Glad you replied, Creig, and, no, you are not lost. Your brain is working perfectly well. Your reaction is also perfectly normal.
First off, the cube is an abstract, so the demand is that you have to think in generic terms to follow the story -- that is not easy.
Then, the specifics that we do know are investigated. So, it is a combination of abstract thinking and placing known facts into that setting.
You are smart replying, because it tells me you are curious.
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Let me try simplify it for you and slow the pace some.
A: We live in a result.
That is already very important, because anything we have detected is therefore part of the resulting outcome.
If you are thinking that 'the whole will therefore be whole as well' -- then don't. The current whole we exist in is no longer whole (that's why we say we live in a result).
Keep that in mind. The prior state 'broke' at a fundamental level, otherwise we would still be in the original state. We still have the same total though. Just like a vase that breaks collectively is still the same total, just now in tatters. The broken pieces add up to the same as the whole vase.
B: Neutrons and protons are the parts we find in the nuclei of atoms.
The third major part is the electron. So, to keep it simple, we have three essential parts of what makes up matter. It's not the whole story, but the focus of the article is just the two major parts that are in the nuclei of atoms. That should keep it simpler: just the material in the center of atoms.
Neutrons and protons, therefore, and physicists have discovered that the inner parts of neutrons and protons are quarks.
That is the starting point, Creig.
Here are the steps, again I am taking it slow:
1. We must start out with energy that existed already. We only know about the beginning of matter. We do not know anything about the beginning of energy, and it is improper to combine both then into one event. The focus is therefore on the first establishment of matter as a result. We are limited in what we can explain, and yet we can explain that limited outcome fully. We can explain why matter came into being.
2. The results did happen, so the normal reality of the prior state of the universe had to have changed. Had the prior state not changed, we'd still be in it. Note how the reason for that change must have been part as well of the prior state. Obviously, the results do not explain the results. The reason for the results must be found at the end of the prior state.
3. The normal conditions of the prior state must have ended up becoming extreme conditions to help explain why something (matter) came into being that had not existed as such (it had been original energy only, nothing material yet). Normal situations do not birth totally new outcomes. Also, no 100% normal overall situation can end up becoming a 100% overall extreme situation. Therefore we can say that, for instance, 68% of all that energy helped create an extreme condition for the other 32% of that energy. The 68% was engaged, but was itself not in any extreme territory. It was the 32% that was in trouble.
4. In that setting, the center of the extreme conditions would not have become damaged. Let's declare that center as 27%. When pressure comes in from all sides, then that 27% center is stuck, cannot budge. It can therefore also not get damaged. Let's call that Zone 1. It was in trouble, but it did not sustain damage.
5. Zone 2 right next to the stuck center will, however, get warped. Zone 2 is where energy got exposed to extreme conditions as well, but then additionally it is also subjected to a bit of friction. A double-whammy therefore. This energy is not fully stuck in place and got churned because of friction as part of the package; this energy got damaged into the quarks. Let’s state that this Zone 2 is 5% of all energy involved in the setup.
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6. Then, due to the damage in Zone 2 (and not in Zone 1 or Zone 3), the extreme conditions stopped being sustained. The immediate reaction is one of letting go of the extreme conditions, and what automatically follows is then a flow (a retraction) toward normal conditions.
7. At the CMBR (placed at 380,000 years from the mathematical center), the extreme conditions finally returned to normal conditions. But... the damaged energy, the quarks, could not return to their original shape. This means that the outward motion of moving from extreme toward normal conditions did not stop at the CMBR, the outbound motion continued. It’s a slingshot in all directions.
8. The quarks find themselves caught naked in the open at the CMBR, damaged goods and all, and they had to establish new balances among themselves. They did so at first opportunity. The quarks established the neutrons and the protons. Six different quarks becoming neutrons and protons in which up and down are dominant. To provide a simple view on what happened, this is akin to six people speaking six different languages, English, French, Swahili, Spanish, Mandarin, and German, and then forming two different tight-knit groups in which they speak just either English or Mandarin.
9. Because the protons still showed a positive charge, the electrons come to the rescue. The electrons is the third major component of atoms. To keep it simple, we can say there are just three major components to matter. With all energy on the same outbound trajectory, what had been undamaged energy in Zone 1 and Zone 3 now provided the relief for the positive charge of the protons. Just a tiny bit of energy is used, not much, but the positive proton charges are all secured in a neutral outcome (though at the subatomic levels the charges still exist because the electrons neutralized but did not annihilate the positive charges of the protons).
The universe as a whole is neutral in charge.
So, we have two rebalancing acts in sequence. Quarks becoming neutrons and protons, self-based. And, next, the electrons pulled into this environment to neutralize (return to balance) the positive charges of the protons.
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This should already help, Creig.
One more aspect to think about: the Broken Toy story.
The Broken Toy story tells us two facts.
1. Nothing of the toy disappeared. All is still there, but the toy is in tatters.
2. The special trick the toy could perform is now gone forever. The toy cannot repair itself.
This Broken Toy story helps in placing a special ability with the prior state of the universe.
The sad or interesting part is that the special ability helped set up the extreme conditions among the energy of the prior state of the universe. So, the ability to set that up is also what ended that ability to be in existence today.
We live in a setting that at best is the Milky Way. We are not connected to anything else in the universe (happenstance notwithstanding). So when you think Universe, always think broken. If you think Milky Way (or other galaxies) think largest engaged material setting whole by itself (on some level of reality).
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Some have told me that after reading the article three times, they finally got it. The quarks are damaged, and they cannot sustain themselves as damaged; they had to collaborate together with other quarks. They had to be in balance.
Only energy in Zone 2 got damaged, which means that 95% of all energy in the universe is still whole. Yet this is not a single whole.
The universe that once was is perhaps best described as an ocean. Now it is a setting in which smaller (but still enormous) oceans like the Milky Way are floating in their own directions. The big large complete whole ocean is no longer.
Let me know if you succeeded seeing the perspective on how we ended up with this result.
