“Wissenschaft für jedermann": Big Bang and stardust

Prof. Andreas Burkert provides insight into a very special property of the universe: The "whole" is more than its individual components. The interaction between the components leads to complexity, self-organization, and new so-called emergent properties that are not apparent in the individual components. Life, for example, is an emergent process. Did it all begin with the Big Bang? Are we part of the blueprint of the universe? Or something else? Emergence research attempts to find answers to these fascinating questions.

This lecture is in German.

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The question "Where do we come from?" is one of humanity's most fundamental questions. Modern cosmology answers it with the Big Bang, which led to the creation of the universe 13.82 billion years ago. The Big Bang created the primordial building block of matter: hydrogen. In the hot centers of stars, the hydrogen then formed heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, the building blocks of life. If we trace the history of atoms in our bodies back, we always end up either in a star or at the Big Bang! Atoms don't age, and all atoms of a chemical element are identical. We owe our existence to this timeless and absolute order of matter. But if that were all there was, we wouldn't exist.