Cosmogony In SF

"'We believe all matter began as a chaos of hydrogen, the smallest atom. Some of it was fused in the primordial fireball to form helium...'"

-Mirkheim, I, p. 42.

 

Does this mean that first there was a chaos of hydrogen, then there was a primordial fireball fusing some of the hydrogen into helium? Whichever way it happened, what preceded or produced either the chaos or the fireball?

 

"'The galaxies were formed by the condensation of monstrous hydrogen clouds. But there wasn't an absolute vacuum between them. Especially not in the beginning, when the universe hadn't yet expanded very far.'"

-Poul Anderson, World Without Stars (New York, 1966), II, p. 18.

 

This account mentions hydrogen but not the fireball or helium although it does mention expansion which, we understand, began from the fireball.

"'...the universe originated as a quantum fluctuation in the seething sea of the vacuum, a random concentration of energy so great that it expanded explosively. Out of this condensed the first particles, and from them evolved atoms, stars, planets, and living creatures.'"

-Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999), Prologue, p. 9.

Presumably those first atoms that evolved were hydrogen. Thus, this account presents four earlier stages:

vacuum

quantum fluctuation

expansion

first particles

 

"'The ylem was the primordial flux of neutrons out of which all else emerged...'"

-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities in Flight (London, 1981), CHAPTER SEVEN, 579.

 

So those neutrons were the first particles.