The Dawn of Elements

“The simulation shimmered into existence around Aris—a holographic recreation of the universe’s first billion years. He adjusted a parameter, slowing down time to observe the initial moments after the Big Bang.  It wasn't an explosion in the traditional sense, but rather an incredibly rapid expansion from a state smaller than an atom. As the universe cooled, energy coalesced, giving rise to fundamental particles—quarks and leptons—the building blocks of all matter.

Protons began to form when quarks, bound together by the strong force, clustered into groups of three.  Neutrons formed similarly, with slightly different quark combinations.  These protons and neutrons were unstable at first; their interactions violent and unpredictable. Aris fast-forwarded through millennia, watching as gravity slowly pulled these particles together, forming the first hydrogen atoms—simple structures consisting of a single proton and an electron orbiting it.

'It’s remarkable,' Aris murmured to his AI assistant, Lyra. 'The sheer improbability of it all.'

‘Probability isn’t always about likelihood, Doctor,’ Lyra responded in her synthesized voice. ‘It’s about the underlying equations that govern the process. The universe seems remarkably efficient at self-organization.’

Helium formed next—two protons and two neutrons bound together—followed by lithium.  Each new element demanded a precise balance of forces. If the conditions had been even slightly different, the universe might have been composed entirely of hydrogen, or collapsed into a black hole long ago.

As protons and neutrons combined, electrons began to settle into predictable energy levels around the nucleus – what physicists called ‘orbitals.’ It’s these orbitals that dictate an atom's properties: its reactivity, how it interacts with other atoms, whether it forms molecules.  Aris noticed a slight anomaly within the simulation—a momentary divergence from expected behaviour in the early lithium formation. A ripple of energy pulsed outwards, briefly disrupting the stability of the nascent hydrogen atoms nearby.

‘Lyra, run diagnostics on the lithium sequence,’ Aris ordered. ‘I'm detecting an unusual fluctuation.’  He had a feeling that this anomaly held a connection to the strange patterns he was observing in Aetherium—a hint, perhaps, that the universe’s harmony wasn’t as perfect as it seemed.”