Series Part 0
Part 01
The First 3 Minutes
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The Big Bang (Lemaitre),
the expansion (Einstein),
the WIMP (Lee, Weinberg, Turner)
1927 - 1985
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Describing “the Big Bang”, the most famous and highest proven theory for the description of the first moments of the creation of our universe, by Allah swt, requires a lot of realistic imagination, if the phrase stands! However, lately, “It is now respectable (though only in the last decade or so) to test theoretical ideas in physics or astrophysics by working out their consequences in the context of the standard model,”[1]
We must understand some main concepts and proven facts in the world of physics:
Singularity, the WIMP, the Dark matter/energy, and the expansion of the universe are the main components of such a discussion.
First: Singularity and Big Bang:
This phrase describes the state of the universe; the creation, at T < 0, meaning before time! Working backward from the physics laws of the present universe, the singularity was a point with size =0, density = infinity!
Physicist Max Planck (1858-1947), the father of quantum theory, developed constants of the least values at which Physics, and hence humanity's knowledge, would collapse, and go beyond any meaning! Our knowledge and all the equations of physics would be broken.
Those constants are:
Planck length = ~1.6 × 10⁻³⁵ meters: The smallest meaningful unit of distance
Planck time = ~5.4 × 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds: The smallest meaningful unit of time
Planck density = ~5 × 10⁹⁶ kg/m³: The maximum meaningful density
Planck temperature = ~1.4 × 10³² Kelvin: The maximum meaningful temperature
If you apply any shorter time or length, or bigger density or temperature numbers than these to any physics equation, it gets broken and produces nonsense!
Singularity is what is beyond these constants. So, no one knows what it was like then. It was on a scale of magnitude such as the imagination recoils from contemplating.
It means that there was nothing, and then there was a beyond imagination small ball of matter, with near infinity density, and unimaginably high temperature, when time first started, pushing the boundaries of the four elements to move on the opposite side of their original state of being! THE MOMENT OF CREATION. The moment when Allah swt said “كن”, and said “ثُمَّ اسْتَوَىٰ إِلَى السَّمَاءِ وَهِيَ دُخَانٌ فَقَالَ لَهَا وَلِلْأَرْضِ ائْتِيَا طَوْعًا أَوْ كَرْهًا قَالَتَا أَتَيْنَا طَائِعِينَ” فصلت
As Muslims, we do not know exactly how the creation took place, physically! We only know the words of Allah swt and believe in their ultimate truth.
However, these numbers and reversed physics do give us some unchallenged facts which in no way contradict our beliefs.
Ok, time started ticking (well, we'll see about that later!). The universe is expanding, has grown much bigger, and is rapidly cooling. It still does, for the last 13 billion years or so سبحان الخلاق العليم.
Second: the WIMPs:
It stands for: Weakly Interacting Massive Particle.
Just after the moment of the Big Bang, things started to happen:
Temperature to drop off from the ~10¹³ Kelvin (trillions of degrees!)
Density is expected to decrease as the expansion process begins.
Energy is diluted by the cooling process, which in turn results in the creation of these kinds of particles with weak interaction phenomena (WIMPs).
However, being cool caused the newly created particles to lose energy and be destroyed as they interacted with one another, releasing energy to start a new round of WIMP creation, and so on! Created, cooling, interacting, destroyed, new energy, new WIMPs. This process continued until thermal equilibrium was reached, and the number of WIMPs (and their mass) reached a maximum.
The energy left over from the annihilation process (collisions or interactions that destroy WIMPs) is spreading those particles, or packets of weakly interacting particles, through the expanding universe.
We must understand that these WIMPS are energy rather than matter. There was a massive creation of matter underway. It is very important to note that those early particles, which we call WIMPs, accounted for 68% of particle creation at this very early stage. There were also all kinds of particles that were created, due to the explosion (بأمر الله تعالى وكلمته), of which had proton + quarks, or more of each, and then an electron joined the constructed particles, and some formed helium, and massive gases; "ثُمَّ اسْتَوَى إِلَى السَّمَاءِ وَهِيَ دُخَانٌ", “Then He turned to the heaven while it was smoke.”!
The % of matter particles that survived the massive and instant annihilation process was 5% of all our universe, while the 27% left is what they call “Dark Matter, which we will discuss in a minute ISA.
WIMPs froze out at approximately 1 second after the Big Bang, at a temperature of ~5 GeV. At that moment, their number was locked in permanently.
Ordinary matter particles had a far more dramatic story. Before baryogenesis — at ~10⁻³⁵seconds — quarks and antiquarks existed in almost perfectly equal numbers. The ratio of matter to antimatter was:
1,000,000,001 quarks
1,000,000,000 antiquarks
That tiny excess — one part per billion — is all the ordinary matter that survived. Everything else annihilated into radiation.
This radiation was detected as “background access radiation” during successive experiments conducted by Penzias and Wilson in 1964 at Bell Laboratories. This discovery of the background radiation is the cooled remnant "afterglow" of the Big Bang. For this landmark discovery, which provided definitive evidence for the Big Bang theory, both men were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. From this point on, the Big Bang Theory has gained momentum as the most reliable and well-proven theory of the Universe's origin.
Second: The Dark Matter:
In the inferno that was generated by the Big Bang, a colossal number of particles were created, by the order of Allah swt, and started to generate and annihilate almost instantly, in that heat that was estimated as ~10⁹ K or ~10⁹ °C! it means in words one trillion degrees °C! unfathomably huge. To imagine this kind of heat, compare it to the heat in the core of the sun, which is 5527 °C!
It was unfathomably huge!
However, these particles began, in just a few seconds, to produce two types of things: Radiation and Matter particles. The latter is what our universe was made of, and it began to scatter under the colossal force of the explosion.
Those particles constituted all stars and galaxies and were dominated by two forces: first, the explosive force, which propelled them away from the center of the explosion at super-high velocities, and the gravitational force, which kept them in roughly spherical orbits. There were two other forces in play that made the famous four forces work in the first few seconds of the birth of our universe. They are, in summary:
Strong nuclear: in Gluons and Quarks, Tiny (inside nucleus), the strongest of them
Electromagnetic: Strong; it has no boundaries.
Weak nuclear, which we mentioned earlier, is found in the WIMPs
Gravity: the weakest of all. However, the most mysterious of all.
The gravitational force was first quantified by Newton. However, he never explained it! Einstein's theory of General Relativity has dismissed gravity as a force altogether. He explained gravity as a geometric effect of the bending of the fabric of the Universe, which combines time and space. In a nutshell, mass produces curvature relative to its mass; the curvature attracts close masses, in accordance with each one’s mass, to come closer to the heavier one!
When those four forces split in the first part of a second (At the Planck Time (t = 10⁻⁴³ seconds) after the explosion of the singularity, the gravity force was the first to split. To give the reader a sense of what was happening in the first part of the first second:
Before the Planck Time (t < 10⁻⁴³seconds): Physics has no knowledge of what was before this point, where there was no time, and no existence of anything we might recognize. It was the Domain of Allah, swt. The light came from HIM that triggered the spark of the Big Bang.
All four forces — including gravity — are believed to have been unified into a single super force. The universe was so hot and dense that no distinction existed between them. This is the quantum gravity regime — and we have no working theory to describe it.
At the Planck Time (t = 10⁻⁴³ seconds)
Gravity was the first to separate from the unified superforce, the earliest and most dramatic split. This is called the Planck epoch transition.
At this moment, gravity became a distinct force with its own identity. Why it was separated first and why it is so much weaker than the others are not fully understood — this is called the hierarchy problem.
At t = 10⁻³⁵ seconds
The strong force separated next, leaving electromagnetism and the weak force still unified.
At t = 10⁻¹² seconds
The electroweak phase transition — the Higgs field switched on, and electromagnetism and the weak force separated into the two distinct forces we know today.
In part two, we will continue with the Dark Matter and Dark Energy, where we will find out that all our observable universe is only 4% of what is hidden from us!
سَنُرِيهِمْ آيَاتِنَا فِي الْآفَاقِ وَفِي أَنفُسِهِمْ حَتَّىٰ يَتَبَيَّنَ لَهُمْ أَنَّهُ الْحَقُّ ۗ أَوَلَمْ يَكْفِ بِرَبِّكَ أَنَّهُ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ شَهِيدٌ
Tariq Abdelhaleem
April 02, 2026
14 Shawal, 1447
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[1] Ref. The first 3 minutes, Steven Weinberg, P19
