Earth Energy Awareness

Big Bang, taking place 13.8 billion years ago, marked the birth of our Universe. At the end of the Planck era, the gravitational force split from the GUT force (the combined force that included the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces). At the end of the GUT era, the GUT force split further into the electroweak force and the strong force, which holds atomic nuclei together. This split began an era of inflation during which the Universe grew at an exponential rate. At the end of the electroweak era, the electromagnetic force separated from the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay of atomic nuclei.

The evolution of Universe is driven by an interplay between matter (the physical stuff that uses atoms as basic units) and energy (a less tangible stuff associated with motion, heat, and 4 fundamental forces of nature). Without energy, the Universe would be a static, unchanging, and lifeless place. We do not have to strictly distinguish between energy and matter because Einstein's theory of relativity suggests that energy and matter are equivalent. Early in the Universe, matter and antimatter would annihilate to produce energy in the form of gamma ray photons, and colliding gamma ray photons could annihilate to produce a matter-antimatter pair of particles. There was a slight imbalance between matter and antimatter, which is why we live in a Universe of matter now.