The matter originated in the Big Bang. Firstly as a soup of quarks, W's, Z's, electrons etc. As the new universe expanded and cooled, the quarks coalesced into particles like protons. As the expansion continued a point was reached where nuclei could trap electrons and make neutral atoms. This occurred about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Once neutral atoms existed, the universe became transparent to photons, which we now see as the Cosmic Microwave Background. In our laboratories such as CERN we can recreate the conditions that existed about 0.0000000001 seconds after the Big Bang and study the processes that would have been occurring at that time.
I'd like to add something clever here. But I can't. There are ministerial posts crying out for people like me...I personally like Sir Roger Penrose's hypothesis. Conformal cyclic cosmology. Recent theoretical progress indicates that spacetime and gravity emerge together from the entanglement structure of an underlying microscopic theory. These ideas are best understood in Anti-de Sitter space, where they rely on the area law for entanglement entropy. The extension to de Sitter space requires taking into account the entropy and temperature associated with the cosmological horizon. Using insights from string theory, black hole physics and quantum information theory we argue that the positive dark energy leads to a thermal volume law contribution to the entropy that overtakes the area law precisely at the cosmological horizon. Due to the competition between area and volume law entanglement the microscopic de Sitter states do not thermalise at sub-Hubble scales: they exhibit memory effects in the form of an entropy displacement caused by matter. The emergent laws of gravity contain an additional `dark' gravitational force describing the `elastic' response due to the entropy displacement. We derive an estimate of the strength of this extra force in terms of the baryonic mass, Newton's constant and the Hubble acceleration scale a_0 =cH_0, and provide evidence for the fact that this additional `dark gravity force' explains the observed phenomena in galaxies and clusters currently attributed to dark matter.
Bow before Manuel, you puny Brockman and acolyte earthlings! Piece of advice: Stay in school kids. Would have been nice if they marked the beginning of the YouTube flatearthers on the timescale, to show how long it took for the pinnacle of dimwittery to find its natural home. This universe used to be part of a bigger union of universes and ours voted to leave and look what happened. There’s no one else around just endless empty planets. Kinda lonely. Sigh. (Scientist discovers oldest stars in universe. After having explicitly said stars could not be this old in current models of the BBT. Theory revised to incorporate failure of previous prediction...and hey presto! Great new success of model hailed in media. Salaries of all concerned to be doubled.)
Yeah, I cared to be an astrophysicist. Wanted to become an artist. And thought of brain surgery too. Finally I did none of these things. I have my reasons for this ... outcome!
