( A Fifteen minute read with a lot of head scratching)

Let me from the off state that I am no Scientist, so don’t expect this post to make much sense, what you read here comes from the following unanswerable questions.

1.Why did the big bang happen?
2. Why does something called energy, space and time exist in the first place?
3. Why do bodies follow a gravitational law that is proportional to their masses and not the square of their masses????
4. Why does the zero point energy exist in Quantum systems even at Zero Kelvin, when all is supposed to be static at rest (zero energy)?

None of which I am going to attempt to answer.

It’s sufficient to say that everything you see around you, from your own body to the planet you’re standing on and the stars in the sky, are made of atoms but no one has ever really seen an atom.

As you know, An atom has 3 subatomic particles called electrons, protons, and neutrons. The exception to this rule is the hydrogen atom which only has 1 proton and 1 electron.

What I am interested in is where in the first place did they come from.

We have seen so much evidence of their existence that most of us believe in them.

It is estimated that the there are between 10⁷⁸ to 10⁸² atoms in the known, observable universe.

In layman’s terms, that works out to between ten quadrillion vigintillion and one-hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion atoms. This estimate accounts only for the observable universe which reaches 46 billion light years in any direction, and is based on where the expansion of space has taken the most distant objects observed.

It appears that they were not formed during the initial development of our universe (sometimes called the big bang) but were formed afterwards in large stars by synthesising more complex atoms.

Stars evolved after the Big Bang.

Density fluctuations left over from the big bang could have evolved into the first stars. These stars altered the dynamics of the cosmos by heating and ionizing the surrounding gases. The earliest stars also produced and dispersed the first heavy elements, paving the way for the eventual formation of solar systems like our own.

The big bang also produced hydrogen and helium, but most of the heavier elements are created only by the thermonuclear fusion reactions in stars, so they would not have been present before the first stars had formed.

What this means for the atom is anyone guess other than before the big bang there we no atoms. 

If they were not around, what were large stars made of?

Were they just collection of energy released by the Big Bang?

If so.

What was holding the energy together to form stars that are estimated to have been between 100 and 250 times as massive as the sun.

According to Hernquist Dark matter provided the first gravitational impetus for hydrogen and helium gas to start clumping together. The gas began releasing energy as it condensed, forming molecules from atoms, which further cooled the clump and allowed for even greater condensing.

So is it dark matter (Dark Matter the putative elementary particles that are believed to make up about 90 percent of the universe’s mass) or gravity or the small-scale density fluctuations—clumps in the primordial soup that created the atom.

But it seems to me if there were no atoms in the first place none of the above appears possible.

It might seem that star formation is a problem that has been solved.

But nothing could be further from the truth. We don’t really know how the very first stars were actually formed. We need to go back to the drawing board because our present understanding of this subject is still primitive.

Jason Silva who likes to articulate the theory that everyone and everything on earth contains minuscule star particles. In other words we are made of star stuff, atoms from the stars, is pie in the sky.

Cosmic dust forged inside stars turned into interstellar dust — dust formed by the deaths of an earlier generation of stars a key building block in the formation of stars, planets and complex molecules; but in the early Universe — before the first generations of stars died out — it was scarce.

Neutral Atoms did not come from the stars, stars came from electrically charged atoms.

The chemical and physical properties of an atom change as ions are created. When two ions with opposite charges come into contact, they are attracted to each other. They may begin to share electrons in either covalent or electrovalent bonds.

Here is a picture of exploding star.

Credit: NASA/ESA/HEIC/Hubble Heritage Team.

So, all life on Earth and the atoms in our bodies were created in the furnace of now-long-dead stars.

Is this true?  It seem to me to be very dubious.

Pretty much everything we know about atoms is indirect evidence.

The physics which works here is the same physics which works elsewhere. If this were not the case, physics would somehow be a local phenomenon, which simply seems wrong. It is not true that everything in Solar system is build of atoms.

Light is not made up of atoms.

We’re probably looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place as there’s no point of reference in our universe.

Atoms are themselves made of subatomic particles which in turn are made of sub-sub-atomic particles. In fact no scientist worth its salt can claim that we and everything in the universe made up of Atoms.

There is no experimental confirmation about structure of universe.

Who told us everything was made up of atoms?

Democritus came up with the idea that something could be cut into its smallest piece and it would still be the same object. He was also the first person to write the word atom down. He came up with an idea, but it took 2,400 years before anyone figured out that he was right!

Or did they?

Current hypotheses suggest that four-fifths of the universe’s mass consists of a mysterious material that scientists can’t observe directly, which researchers call dark matter.  The substance makes itself known by the way galaxies rotate and bend light around them, suggesting those celestial structures have more mass than observers can see.

We don’t yet know what dark matter is.

The Universe is enormous and our planet is but a small, pale blue dot that makes up a fraction of the matter in our Universe. The rest is something else, a material that nobody on Earth has ever seen.

Fritz Zwicky came up with the term  “dark” matter.” He was some crazy theorist who couldn’t get his forces to add up, and so invented an entire new form of matter.

Astronomers now believe that dark matter has been fundamental in creating the Universe as we know it. There is a lot of it: about 25% of the Universe. Billions of dark matter particles pass through us every second.

Atoms are the smallest pieces of matter; they are made of particles (protons and electrons). When atoms are grouped together, these groups are called molecules.

While atoms are the tiniest bits of matter, they are made of the sub-atomic building blocks of matter—protons and electrons—revolving around a nucleus. The “atomic number” of an element, as seen on a periodic chart, refers to the number of protons contained in one atom of that element.

Confusingly, it’s sometimes said that dark matter makes up about 80% of all the matter in the Universe. That’s because only 30% of the Universe is made up of matter, and most of it is dark matter. The rest is energy. Dark matter is the skeleton on which ordinary matter hangs. Billions of dark matter particles pass through us every second.

We only know about a small fraction of the matter in the Universe. The rest is a mysterious substance known only as dark matter.

Now the most popular suggestion is that dark matter is made of a new kind of particle, predicted by theory but never detected. They are called WIMPs: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. When these particles hit anything they pass straight through.

WIMPs have a lot of mass, although they are not necessarily large.

“WIMP” is just a catchphrase, and could include many different types of particles.

Below is a picture of Dark matter. (Credit: Yannick Mellier/IAP/SPL)

Where is it?

At this point you may be throwing your arms up in frustration. “First they decided there’s all this invisible matter, now they’ve decided it’s made of some new kind of stuff that they can’t detect!

Dark matter doesn’t exist at all. We’re back where we were.

The challenge is to find dark matter when we don’t know what we’re looking for.

Instead, the laws of gravity as we know them must be wrong, and that’s why galaxies behave so oddly. This idea is called MOND, short for “Modified Newtonian Dynamics”.

The problem, says Massey, is that the MOND supporters have not come up with a viable alternative to dark matter: their ideas can’t explain the data.

Dark matter particles usually pass through normal matter. But the sheer number of them means that, very occasionally, some will collide with the nucleus of an atom.

This collision should create gamma rays: extremely high-energy light. On these rare occasions, “dark matter can shine,”

Here is one (Credit: NASA Goddard/A. Mellinger, CMU/T. Linden, University of Chicago)

In 2014, using data from NASA’s powerful Fermi telescope,researchers claimed to have detected the gamma rays from these collisions. They found an area of our Milky Way galaxy that seems to be glowing with gamma rays, possibly from dark matter.  But the jury is still out on whether the gamma rays are really from dark matter. They could also have come from energetic stars called pulsars, or from collapsing stars.

As well as colliding with normal matter, dark matter might occasionally bump into itself, and there’s a way to see that too.

Although we can’t see it directly, dark matter does do one thing to give itself away.

It bends the light that passes through it.

Is there two types of dark matter one interacting with other?

So a second way of detecting dark matter would be to create it first. Physicists hope to do just that using particle colliders, like the Large Hadron Collide in Geneva, Switzerland.

If the LHC does create some dark matter, it would not actually register on its detectors.

If WIMPs do make up the dark matter and they discover them at the LHC then we are in with a good chance of working out what the dark matter in the Universe is composed of.

How much of an atom is empty space?  Very nearly all of it.

The space inside the atom is just that, empty space, i.e. vacuum.

Vacuum, by definition, is the absence of matter. Matter, of course, is something that has mass and occupies space, it’s really a space with very little matter in it.

Many modern devices (like the integrated circuit chips that make everything from cars to computers work), have to be fabricated in a vacuum.

Even outer space, which is considered a vacuum and has less matter in it than anything mankind can reproduce, still has some atoms bouncing around.

Here is my top ten list of “Things That Are Not Matter”:

1. Light 2. Sound 3. Heat 4. Energy 5. Gravity 6. Time 7. A Rainbow 8. Love

9. Happiness 10. A really good joke

When two atoms approach each other, their electron shells push back at each other, despite the fact that each atom’s net charge is 0. This is a very useful feature of nature. It makes our lives a lot easier.

When you sit on a chair, you are not really touching it. You see, every atom is surrounded by a shell of electrons.

If atoms push away from each other, why doesn’t the entire universe just blow away from itself? The answer is that some, actually most atoms’ electron shells are not full.

Electrons really do go back and forth between atoms and they do so pretty fast.

Electrons tend to be kind of mobile, which is also a very nice feature of nature, since without it your walkman would not work. Once both atoms’ outer shells are full due to this electron sharing, they go back to their usual repulsive behavior.

This, by the way, is how we get molecules and the secret to understanding Chemistry. It’s all about the electrons!. It describe the nature of atoms.

We are much more than what we perceive ourselves to be, and it’s time we begin to see ourselves in that light.

The atom has no physical structure, we have no physical structure, physical things really don’t have any physical structure! Atoms are made out of invisible energy, not tangible matter.

It’s quite the conundrum, isn’t it?

Not really, when you enter the world of Quantum it’s totally bonkers.

With quantum physics.

One of these potential revelations is that “the observer creates the reality.”

As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality.

We are all energy, radiating our own unique energy signature.

Feelings, thoughts and emotions play a vital role, quantum physics helps us see the significance of how we all feel. If all of us are in a peaceful loving state inside, it will no doubt impact the external world around us, and influence how others feel as well.

At our subatomic level, does the vibrational frequency change the manifestation of physical reality? If so, in what way?

We know that when an atom changes its state, it absorbs or emits electromagnetic frequencies, which are responsible for changing its state.

Do different states of emotion, perception and feelings result in different electromagnetic frequencies? Yes! This has been proven.

If we are made of atoms, then a scientist studying atoms is actually a group of atoms studying themselves.

The relationship between physical things and mental/spiritual ones is a huge one in philosophy.

Anyone who wants to invent a new theory of gravity has to go one better than Einstein and explain everything he was able to explain, and also account for the dark matter.

Yes, cosmology is really weird.

Some day humanity might have sufficient knowledge and tools to truly understand the origin of the universe, but currently we’re only a tiny baby step closer than when “Let there be light” was written.

Philosophically, no matter what you want to believe about the beginning of things, you need to get comfortable with the idea of infinity. Either infinite time, or an infinite deity that exists outside of time; really, both accomplish the same thing by explaining how things exist, and neither can be proven or disproven.

All we know is that there is something infinite going on and if energy couldn’t have been created, then there were no Universe in the first place.

Most of our Universe is still a black box, its secrets waiting to be unlocked.

How a dark, featureless universe formed the brilliant panoply of objects that now give us light and life remains very much a mystery.

Does it matter that there are things in this universe humans are not meant to understand.

All comments welcome. All like clicks chucked into dark matter.