- land, sea, air, life

- where did they all come from?

Look up into space from our planet

and what you see is a vast cosmos - teaming with billions of stars and galaxies.

Turn back the clock over 13 billion years and our universe was a very different place,

back then it was small that it could fit inside the palm of your hand.

Form this infant universe everything would be created

- stars, galaxies and the building blocks of life itself.

the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood

the atoms for the air we breathe - the water we drink

the raw materials for our cities and machines

Naked Science takes a journey through space and time

to discover how the universe was born

and how it created everything in our world

- and how eventually it will die.

Everything we see around us is made of matter - atoms and molecules.

Take this car - it's a 1956 Ford Fairlaine Convertible.

It's constructed from many different materials like steel, rubber and glass¡­

Go deeper and these materials are made up from combinations of elements like iron, silicon, chromium and carbon

Each and every atom that makes up this car were created by our growing universe.

Physicist Laurence Krauss studies how the atoms we see on our planet have come to be here

We really are part stardust and part big bang dust.

Most of the atoms in our body are from the cores of stars

but some of them have been around from the earliest moments of the big bang.

So we really are truly cosmic individuals

Each and every atom was created over billions of years as our universe evolved.

So when we look at this car, of course, all the atoms in this car came from stellar explosions,

from supernova processes and from stellar evolution,

but they were created at different times during the evolution of the Universe

To understand how the universe made all the raw material we see here on Earth,

we need to take an incredible journey

and travel back through space and time to the moment our universe was born.

In the beginning there was nothing.

No space, no time

And then there was light.

Suddenly a tiny speck of light appears - it was infinitely hot.

Inside this tiny fireball was all of space

This was literally the beginning of time.

The cosmic clock was ticking - time could flow and space expand.

At the earliest moments of the big bang, if you take it back to T=zero,

everything in our universe, everything we can see, all the matter and all the energy in all of the galaxies

was once contained in a region smaller than the size of a single atom today,

The idea that our universe was once tiny originated from the brilliant work of American astronomer Edwin Hubble.

Back in the 1920's most astronomers believed that everything visible in the night sky were stars

and they were part of our galaxy - the Milky Way

But Hubble wasn't convinced.

He studied a swirling cloud of light called the Andromeda Nebula and showed that it was a star city

another galaxy far outside of our own galaxy

He showed that these 'other' galaxies were speeding away from ours

and the further away they were, the faster they seemed to be moving

The universe was expanding

and if the universe was expanding, then at some point in the past it must have been smaller

- much smaller

and that it must have had a beginning.

The idea of the 'Big Bang' was born.

Theoretical physicist David Spergel is a Big Bang expert

The Big Bang theory is not really a theory of how the Universe began;

it's really a theory of how the Universe evolved

No-one knows exactly what happened during the Big Bang

but scientists do know that a fraction of a second after the universe was born

this tiny super-hot fireball was already starting to expand

We don't know how the Universe began,

so we start our story when the Universe was a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a minute old

Pretty young, the Universe was the size of a marble

Less than a trillion trillionth of a second after the Big Bang

the marble sized universe was very unstable and underwent an enormous growth spurt.

During this period of incredibly rapid expansion,

Space itself was expanding faster than the speed of light.

In the same way that this hot glass ball inflates, so did the baby universe

expanding in all directions at once and as it expanded it cooled.

A trillion trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was small enough to fit inside the palm of your hand.

A tiny fraction of a second later it was the size of Mars

Another fraction of a second and the baby universe had grown to 80 times the size of the earth.

A trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and our newborn universe was still expanding

But it didn't contain matter - it was pure energy

Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 showed that mass and energy are interchangeable

It gave us the knowledge to build weapons of mass destruction.

It also revealed how the universe created the first matter.

When a nuclear bomb explodes

a tiny amount of matter is annihilated and converted into energy.

In the baby universe the exact opposite happened.

It converted pure energy into particles of matter.

But there was a problem.

The universe created both matter and its arch rival anti-matter

- and when these two met they obliterated each other.

The infant universe was a war zone - a battle to the death between matter and antimatter

If they mutually annihilated each other the universe would remain full of energy with no galaxies, stars, planets or life

Fortunately for us there was an imbalance.

For every 100 million anti-particles formed, there were 100 million and 1 particles of matter

But there was that one extra particle of matter left over in each volume,

and that was enough to account for everything we see in the universe today,

This tiny imbalance led to all matter we see in the universe

- galaxies, stars, planets, - even convertibles and ourselves.

Astrophysicist Carlos Frenk from Durham University in England explains.

We are a little bit of debris left over from the annihilation of matter and antimatter;

we're the leftovers of that process.

If the Universe had not developed this slight asymmetry between matter and antimatter

the Universe would have been completely boring, there would be no structure, there would be no galaxies, there would be no planets,

Quite what this newborn Universe was like has challenged cosmologists since the Big Bang was first put forward.

Now in one of the biggest laboratories on Earth

they are able to recreate the conditions that almost certainly existed an instant after the Big Bang.

It's called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider - RHIC for short

and it's located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.

It's like a time machine - taking us back to 10 millionths of a second after the Big Bang

Here scientists like Todd Satogata accelerate subatomic particles close to the speed of light and then smash them into each other.

The particles race around this 2.5 mile long circular tunnel in opposite directions 78,000 times a second¡­

and then collide inside this giant detector - bigger than a 3 story house¡­

When they smash into each other they generate incredible heat - just like the real infant universe

We believe the early universe was extremely hot billions of times hotter than the centre of the sun

and what you're doing smashing these nuclei together is melting matter, creating matter hot enough to give us a glimpse of what the very early universe was like

When the particles collide they break open and throw out a shower of even smaller particles

It's a bit like discovering what cars are made of by watching them smash into each other

You can race two race-cars together and smash them into each other head-on,

and when you do that multiple times you start to see different patterns coming out,

a tyre comes out here, a radiator comes out there,

and before long you can start to conclude that a race-car is made up of these certain pieces.

What the scientists at Brookhaven have discovered is that within these superheated collisions a completely new form of matter appears.

And this matter contradicts the previous theories on the nature of the early universe.

Because it's not a gas - it's a liquid.

It was super hot - 100,000,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun

There was so much energy inside the young universe that the particles vibrated so fast that it had no stickiness

there was no friction and it flowed perfectly.

This liquid is perfect, it has no viscosity, in some sense it would be the perfect motor oil except it's a trillion degrees hot.

Inside the collider this amazing liquid Universe exists for only a tiny fraction of a second.

The Brookhaven scientists have succeeded in recreating conditions that existed over 13 billion years ago

Despite the universe being a perfect liquid - it was in turmoil.

It was full of subatomic particles smashing into each other releasing more and more energy

There was so much energy that unless the particles slowed down they would never bond and create atoms

- the building blocks of matter

- and the universe would never create the galaxies and stars or even us.

The universe is now one millionth of a second old

and has expanded from smaller than the size of an atom to 8 times the size of the solar system

After the incredible turmoil of the first millionth of a second the Universe was now relatively calm

Over the next three minutes the expanding cosmos cooled sufficiently for protons and neutrons to bind together

and form the first atomic nuclei: hydrogen and helium.

These were not yet proper atoms

They were missing a vital ingredient - the electron

In the hot baby universe there were plenty of electrons around,

but there was still so much heat and energy the electrons were moving too fast to form bonds

And it would stay that way for over three hundred thousand years.

380,000 years after the Big Bang the universe had expanded to the size of the Milky Way.

It had cooled from billions of degrees Fahrenheit to a few thousand

As it cooled, the electrons slowed down.

The universe was now ready to make its first true elements.

One of the scientists who discovered this critical moment in the story of the universe was Arno Penzias.

1963, 30-year-old Penzias and his 27-year-old colleague Robert Wilson began work on a new antenna in New Jersey.

Initially they were only studying cosmic radio waves

- but they would stumble on one of the greatest discoveries of all time.

As they started to test their equipment, they detected an unexpected background noise

It was an additional signal and it appeared to be coming from the sky,

we eliminated very carefully the ground, even the solar system,

because we did this winter to summer, seasonal variation,

man-made sources of equipment, all these things were eliminated.

In desperation, the two scientists began to wonder whether the strange signal might have another, more earthly, origin

They found there were pigeons roosting in the antenna, and it was covered with droppings

They wondered if the pigeons were the source of the strange signal.

There was only one solution: the droppings and the pigeons would have to go

When we finally got around to removing the pigeon droppings, we also had to remove the pigeons

and that was a difficult problem because they turned out to want to come back and so we mailed them off to another site

But even with the troublesome pigeons gone, the mysterious signal would