Here we will introduce you to a physical system that is a beautiful gift of nature: the plasma that existed from the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang until it transitioned to a neutral gas ...Here we will introduce you to a physical system that is a beautiful gift of nature: the plasma that existed from the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang until it transitioned to a neutral gas 380,000 years later. Gently disturbed away from equilibrium by mysterious, very early-universe processes, the plasma is an unusually simple, natural system whose dynamics are calculable and also observable in maps of CMB intensity and polarization.
