10-35 to 10-32

During this short snippet of time, known as the Era of Inflation, the strong nuclear force separates from the remaining two unified forces: the electromagnetic and weak. Scientists are still not sure how and why this happened, but they believe it sparked an intense expansion — or “inflation” — of the universe. Measurements of the expansion during this time are extremely hard to comprehend. It seems that the universe grew by some 100 million billion billion times.

Things at this point are really strange. Energy exists, but light as we know it does not. That’s because light is a wave that travels through space — and there is no open space yet! In fact, space is so crammed full of high-energy phenomena right now that matter itself cannot yet exist. Sometimes astronomers refer to the universe during this time as soup, because it’s just so hard to imagine how thick and energetic it would have been. But even soup is a poor descriptor. The cosmos at this time is thick with energy, not matter.