It's weird but yet amazing that we know that they happened and can understand how

the universe got its start. But like any other field of science:we have clues,
observations, based on what we see going on now. A lot of what we know about the
early Universe comes from experiments done in giant particle colliders. The higher
energy we can give our colliders, the faster we can whack particles together and
the earlier phase of the Universe we can investigate. So let's wind the clock back.
Looking around us, peering into the Universe both near and far, what can we say
about the beginning of everything? When the Universe gots its start, it was
unfathomably hot and dense. It was totally different then than it is today. At some
point in the past it was so hot that the atoms wouldn't have been able to hold on
to their electrons. A little farther back and it was so hot that nuclei can't stay
together, and the Universe was a small ball of energy mixed with neutrons, protons,
and electrons. The Universe is 13.82 billion years old, so being able to go back to
that very first one-ten-millionth of a trillionth of a second is a massive triumph
of physics. What happened after that fraction of a second is better understood. The
Universe expanded and cooled, the four forces went their seperate ways and the
first basic subatomic particles were able to hold themselves together. This all
happened in the very first second of the Universe's existence. The next thing we
knew the Universe made something remarkable: it made atoms. Then, the Universe
cooled enough the fusion stopped. When it did, there was three times as much
hydrogen as helium in the Universe. This primordial ratio is still pretty much true
today. At this point the Universe is still hotter than a star's sutface, but it's
also still expanding and cooling. As it does, structures start to form as the
gravity of matter can overcome the tremendous heat. These will become the galaxies
we see today. The next big event happened when the Universe was at the ripe old age
of about 380,000 years, the Universe was ionized. But after that it had cooled
enough that electrons could combine with protons and helium nuclei, becoming stable
neutral atoms for the very first time. We call this 'recombination'. When the
Universe was still ionized, prior to recombination, it was opaque. After that the
universe became transparent. The light emitted at this time is what we see as the
cosmic microwave background today, that background glow predicted by the Big Bang
model has been on its journey to Earth for almost 13.8 billion years. This light is
important, because it tells us what the Universe was like not long after it formed.
At some point at the very early Universe, the expansion suddenly accelerated
vastly. For the tiniest fraction of a second, space inflated hugely, far faster
than the normal expansion, increasing in size by something like a hundred trillion
times, this expansion is called 'Inflation'. At the time of Inflation, the
fluctuations we see are actually small perturbations in the frabric of space whoch
is stretched out. There were denser spots which are seeds, that grows and their
gravity attracting flows of dark matter. Normal matter collected there too, and
eventually forming the first stars after the Big Bang. Those tiny little bumps at
the beginning of the Universe became galaxies and clusters of galaxies, now tens of
billions of light years away, Our own galaxy, our own piece of the Universe,
started the same way, as a quantum fluctuation in space 13.8 billion years ago.