00:00:17
rather beautiful, isn't it?
00:00:20
It's quite literally got everything,
00:00:23
from the very big
00:00:24
to the very small.
00:00:26
Sure, there are some less than savory elements in there,
00:00:29
but on the whole, scholars agree that its existence
00:00:32
is probably a good thing.
00:00:34
Such a good thing, that an entire field
00:00:37
of scientific endeavor is devoted to its study.
00:00:40
This is known as cosmology.
00:00:43
Cosmologists look at what's out there in space
00:00:46
and piece together the tale of how our universe evolved:
00:00:50
what it's doing now,
00:00:51
what it's going to be doing,
00:00:53
and how it all began in the first place.
00:00:55
It was Edwin Hubble who first noticed
00:00:58
that our universe is expanding
00:01:00
by noting that galaxies seem to be flying
00:01:02
further and further apart.
00:01:04
This implied that everything should have started
00:01:06
with the monumental explosion
00:01:08
of an infinitely hot,
00:01:10
infinitely small point.
00:01:12
This idea was jokingly referred to at the time
00:01:15
as the "Big Bang,"
00:01:17
but as the evidence piled up,
00:01:22
We know that after the Big Bang,
00:01:24
the universe cooled down
00:01:25
to form the stars and galaxies that we see today.
00:01:29
Cosmologist have plenty of ideas
00:01:31
about how this happened.
00:01:32
But we can also probe the origins of the universe
00:01:35
by recreating the hot, dense conditions that existed
00:01:39
at the beginning of time in the laboratory.
00:01:42
This is done by particle physicists.
00:01:46
Over the past century,
00:01:48
particle physicists have been studying
00:01:50
matter and forces at higher and higher energies.
00:01:53
Firstly with cosmic rays,
00:01:55
and then with particle accelerators,
00:01:57
machines that smash together
00:01:59
subatomic particles at great energies.
00:02:02
The greater the energy of accelerator,
00:02:04
the further back in time they can effectively peek.
00:02:08
Today, things are largely made up of atoms,
00:02:10
but a hundreds of seconds after the Big Bang,
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