TAKE a break from crime, O. J. and Governor Chris Patten's latest salvoes to ask yourself: what happened during the first 0.00000000000000000000000000000001 millisecond of the universe? Why does it matter? Well, astronomers worldwide are about to discover whether the exotic particles produced in this tiny fraction of a second after the big bang still exist - and hence prove their theory of why and how we are here at all.
If those particles cannot be found, then it's back to the drawing board on the whole hypothesis of the universe and the big bang, according to leading cosmologist Michael Turner, who last night gave this year's opening talk in the Hong Kong University Research School lecture series.
Already there are signs this may have to happen.
'Detecting that primary substance that made the universe might be the discovery of half a century, and what's wonderful is that we have the instruments to test for it,' said Professor Turner, from the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Ever since that amazing event billions of years ago, forming a very small, very dense and very hot 'soup' of primeval particles, the universe had been forming bigger structures such as galaxies and planets, expanding and cooling, he said.
But though that was known back to a mere 0.00001 of a second after the big bang, fundamental questions such as how much matter the universe contained - which would indicate how long it would continue to expand - and how the soup became 'lumpy' in its first rapid inflation phase would be answered by studying the tiny fraction of time before that.
