Ben Kilminster is a friend and a distinguished colleague working for the CMS and CDF experiments. Besides being a long-time higgs hunter, having sought that particle for over a decade in the two mentioned experiments, Ben is a veteran of science outreach since for many years he has published summaries of CDF results for the public on the online magazine "Fermilab Today". When I saw him posting on a social network an earlier version of the text below, which I liked a lot, I asked him to make it a guest post entry for my blog, and he graciously agreed. The piece is titled "How The Universe Works - in Ten Sentences". Thanks Ben!

I mark with a * some logical leaps that scientists make.

The

universe began*, and when it  was just a 10 billionth of a second

old, and about 100 trillion times hotter than today, the weak nuclear

force that mutates matter into other types of matter and

the electromagnetic force that attracts charged objects spontaneously

broke apart.

At some point in these first

moments, matter became favored* over anti-matter, and as the

universe grew colder, bound states of quarks were created from

the strong nuclear force, producing protons which later attracted

electrons through the electromagnetic force to make hydrogen. 

Due

to a large amount of an unknown component* of matter called dark

matter, hydrogen clumped into various scales of structure, which

later collapsed into clusters of galaxies and galaxies within them. 

Another unknown

component* of energy kept the universe expanding at ever increasing

speeds, resisting the gravitational urge to collapse everything, but

meanwhile the hydrogen in the galaxies was gravitationally collapsing

into stars. 

The stars burned for a while

using the weak nuclear force to produce energy to avert their total

gravitational collapse, but finally  ran out of hydrogen, and the

extreme pressure of the collapse fused hydrogen into heavy elements

while blowing up the stars. 

The

stars coalesced again with hydrogen and these heavier elements, and

began burning again, providing tremendous heat and gravity even hundreds

of millions of miles away, while some of the ejected material

was attracted into stable structures, gravitationally bound to the

stars, called  planets, composed of metals and other heavy elements

that made them heavy enough to attract an atmosphere and provide lots of

elements for molecular structures. 

In

planets far enough from the stars for liquids not to freeze or

evaporate, the heat and elements started chemical

reactions which produced complex molecules, and as the molecules

starting interacting, more complex molecular chains were formed, and

eventually generated structures which were capable of replicating. 

The successful

chains continued to engulf other materials to sustain their

growth*, and life was born, competing until some of them were dominant

over the others, successfully garnering more of the molecules available,

and over time, some living structures began to work together

forming more complex structures in order to eat more stuff, and

reproduce themselves, using a detailed molecular plan of their

properties. 

Finally, the complex structures began asking silly questions like how the universe works in less than 10 sentences.

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