This student text describes Epoch One in our Evolving Universe. It is the last student text of the Tracing the Origins of Our Universe activity.

Feel the number One in the upper left corner of the card. Place your Epoch One Tactile Card to the right of the Epoch Two Tactile card on the table.

This very small epoch card is filled with question marks because Epoch One is called the Mysterious Epoch. The details of what happened during this epoch are not known.

The time span for this epoch is from zero seconds to ten to the negative forty-third seconds.

The events that happened here are sometimes called the “Big Bang," but there are differing opinions as to what really occurred during this brief time in the history of the universe.

Were quarks or X particles present from the beginning? We do not know.

We are quite confident, however, that the temperature of this high-energy, very compact and condensed first epoch universe was above ten to the thirty-two kelvins.

At these temperatures, it may well be that everything was in energy form.

Where do we go from here?

Now that we have traced the origins of quarks and electrons back to Epoch Two, we need to think about the limitations of our search.

Just as you traced only one pizza ingredient back to its beginning, we did much the same things as we looked for “beginning” of quarks and electrons.

The universe is and was a complicated place with many more things happening than what we have described in these short texts.

There were some tremendous matter-antimatter annihilations taking place that we only briefly mentioned and there were many other small, but significant, matter particles present that we ignored because they did not interact with quarks.

We limited ourselves to one model of the early universe, because it most closely correlates some of the basic precepts of the standard cosmological model with quarks and electrons being the fundamental particles. There are other models that may be just as valid as this one.

Probably one of the most significant results of tracing the history of quarks and electrons in the universe is that we found that their ultimate origin is uncertain. Cosmogonists are still seeking answer to questions about “the beginning.”