And yet, despite all of this progress, many important questions remain unanswered—in particular when it comes to our universe’s earliest moments. We still don’t know, for example, how the protons and neutrons that make up the atoms in our universe survived the heat of the Big Bang. From what we do know, it seems that these particles should have gone extinct long before a single atom had had the chance to form. But something that we don’t yet understand must have prevented this from taking place.
