How the Universe Works
Season 1
TV Series | How the Universe Works | Contents page
How the Universe Works S01E01
Part 1
April 18, 2021, 7:55 p.m.
Billions and billions of galaxies.
The universe is so vast
we can't even imagine
what those numbers mean.
But 14 billion years
ago, none of it existed..
until the big bang.
The big bang is the origin of
space and the origin of time itself.
We take a journey
through space and time,
from the beginning to the
end of the universe itself.
How the Universe Works
Big Bang
This is our world.
Cities...
forests...
oceans...
people.
Everything in the universe
is made from matter created in
the first seconds of the big bang.
Every star...
every planet...
every atom...
every blade of grass,
every drop of water.
Water is ancient
The hydrogen atoms in here were
born moments after the big bang.
Then came everything else.
The big bang is the defining
event of our universe...
and everything in it.
The secrets of our past,
our present, and our future...
are locked inside this
one moment in time.
To unlock the secrets of the big bang,
we have to travel outside
of our own solar system.,.
and journey beyond even our own galaxy.
As we travel into deep space,
we're actually seeing into the past,
and getting closer to being able
to witness the dawn of time itself
Passing the first infant
galaxies and the first stars,
we arrive back at the
moment the universe began
and face the biggest
questions in all of science.
This is the Holy Grail of physics.
We wanna know why it banged.
We wanna know what banged.
We wanna know what was
there before the bang.
To get the answers,
we've built machines the size of cities
to simulate conditions when
the universe was created..
and space telescopes to
peer deep into our past
We are getting close to
answering the old age questions
why are we here?
Where did we come from?
Does the universe, in fact,
have a beginning or an end?
And if so, what are they like?
If we find the answer to that,
it would be the ultimate
triumph of human reason.
We would know the mind of God,
The origin of the big bang is
the greatest mystery of all time.
And the more we learn, the
deeper the mystery becomes.
We like to think that
our universe is unique.
However, now we're not so sure.
Perhaps there is a
multi-verse of universes.
Another possibility is that our big
bang is just one of many big bangs.
But it may be one of just an infinite...
number of universes,
and there may be other regions
in that infinite number of universes
where a big bang is
just happening today.
But there's only one
universe we're sure of,
and understanding this
one is hard enough.
Since the late 1920s,
everything we know about
how our universe works
has been turned upside-down.
It's important to realise
how much our picture of
the universe has changed
in the last century.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
the conventional wisdom in science was
that the universe was static and eternal.
In 1929, that all changed.
At the Mount Wilson
Observatory, above Los Angeles,
astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered
galaxies aren't stuck in one place.
Not only are they moving,
but they're flying away from
Earth at incredible speeds.
This was the first real
evidence of the big bang.
All galaxies on average
were moving away from us,
and stranger still,
those that were twice as far
away were moving twice as fast.
And those that were three times as far away
were moving three times as fast and so on.
Everything was moving away from us.
It became known as Hubble's Law.
His discovery is still the starting
point for exploration of the big bang.
What Hubble convincingly demonstrated
by seeing the motion of those galaxies
is that the universe is expanding.
Theoretically, an expanding universe
must have started from a single point.
By measuring how fast
the universe is expanding,
astronomers calculated backwards
and figured out when it burst into life.
People ask the question,
"How do you know that the universe
is 13.7 billion years old?"
I mean, smarty pants, you weren't
there 13.7 billion years ago.
Well, when you watch
television on videotape,
you hit the stop button
when you see an explosion,
and you could run it backwards and
see when it actually took place.
The same thing takes
place with cosmology.
We can run the videotape backwards
and then calculate when it all
came from a cosmic explosioa
How the Universe Works
Season 1
TV Series | How the Universe Works | Contents page