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In the universe we see that hydrogen (bound up energy) is found in a highly concentrated ordered state in some places and it's highly dispersed in most other places. There is a natural progression that makes all of the elements heavier than hydrogen so is there a return cycle to make hydrogen again? If not, how did hydrogen (bound up energy) get into a highly concentrated ordered state as we see it today? (You could appeal to another universe and it still will not answer the question of how energy got ordered or made for that matter.)

Jungle Jargon
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    You may want to edit your question and remove the last part: " I need to have..." – user190081 Nov 05 '18 at 17:10
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    Your title asks about energy, but the question itself asks about hydrogen. That's a bit confusing, so you should fix the title to better reflect your question. Or change the question body to match the title, if you are really asking about energy. – PM 2Ring Nov 05 '18 at 18:07
  • The question is how energy got into an ordered state as we see it today? – Jungle Jargon Nov 05 '18 at 23:10
  • In supernovas, the last phase just before the forming of the black hole or the neutron star is, that the temperature goes over some ten billion Kelvins. On that temperature, even the $He_4$ nuclei break apart, and the collapsing stellar core is pure hidrogen for some seconds. – peterh Nov 05 '18 at 23:54
  • A star that goes supernova is already in an ordered state. My question is how the star got to be in an ordered state in a vacuum where hydrogen disperses into a less ordered state. – Jungle Jargon Nov 06 '18 at 00:05
  • I don't see that my question was answered. We see that the universe is in a highly ordered state. We don't see how it got that way. My question is how did the energy in the universe get ordered. – Jungle Jargon Nov 13 '18 at 01:59

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When you talk about highly concentrated ordered states of hydrogen, are you referring to stars and galaxies? If so, they are formed by gravity. There is not a “return cycle” that makes hydrogen from heavier elements.

G. Smith
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  • It could be planets or stars. – Jungle Jargon Nov 05 '18 at 23:08
  • Gravity assembles planets as well as stars and galaxies. So in that sense energy can order or organize itself. – G. Smith Nov 05 '18 at 23:41
  • There has to be considerable mass for there to be gravity. The first element to have been made is hydrogen which does not have much mass unless it is already compressed into a liquid or semisolid metallic state and there is no energy in a vacuum to do that. (There is no other matter around in the early universe for much gravity to exist.- I don't see where the gravity would come from to bring a gas together in a vacuum.) – Jungle Jargon Nov 05 '18 at 23:53
  • Even in a vacuum? – Jungle Jargon Nov 06 '18 at 00:08
  • Any amount of mass will attract. Gravity doesn’t “start” when you get enough mass. Two H atoms attract, although it’s too small to actually measure. The observable universe has something like 10^80 nucleons. If they were originally perfectly evenly distributed, they wouldn’t clump. But they weren’t, because of quantum fluctuations, so they did start to clump. As soon as the density became a bit larger in some regions, gravity amplified those clumps and eventually produced galaxies. – G. Smith Nov 06 '18 at 00:11
  • Yes, gravity works in a vacuum. – G. Smith Nov 06 '18 at 00:12
  • The reason I ask is that hydrogen disperses in a room with atmospheric pressure. It seems it would disperse much more in a vacuum. – Jungle Jargon Nov 06 '18 at 00:14
  • In the early universe the hydrogen was at a high temperature so it was moving around and bumping into other atoms. Even today, in space, the temperature is nonzero so atoms move around. In that sense they are “dispersing” except that they aren’t going anywhere. In any region, as many atoms are moving in as moving out. Perhaps you are confused by thinking that in the Big Bang matter expanded into empty space. It did not. Space expanded between the matter. – G. Smith Nov 06 '18 at 00:20
  • Speaking of energy organizing itself... Other forces organized energy into protons and neutrons, then nuclei, then atoms, then molecules, then (presumably) cells and living organisms. – G. Smith Nov 06 '18 at 00:26
  • Right, when space expands, distance expands and the rate of time increases. That basically means that everything is expanding together. The result is a vacuum in space where hydrogen gas would disperse, it seems. – Jungle Jargon Nov 06 '18 at 00:29
  • Organisms utilize a flow of energy and they do not order any energy as far as I know. – Jungle Jargon Nov 06 '18 at 00:42
  • I don’t know what “rate of time increases” means. As space expands, the average density of the gas decreases. Cosmologists don’t think of this as dispersion. At each instant after atoms formed, gas fills the expanding universe. This is not dispersion. Dispersion is when gas in a region of higher density moves to a region of lower density. – G. Smith Nov 06 '18 at 00:43
  • A living organism consists of energy in the form of atoms. Its atoms are highly ordered or organized and not random. You disagree? – G. Smith Nov 06 '18 at 00:49
  • The rate of the passing of time probably would not affect whether or not hydrogen disperses in a vacuum. If the early universe was filled with hydrogen atoms, that might explain the clumping. We would have to determine what the density would be. – Jungle Jargon Nov 06 '18 at 00:51
  • Living organisms contain written directives that are carried out. This has to do with information, not physics. That is another can of worms entirely. – Jungle Jargon Nov 06 '18 at 00:54
  • H and He atoms formed about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. (Before that, it was hot enough that any atoms that might have formed immediately got ionized.) According to the Wikipedia article "Chronology of the universe", the density at that time was about 500 atoms per cubic centimeter and the pressure was about $10^{-17}$ atmospheres. – G. Smith Nov 06 '18 at 01:38