In The Beginning

• Nelson Gardner, Grade 5, Tighes Hill Public School
• Short Story
• 2014

Excellence Award in the 'Write As Rain 2014' competition

In beginning there was no time, no space, nothing.

A faint light sparked the beginning of the universe; it expanded into nothing but itself. It would have continued this way if expansion did not happen. An explosion the equivalent to a combusting bag of flour started the expansion. Now the universe is 0.000002 seconds old, sparks the building blocks of matter and the first atoms to be created.

More atoms are being created, for example: Leptons, X-Bosons and Magnetic Monopoles. The universe is now 0.000004 seconds old, X-Bosons don’t last very long and dissolve into matter and antimatter. Antimatter reacts with matter and they annihilate each other. Atomic black holes (as heavy as a mountain and as small as an atom) float around in the cosmic soup.

Protons consist of one down quark and two up quarks while neutrons are made of two down quarks and one up quark. The universe is now 0.000005 seconds old, 1000 times denser than water and 2,000,000 degrees Celsius. Gluons join particles and make the elements hydrogen, helium and lithium.

At two minutes, the universe is 100x denser than water and 1752000 degrees Celsius. The atoms are making more complex elements such as gold and carbon. When the universe is five years old, the first stars arise in spinning disks as mini galaxies. The remaining clumps of gas and dust suck up other clumps and get big enough to be planets.

As stars move closer, the first galaxies form. At 300,000 years a special galaxy is formed, The Milky Way.