less dense and the refractive index of light changes going from cold to warm and back.
Formula for this (very simplified): n≈ 1 + 77.6 * 10^(-6) *P/T where P is pressure (Pascal), T is temperature (Kelvin). (Physicists mostly use Kelvins, it’s more convenient when working with low temperatures.)
So, if temperature jumps, pressure jumps too (just like yours with the weather), and the star’s light jumps as well. As a result, the light from the star reaches us sometimes a bit brighter, sometimes weaker. We see this as twinkling (scintillation).
For telescopes this is fucked. Even if you have a 10-meter mirror, the atmosphere will still blur the picture down to about 1 arcsecond. This limitation is called seeing.
Small insert about arcminutes Imagine you look at a full circle around you. That’s 360°. If you cut it, then 1° = a piece of that circle, like the width of your pinky at arm’s length. 1 arcminute = that pinky divided by 60, fuck me, already complicated… 1 arcsecond = divided by 60 again. Basically nothing left of the pinky.
The Moon in the sky is about 1800 arcseconds across. 1 arcsecond = same as taking a 2 cm coin and moving it 4–5 km away. From the ground it would look the same size as 1 arcsecond in the sky.
You ask how twinkling and angular resolution are connected? Answer: twinkling blurs an already shitty image and instead of a sharp dot we see a blurry blob. It refracts, goes crooked, gets messed up and you can’t see shit.
Let’s continue But sneaky physicists came up with a solution: adaptive optics. Scientists shine a laser into the sky, get an "artificial star" and track how its light is distorted, basically calibrating. Then the telescope mirror bends hundreds of times per second, compensating all the dents of the air. As a result they get a perfectly sharp image, almost like in space.
Tonight is a blood moon🌒 I made a short overview of what people usually associate the Moon with in movies and in real life.
Tides Interstellar In the movie there is a planet with enormous waves. This is a hypertrophied version of what the Moon does on Earth. Its gravity lifts oceans by meters. For ancient people the sea that obeys the Moon was pure magic. Without physics there was no other way to explain it.
Moonlight Harry Potter (Lupin) Werewolves always react to the full moon. Physics explains it: brightness reaches 0.25 lux which is 250 times brighter than a dark night. Normally the night sky without the Moon is about 0.001 lux. For the brain and hormonal system this is a real trigger. Lupin was also freaking out about it.
Cycles All stories about female magic The lunar cycle is 29.5 days which almost coincides with the menstrual cycle. In culture this turned into the image of the Moon as a patroness of female power magic and witchcraft. Physics is simple here: celestial mechanics matched biology. By the way this is also a stereotype because not all women have the same cycle. But on average yes about 29 days.
Stability of Earth Melancholia (von Trier) A movie about a planet that destroys orbits. We do not have this problem because the Moon stabilizes Earth’s axis. Otherwise climate would change chaotically. In fact the Moon makes civilization possible. In myths this became the image of the guardian of balance.
Madness of full moon Horrors and thrillers The word lunatic is not accidental. During full moon melatonin levels drop and sleep gets worse. In general sleep is worse if you sleep with light around because melatonin is produced in darkness. People actually become more irritable and impulsive. Movies use this as a mystical motif: the night of the full moon equals the night of chaos.
