Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

by David Christian

Even earlier, but in the same spirit, H. G. Wells wrote a history of humanity as a response to the carnage of World War I. There can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas.… With nothing but narrow, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction.

understood something else, too: If you want to teach the history of humanity, you probably need to teach the history of everything. That’s why his Outline of History turned into a history of the universe. To understand the history of humanity, you have to understand how such a strange species evolved, which means learning about the evolution of life on planet Earth, which means learning about the evolution of planet Earth, which means learning about the evolution of stars and planets, which

cross-cultural contacts have shown how embedded all origin stories and religions are in local customs and environments. That is why globalization and the spread of new ideas corroded faith in traditional knowledge. Even true believers began to see that there were multiple origin stories

Some people responded with aggressive, even violent, defenses of their own religious, tribal, or national traditions. But many simply lost faith and conviction, and along with them, they lost their bearings, their sense of their place in the universe. That loss of faith helps explain the pervasive anomie, the feeling of aimlessness, meaninglessness, and sometimes even despair that shaped so much literature, art, philosophy, and scholarship in the twentieth century. For many, nationalism offered some sense of belonging, but in today’s globally connected world, it is apparent that nationalism divides humanity even as it connects citizens within a particular country. I have written this

doing, I started using the term big history.4 Only as the story slowly came into focus did I realize that I was trying to tease out the main lines of an emerging global origin story. Today, big history is being taught in universities in many different parts of the world, and through the Big History Project, it is also being taught in thousands of high schools.

We can never see the world directly in all its detail; that would require a brain as big as the universe. But we can create simple maps of a fantastically complicated reality, and we know that those maps correspond to important aspects of the real world. The conventional diagram of the London Underground ignores most of the twists and turns, but it still helps millions of travelers get around the city. This book offers a sort of London Underground map of the universe.

The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim insisted that the maps lurking within origin stories and religions were fundamental to our sense of self. Without them, he argued, people could fall into a sense of despair and meaninglessness so profound, it might drive them to suicide. No wonder almost all societies we know of have put origin stories at the heart of education. In Paleolithic societies, students learned origin stories from their elders, just as later scholars

stories of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism in the universities of Paris, Oxford, Baghdad, and Nalanda. Yet, curiously, modern secular education lacks a confident origin story that links all domains of understanding. And that may help explain why the sense of disorientation, division, and directionlessness that Durkheim described is palpable everywhere in today’s world, in Delhi or Lima as much as in Lagos or London. The problem is that in

assemble that knowledge into a single, coherent story in the way that globes in old-fashioned classrooms linked thousands of local maps into a single map of the world. And that leaves us with a fragmented understanding of both reality and the human community to which we all belong.

Unlike many traditional origin stories, the modern origin story lacks a creator god, though it has energies and particles as exotic as the pantheons of many traditional origin stories. Like the origin stories of Confucianism or early Buddhism, the modern story is about a universe that just is. Any sense of meaning comes not from the universe, but from us humans. “What’s the meaning of the universe?” asked Joseph Campbell, a scholar of myth and religion. “What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there, that’s it, and your own meaning is that you’re there.”

French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “Knowledge is like a sphere; the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown.”5 With all its imperfections and uncertainties, this is a story we need

the heart of the modern origin story is the idea of increasing complexity. How did our universe appear, and how did it generate the rich cavalcade of things, forces, and beings of which we are a part? We don’t really know what it came out of or if anything existed before the universe. But we do know that when our universe emerged from a vast foam of energy, it was extremely simple. And simplicity is still its default condition. After all, most of our universe is cold, dark, empty space. Nevertheless, in special and unusual environments such as on our planet, there existed perfect Goldilocks conditions, environments, like Baby Bear’s porridge in the story of Goldilocks, that were

More complex things appeared at key transition points, and I will refer to the most important of these as thresholds. The thresholds give shape to the complicated

The early universe had no stars, no planets, and no living organisms. Then, step by step, entirely new things began to appear. Stars were forged from atoms of hydrogen and helium, new chemical elements were created inside dying stars, planets and moons formed from blobs of ice and dust using these new chemical elements, and the first living cells evolved in the rich chemical environments of rocky planets. We humans are very much part of this story, because we are products of the evolution and diversification of life on planet Earth, but in the course of our brief but remarkable history, we have created so many entirely new forms of complexity that, today, we seem to dominate change on our world. The appearance

something with new emergent properties, always seems as miraculous as the birth of a baby, because the general tendency of the universe is to get less complex and more disorderly. Eventually, that tendency toward increasing disorder (what scientists term entropy) will win out, and the universe will turn into a sort of random mess without pattern or structure. But that’s a long, long way in the future. Meanwhile,

The birth of the universe—our first threshold—is as miraculous as any of the other thresholds...

The hominin lineage splits from the chimp lineage APPROXIMATE ABSOLUTE DATE: 7 million years ago DATE DIVIDED BY 1 BILLION: 2.5 days ago

To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. —CARL SAGAN, COSMOS So it must have been after the birth of the

But what could possibly leverage the creation of a new universe? How do you bootstrap a universe? Or, for that matter, the origin story that describes how a new universe appeared? Bootstrapping

One possible approach is to vanish the problem of beginnings by assuming the universe was always there. No bootstrapping needed. Many origin stories have gone this way. So have many modern astronomers, including those who supported the steady-state theory in the middle of the twentieth century. This is the idea that at large scales, the universe has always been pretty much as it is today. Similar, but subtly different, is the idea that, yes, there was a moment of creation when great forces or beings roamed the universe making things, but since then, nothing much has changed. The elders of Lake Mungo might have seen the universe like this, describing a world brought to life more or less in its current form by their ancestors. Isaac Newton saw God as the “first cause” of everything and argued that He was present in all of space.

If the geometry of space-time is spherical, like the surface of Earth but in more dimensions, then asking what existed before the universe is like looking for a starting point on the surface of a tennis ball. That’s not how it works. There is no edge or beginning to time, just as there is no edge to the surface of Earth.6 Today, some cosmologists are attracted to another set of concepts that tug us back to the idea of a

the problem of ultimate beginnings than any earlier human society had. Bootstrapping a universe still looks like a logical and metaphysical paradox. We don’t know what Goldilocks conditions allowed a universe to emerge, and we still can’t explain it any better than novelist Terry Pratchett did when he wrote, “The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”7 Threshold 1: Quantum

bootstrap for today’s most widely accepted account of ultimate origins is the idea of a big bang. This is one of the major paradigms of modern science, like natural selection in biology or plate tectonics in geology.8 It wasn’t

Our species’ minds evolved to deal with things at human scales, so they struggle with things this tiny, but it might help to know that you could squeeze a million atoms into the dot at the end of this sentence.9 At the moment of the

entire universe was smaller than an atom. Packed into it was all the energy and matter present in today’s universe. All of it. That is a daunting idea, and at first it might appear plain crazy. But all the evidence we have at present tells us that this strange, tiny, and fantastically hot object really existed about 13.82 billion years ago. We don’t yet understand how and why this thing appeared. But quantum physics tells us, and particle accelerators—which speed up subatomic particles to high velocities by means of electric or electromagnetic fields—show us, that something really can appear in a vacuum from nothing, though grasping what this means requires a sophisticated understanding of nothing. In modern quantum physics, it is impossible to determine precisely the position and motion of subatomic particles. This means you

first law of thermodynamics tells us that the ocean of energy is always there; it’s conserved. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that all the forms that emerge will eventually dissolve back into the ocean of energy. The forms, like the movements of a dance, are not conserved. Some distinct

there is a bad guy in the modern origin story, it is surely entropy, the apparently universal tendency for structures to dissolve into randomness. Entropy is the loyal servant of the second law of thermodynamics.

Entropy is also very, very dangerous, and in the end it will get us all. Entropy stands at the finale of all origin stories. It will dissolve away all structures, all shapes, every star and every galaxy and every living cell. Joseph Campbell described entropy’s role poetically in a book on mythology: “The world, as we know it… yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.”12 Modern

powerful is entropy that it is not easy to understand how any structures appeared in the first place. But we know that they did.

how did the very first structures emerge? This is a problem for which science does not yet have complete answers, though

addition to energy and matter, some basic operating rules emerged from the big bang. Scientists did not begin to understand how fundamental these rules were until the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Today, we describe these rules as the fundamental laws of physics. They explain why the frantic and chaotic energies of the primeval atom were not completely directionless—the laws of physics steered change down particular pathways and blocked a nearly infinite range of other possibilities. The laws of physics filtered out those states of the universe that were not compatible with them, so at any given moment, the universe existed in only one of the many states that

don’t know why the rules emerged or why they took the forms they did. We don’t even know if these rules were inevitable. Perhaps other universes exist with slightly different rules. Perhaps in some universes, gravity is stronger or electromagnetism is weaker. If so, these universes’ inhabitants (if they have any) will tell different origin stories. Maybe some universes lasted for a millionth of a second, while others will exist much longer than ours. Perhaps some universes

the universe plunged below the temperatures at which matter and antimatter could easily be created, there took place a violent, universe-wide demolition derby in which matter and antimatter annihilated

unlocking huge amounts of energy. Luckily for us, a tiny surplus of matter (perhaps one particle in a billion) survived the carnage. The leftover particles of matter got locked into place because temperatures were soon too low to turn them back into pure energy. And that leftover stuff is what our universe is made of. As temperatures fell, matter diversified. Electrons and neutrinos were ruled by electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. The protons and neutrons that form

The mapping began with nebulae, fuzzy blurs that popped up on all their star charts. (We now know that most nebulae are entire galaxies, each with billions of stars.) How far away were the nebulae?

same principle works with starlight. If a star or galaxy is moving toward Earth, the frequency of its light waves will seem to increase. Our eyes interpret higher-frequency visible light as blue light, so we say it has shifted toward the blue end of the electromagnetic spectrum. But if it is moving away from Earth, the frequency of its light will seem to

1929, he demonstrated that almost all galaxies appeared to be moving away from us and that the most remote objects seemed to have the largest redshifts. In other words, the more distant an object was, the faster it was moving away. And that seemed to mean that the entire universe was expanding. The Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître had already suspected this on purely theoretical grounds. And, as Lemaître pointed out,

discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation persuaded most astronomers that the big bang was real because no other theory could explain this all-pervading radiation. Making an odd but ultimately

Today, the evidence that our universe began in a big bang is overwhelming. Lots of details remain to be worked out, but for the time being, the core idea is firmly established as the first chapter of a modern origin story. That’s the bootstrap. And, as quantum physics allows things to appear from a vacuum, it seems that the entire universe really did pop out of a sort of nothingness full of potential.14

The first law of thermodynamics tells us that the total amount of energy in the universe never changes. It is conserved. Our universe seems to have arrived with a fixed potential for things to happen.

gravity can move them in close formation and in the same direction, like soldiers on the march. As water pours over the edge, potential energy turns into kinetic energy, or energy of motion. This is coordinated movement in a single direction. It’s structured, so we can describe the energy that drives it as free energy. And free energy, unlike the random heat energy of gas molecules, can do work because it has some structure and shape and can push things in a single direction rather than pushing them every which way.1 If you wanted to, you could direct this flow of free energy through a turbine and generate electricity. Free energy is what gets things done. It’s the fast-moving, unstoppable Energizer bunny of our origin story.

But unlike energy in general, free energy is not conserved. It’s unstable, like an uncoiling spring. As it does work, it loses both its structure and the ability to do more work. When the water from a waterfall smashes into rocks at the bottom, it turns into the scattered, incoherent energy of heat. Every molecule jiggles around more or less independently. The energy is still there; it’s still conserved (that’s the first law). But the molecules push in so many directions that their energy can no longer drive a turbine. Free energy has turned into heat energy. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that, in the very long run, all free energy will turn into heat energy.

gravity forced atoms together, they collided more often and jiggled more frenetically. That drove up temperatures in the clumpier regions, as more heat was concentrated in smaller volumes of space. (The same principle explains why a tire gets warmer when you pump it up.) While most of the universe kept cooling, the clumpy bits began to heat up again. Eventually, some clumps got so hot that protons could no longer hold on to their electrons. Atoms broke apart, re-creating inside each clump the charged plasma, crackling with

electricity, that had once pervaded the entire universe. As gravity piled on the pressure, denser regions got denser, their cores got hotter, and gravity began to re-create the high energies of the early universe. At roughly ten million degrees Celsius, protons have so much energy that they can collide violently enough to overcome the repulsion of their positive charges. Once pushed across this barrier, protons began to link up in pairs, bound together by the strong nuclear force, which operates only over tiny distances. Proton pairs formed helium nuclei as they had done, briefly, once before, just after the big bang. As protons fused, some of their mass was turned

Entropy loves this deal because the energy that props up a star, like the energy of a waterfall, eventually degrades when it is released into space. So, while the star is getting more complex, it’s also helping entropy degrade free energy into heat energy. This is something we will see throughout

the modern origin story. Increasing complexity is not a triumph over entropy. Paradoxically, the flows of energy that sustain complex things (including you and me) are helping entropy with its bleak task of slowly breaking down all forms of order and structure.

Hydrogen and helium were the first elements to be made because they are the simplest. Hydrogen has one proton in its nucleus, so we say it has atomic number 1. Helium has two protons in its nucleus, so its atomic number is 2. When the CMBR was emitted, about 380,000 years after the big bang, there was also a sprinkling of lithium (atomic number 3) and beryllium (atomic number 4). And that was it. These were the only elements created in the big bang. The Goldilocks conditions for creating more elements with larger nuclei were simple: lots of protons and very high temperatures, temperatures that had not existed since just after the big bang. Those

temperatures would be created inside the dramatic, conflicted world of dying stars as they wearied, staggered, and eventually broke down, no longer able to pay entropy’s complexity taxes.

understand how stars manufacture new elements in their death throes, we need to understand how they live and age. Stars live for millions or billions of years, so we cannot watch them aging. That’s why ...

There are three main areas of interest in the diagram. Crossing the diagram, in a broad, curved band extending from the bottom right to the top left, is the main sequence. Most stars will spend about 90