In graduate school, I was required to take a lab safety course to familiarize myself with OSHA regulations and the safe handling of hazardous materials. After sitting through a 3-hour experience describing chemical compounds I didn’t work with, and the right way of notifying the authorities of various kinds of radioactive waste, the instructor asked me which department I was in. When I told her I worked on observational astronomy she quipped that I should have asked to leave — all of my dangerous materials were thousands of light years away.
There are a lot of reasons astronomers don’t go to black holes, supernovae, and gamma-ray bursts, and somewhere on that list is the fact that they’d all kill you instantly. Marvel’s First Family don’t think that way. In Ryan North and Cory Smith’s Fantastic Four #33, after having lost their powers, the team devise a scheme to travel back to the earliest moments of the universe for a split-second; just long enough to expose themselves to intense cosmic radiation before returning to the present.
Marvel Comics
You’re probably 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 have used what we know about the fundamental building blocks of reality, coupled with observations on the expansion rate and composition of the known universe, to build a sophisticated understanding of the earliest moments of time. We can’t observe the Big Bang directly, of course, but we can see signals of its after effects, study what the cosmos is made of, measure how it’s distributed, and use that evidence to extrapolate what the conditions must have been like as it expanded rapidly, cooled, and became less dense.
We’ve learned enough now to know how the very first fractions of a second went, as the four fundamental forces of nature “froze” out of a single unified force. We know that the universe must have gone from a period of rapid inflation to baryogenesis (when there proved to be more matter than antimatter) to the first quarks to nucleosynthesis, which created the first elements. Eventually the universe cooled to the point where it became transparent, and some of the light emitted from that time is still visible in the form of the Cosmic Microwave Background, which can tell us a great deal about the early universe.
In order to recharge their powers, the Fantastic Four decide to travel to 10-33 seconds after the Big Bang. This is right around the end of cosmic inflation, when the universe expanded rapidly for reasons which are not well understood, but must have occurred in order to make a modern day universe where space looks uniform in all directions. Massive particles as we know them had not frozen out of the soupy early universe yet, and there were no photons.
Through their excursion, much like in the film Fantastic Four: First Steps, we witness how hugely powerful Susan Storm really is. Her force field is somehow able to let in just the good radiation and block the rest of the maelstrom of creation, while simultaneously protecting their ship as it displaces a volume equivalent to hundreds or thousands of galaxy superclusters.
The time period North chooses for the crew to visit also coincides with one of cosmology’s greatest mysteries: the universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry. For reasons that are currently unknown, our world is made of matter, instead of its complementary counterpart, antimatter. Nothing indicates that there are antimatter stars or galaxies in the modern universe (we’ve looked). Yet, the laws of physics treat matter and antimatter identically, and a universe emerging from the extreme high energy state of the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of both.
So what happened to all the antimatter? It’s possible that some physical mechanism breaks the symmetry, creating one extra matter particle for every, say, two billion matter and antimatter pairs created during baryogenesis, leading to there being slightly more matter than antimatter. Or maybe all the antimatter is still out there, but we haven’t found the right way of looking for it. If you want to get really wild, there could be a reverse universe of antimatter that was created at the moment of the Big Bang, one that travels backward in time instead of forward.
Or, you know, it’s all just in the Negative Zone.
Marvel Comics
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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