Chapter 833: Chapter 831: The Cosmic Soup Cools, Death God Eternal! (Theoretical, Skip if Uninterested)
What is the universe?
Or rather, what is the world we live in?
The way a world is born, to so extent, already determines the way it will end.
If a world truly is, as legend has it, created in seven days by an omnipotent and omniscient god, then it will eventually end like those legends say, destroyed in a catastrophe born of divine wrath.
In other words, if we want a world to truly be analyzable, it must ensure that from its inception it is rational, that everything is generated according to certain rules, and not just a whim of so unknown existence.
For example, if you want to understand the principles of the human body, you first need to ensure that the human body truly evolved step by step from ancient apes, and not created by so deity.
Otherwise, the ultimate right to interpretation will always lie with the deities, and humanity will never be able to uncover its own mysteries.
Then, the reversed retina, the recurrent laryngeal nerve taking a detour, shared openings of trachea and esophagus, unprotected temporal lethal weaknesses, superfluous male nipples, and the lack of a penile bone for better male propagation will all be little flaws left by the gods due to carelessness in creating humans.
Rather than being choices made actively or passively during evolution for better survival and adaptation to the environnt.
To Richard, he seeks to analyze the current world, making it like Earth, a universe that conforms to rationality, rules, and logic.
Then what kind of universe is the one Earth resides in?
Everything was decided at the mont of birth.
According to the most agreed-upon research results on Earth, the universe Earth is in was born from a unique explosion, which is known as the Big Bang theory.
In the Big Bang theory, the initial state of the universe is called a Singularity.
This is a point with an infinitely small volu, infinitely great density, infinitely great gravity, and infinitely great spaceti curvature. At this point, known physical laws no longer apply, and space and ti have no aning.
In this state, the universe’s temperature is about 10^32 degrees, which is the so-called Planck temperature. At such temperatures, not ntioning the atoms forming the basis of matter, even protons and neutrons within the atomic nucleus, and even more fundantal particles — quarks, do not exist.
At this ti, the universe is just a high-energy soup.
Suddenly, at one mont, the Singularity exploded, the universe’s volu began to expand rapidly, exponentially increasing.
In the following few microseconds, quarks combined into protons and neutrons, their ratio was 7:1, but they could not form stable atomic nuclei. Because they were constantly disturbed by neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, triggering nuclear reactions of beta decay that greatly suppressed nucleosynthesis.
This situation continued until the universe was about a second old, when the universe’s temperature had dropped to about the 10^11 degree level, that is, hundreds of billions of degrees. Neutrinos and anti-neutrinos finally stopped interacting with nucleons, and Big Bang nucleosynthesis truly began.
Later, when the universe was between two and three minutes old, hydrogen, hydrogen isotopes, helium elents, and helium isotopes appeared in sequence.
Among them, the hydrogen isotope — deuterium (one proton, one neutron), is an interdiate product in the nuclear reaction chain. A large amount of deuterium eventually ford helium (two protons, two neutrons) through different pathways.
By the ti the universe was 3 minutes old, almost all neutrons had combined into helium. Because at the universe’s birth, the ratio of protons to neutrons was 7:1, so at this ti, the mass ratio of hydrogen to helium was 6:2 or 3:1.
In other words, at this point in the universe, 75% is hydrogen and 25% is helium, with their atomic numbers being 1 and 2, respectively, and atomic masses 1 and 4.
Afterward, nuclear reactions continued; in the high-temperature environnt, particles constantly collided, forming larger particles from smaller ones, creating higher atomic number particles from lower ones. However, due to the restrictions of physical principles, stable atoms with atomic masses of 5 and 8 do not exist in the universe. The stable atom Lithium-6, with a small reaction cross-section, led to the next ion produced by nuclear reactions being the isotope of lithium — Lithium-7.
During this nuclear reaction process, as the universe expanded rapidly, its volu beca ever-larger, and its temperature dropped ever faster. By the ti a small amount of Lithium-7 was produced, the universe had beco very cold, and nucleosynthesis nearly ended.
When the universe was 1 hour old, nucleosynthesis completely stopped. At this ti, the composition of the universe’s matter was about 75% hydrogen, 25% helium, and a very small amount of Lithium-7, resembling a vast cotton candy-like gaseous nebula.
This state persisted from when the universe was 1 hour old until around 1 billion years.
When the universe was 1 billion years old, in so locations in the gaseous nebula, due to having relatively more material, under the effect of gravity, it began attracting more surrounding material to gather. The density beca ever higher, finally resulting in gravitational collapse when gravity exceeded internal support.
After gravitational collapse, a region of the gaseous nebula fractured into smaller fragnts, each fragnt with collapsing gas releasing gravitational potential energy as heat. As its temperature and pressure increased, these fragnts slowly condensed into forms known as protostars — intensely hot, rotating gas. This is how the first generation of stars was ford.
After the first generation of Constant Stars ford, inside their cores, nuclear synthesis began to restart due to the high-temperature environnt, and elents with larger atomic numbers and atomic masses started to be synthesized sequentially.
First, the well-known hydrogen elent undergoes fusion, synthesizing into helium elent through nuclear fusion. The energy in this fusion process is also used to counteract the gravitational collapse caused by gravity, ensuring the stable volu of the Constant Star.
When all the hydrogen elents are depleted, the balance between fusion energy and gravity gets disrupted, causing the Constant Star to undergo a second gravitational collapse, leading to a substantial increase in core temperature and pressure, reaching the conditions for Helium Fusion, synthesizing carbon, oxygen, etc., through helium fusion.
When helium is depleted, the third gravitational collapse begins again, and the Constant Star collapses once more. The core temperature and pressure further increase, and carbon and oxygen elents begin to undergo fusion, synthesizing into silicon.
If the star’s mass is not large enough, it will die in one of these collapses, evolving into a White Dwarf Star (with about one-tenth the mass of the Sun) or a Red Giant Star (with less than ten tis the mass of the Sun). But if the star’s mass is sufficiently large, it will continue like this, with elents beyond lithium being continuously generated, such as neon, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, calcium…
However, this synthesis still has its limit.
This limit is the Iron Elent.
In the core of a massive star, through multiple collapses, elents undergo fusion, synthesizing into iron elent through nuclear synthesis.
After most of the mass in the star’s core has turned into iron, when the core has beco an iron core, the pressure produced is already imnse. This causes most of the electrons in the center of the iron elent to be squeezed into the atomic nucleus, combining with protons to beco neutrons, making the core area almost entirely neutrons.
Neutrons are extrely compact, so when iron atoms attempting fusion reach the surface of the neutrons, they are blocked, rebounding fiercely like a ball hitting a wall, unable to enter the core.
In this way, no matter how much energy the Constant Star provides to the core, it cannot make the iron proceed to the next step of fusion; the star’s life process is locked. At this point, the elents in the Constant Star, from the outside to the innermost part, are in the order of hydrogen, helium, carbon, silicon, iron.
After this continues for a period, the star’s fusion stops, and under the influence of gravity, the star begins yet another collapse.
Because this ti no new fusion will restart, the star will produce an unprecedented super explosion, a supernova explosion.
In this state, within an extrely short ti, the temperature and pressure reach a new high, generating elents beyond iron, such as nickel, copper, zinc, and extending to the Uranium Elent.
Uranium is the largest atomic number elent found in nature; elents with atomic numbers exceeding the Uranium Elent can only be artificially synthesized and cannot be obtained naturally.
This is the universe where Earth is located.
In our understanding, everything currently in the universe where Earth is located is composed through explosions and nuclear synthesis from the initial Singularity’s pot of energy soup.
In this universe, the most fundantal components that make up every organism and every object can be traced back to an explosion.
In this universe, no life is sacred, for they all share the sa past.
Their endings are also the sa, ultimately facing death.
Then, dust returns to dust, earth returns to earth, forming the particles that compose them again to form new life.
This is a cycle, this is a kind of scientific cycle, your head may beco a white cat in a century, and your hands may co from the spine of a saber-toothed tiger from ancient tis.
You, I, and he, are actually one entity.
In this universe of material cycles, almost nothing is eternal, the only possibly eternal existence is the ever-increasing entropy.
The universe will continue to expand, and the Planck temperature that started from the Big Bang Singularity will continue to lower until it gradually approaches absolute zero.
Slowly, all the Constant Stars will exhaust their energy and extinguish one by one, making the entire universe darker. Slowly, Black Holes will continue to form, dominating the universe. Slowly, Black Holes will continue to emit Hawking radiation, and even the Black Holes themselves will begin to disappear.
Ultimately, the entire universe will reach a state of maximum entropy, with all matter evenly distributed across the universe. The universe becos monotonous and dead, losing all vitality, reaching the thermal death outco determined upon its birth—decided when the Singularity’s pot of searing energy soup exploded, to ultimately cool down completely at so distant future point.
The hot soup finally cools, Death God is eternal!
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