Graduate school required me to take lab safety courses to become familiar with OSHA regulations and safe handling of hazardous materials. After sitting through three hours of experience describing compounds of compounds that I didn’t work, the instructor asked which department I was in, in the right way to notify the authorities of different types of radioactive waste.
There are many reasons why astronomers don’t go to black holes, supernovas, or gamma ray bursts. Somewhere on that list is the fact that they will kill you all instantly. Marvel’s first family doesn’t think so. After losing their power in Ryan North and Corey Smith’s Fantastic Four #33, the team devised a scheme to return to the earliest moments of the universe. It is long enough to expose yourself to intense cosmic radiation before returning to the present.
Marvel Comics
Perhaps you are familiar with the concept of the Big Bang, the explosive expansion of the universe from a single point of infinite density 13.8 billion years ago. Physicists, coupled with observations about known expansion rates and composition of the universe, have used what we know about the fundamental components of reality to build a refined understanding of the earliest moment. Of course, we cannot directly observe the Big Bang, but we can look at the signal of the after effect, study what the cosmos are being made, measure how they are distributed, and use that evidence to estimate what the conditions were as they rapidly expanded, cooled, and reduced density.
As the four basic forces of nature “freeze” from a single unified force, we now learn that is sufficient to know how the first fraction progressed. It is known that the universe must have shifted from an era of rapid inflation to the first Quarks to nuclear synthesis, which created the first elements, from the time of rapid inflation to the formation of the valli (if it proved to be more problematic than antimatter). Eventually the universe is cooled to a point where it has become transparent, and some of the light emitted from that time is still visible in the form of the microwave background of the universe.
To recharge their powers, the Fantastic Four decides to travel from 10-33 seconds of the Big Bang. This must have occurred because the universe rapidly expanded for reasons that are not well understood, but created a modern universe where space appears uniform in all directions. The giant particles we know weren’t frozen from early universes like soup yet, and there were no photons.
Just like in the film’s Fantastic Four: First Step, through their excursions, we witness how incredibly powerful Susan Storm is. Her Forcefield can somehow incorporate good radiation to block the rest of the creation swirl, and at the same time replace the volume equivalent to hundreds or thousands of galaxies’ superclusters.
The period North visits by the crew coincides with one of the greatest mysteries of cosmology: the asymmetry of matter and attitudes in the universe. For reasons that are not currently known, our world is made up of matter rather than antimatter, its complementary counterpart. There is no indication that there are antimatter stars and galaxies in the modern universe (we saw it). However, the laws of physics treat matter and antimatter the same, and the universe emerging from the extreme high energy states of the Big Bang should have produced equal quantities of both.
So, what happened to all the antimatter? Physical mechanisms break symmetry, creating one extra material particle for each antimatter pair created between, say, 2 billion matter and the valori formation, making it slightly more important than antimatter. Or maybe all the antimatter is still there, but I couldn’t find the right way to look for it. If you really want to be wild, there may be an antimatter reverse universe created in the Big Bang moment.
Or, as you know, it’s all in the negative zone.
Marvel Comics
AIPT Science is presented jointly by AIPT and New York City skeptics.
