For our Christian friends lurking in this thread who are scratching their heads about the problem of compressing matter to extremely small volumes, I offer a little lecture. Some people have already touched on these things, but I’d like to make it tidy. Most posters here can skip this. Here goes...
The matter that was compressed in the Big Bang was not in the form of stars, planets, galaxies, dirt, or even atoms as we know them today. The closer you get to the hypothetical Point of Origin -- the Big Bang -- the weirder matter gets.
At a certain point in time, the universe was nothing but hydrogen atoms (mostly, to be precise). As you go backwards in time, getting closer to the BB, there’s not a hydrogen atom to be found, only baryons -- protons and neutrons. Keep going and there are no baryons any more, only a kind of quark-gluon plasma. Keep going and you pass the inflationary period where even the quarks disappear. Some theories have a universe entirely made of strings, from the infamous superstring theory. Keep going, and who knows what you get. At his point, we simply don’t. However, there’s nothing to say we
can’t. Eventually.
In fact, we know that at each point along the way, matter becomes increasingly compressible. We even have evidence of this from the real world, such as with neutron stars
WP:
A typical neutron star has a mass between 1.35 and about 2.1 solar masses, with a corresponding radius between 20 and 10 km,[1] respectively—in contrast, the Sun is 30,000 to 70,000 times larger. Thus, neutron stars have overall densities of 8.4 × 1016 to 1 × 1018 kg/m³,[2] which compares with the approximate density of an atomic nucleus of 3 × 1017 kg/m³.[3] The neutron star's density varies from below 1 × 109 kg/m³ in the crust increasing with depth to above 6 or 8 × 1017 kg/m³ deeper inside.[4]
This relates to the Chandrasekhar limit discussed above. It’s roughly the dividing line between a normal star (down to a white dwarf) and a neutron star. After that, you’re looking at the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, which defines the line between a neutron star, and what would be a quark star (if they exist). The densities correspondingly increase. That is, matter becomes increasingly compressible.
But that’s not the whole story. As has been mentioned, even the five forces get weird the closer you get to the BB. The strong and weak nuclear forces become indistinguishable from each other, and that force merges with electromagnetism, and eventually even gravity joins the fray until you’re left with only one single superforce.
But even that’s not all. The distinction between force and force carrier blurs at some point. The difference between force and force carrier, and spacetime itself eventually blurs.
In short, the higher your energy density, the more exotic the universe becomes. At some stage you’re no longer talking about compressing “matter” at all, as we generally think of it.
In fact, The mystery isn’t really that this highly weird, exotic and anti-intuitive universe can become increasingly compressed the closer you get to the BB. The real mystery is that we can actually model what’s happening mathematically. That we can, in some sense, understand it.
How do we do that? Ah, yes... they call it “science.” Wonderful stuff, that.
Okay, class dismissed.
