Cosmology
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There is probably no topic more profoundly "Spiritual" than Cosmology - the study of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe. Of course, to remain where we are most certain that truth is, we stick with what is understood experimentally, and thus subjected to study using scientific methods leveraging confirmatory experimentation and scientific skepticism.

What cosmology, and the physics and chemistry that are used to understand it, seems to indicate to us today is that All That Is got its start from nothing. This is possible only if equal amounts of "positive" something (particles) and "negative" something (antiparticles) came into existence at the same time. In that case, the sum of the "positive" something and the "negative" something still totals zero, so a net "positive" was not created out of net nothing. What is still a profound question in cosmology is, "So where did all the antiparticles go?"

The Creation that we are aware of is thought to be all "positive" something (particles), whether energy or matter. A very low amount of antiparticles are detected now and then (rarely). It is not known whether or not pocket(s) of Creation exist which are predominantly antiparticles with rare amounts of particles in the mix. They haven't been detected so far with the instruments we currently have created to study the Universe.

According to our current understanding, all of Creation after the initial start, referred to as The Big Bang, eventually cooled down to form the first atoms, which were primarily hydrogen, our simplest and smallest atom. At this point, another force becomes important to our story. Gravity. Electromagnetism was also important, but lets focus on gravity here for now.

All matter has a feature we will call "Mass", and everything having mass attracts everything to it. It is not clear what the actual end result, or even the cause of this attraction is. However what we do know is that as sufficient mass accumulates, the total force of gravity in that region increases, and thus the attraction for all things in that area to come together increases. With sufficient mass, atoms may be forced together with such magnitude that new types of atoms are formed from the combinations of the old. At first, hydrogens are smashed together and form helium. But as mass continues to increase, and time plays out, all the other known atoms in the Universe can be formed as well.

Initially, these "nuclear fusion" reactions occurred in stars, later, they also occurred also when stars collapsed or exploded. And now, of course, they can be made to occur by the clever engineering that has been developed by humankind.

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More can be said, but we won't here. It is sufficient to remark in summary that all things that are known, all atoms that exist, were caused as the product of The Big Bang cooled down, and as the products of the Big Bang came together due to attractive forces (gravity) such that all the other atom types that exist in the Universe today were formed.

Restated differently and with obvious personal significance, prior to you ever coming to be, first everything you are made up of had to come to be. That didn't happen entirely at the initiating event that resulted in the creation of all matter that exists in the known universe. All that initially came to be then went through numerous transformations, resulting in the creation of all the atom types that currently exist from what was primarily hydrogen at first. Those transformations were made possible through gravitational attraction (a Fundamental Rule), which eventually resulted in nucleosynthesis in stars and in their explosions and collapses. These materials, attracted to each other, formed new stars and now solid planets from the material produced within the earlier stars. Some of these too again collapsed or exploded, repeating the cycle again.

You, the reader, are thus the result of billions of years of star-born nucleosynthesis and multiple supernova explosions, leading eventually to the formation of the Earth and the life on it. You are of stardust.


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