To my understanding, at the very beginning there was the big bang when nothing (or everything?) existed in singularity, and then at some early point hydrogen came to existence. I understand how stars churn with gravity and heat and whatnot those bigger atoms such as iron at later stages of the universe. But how and why did hydrogen happen as the first atom, and why didn’t we have, say, uranium straight from the beginning?
In: Physics
In order to build something complicated, you often have to build its simpler components first. Once you have protons and electrons, hydrogen is just about the simplest thing you can build, it’s just one proton with an electron buddy.
All other atoms are just more and more complicated combinations of different numbers of protons with electrons, so in a way, hydrogen is the basic building block everything else is made of. That’s why it had to exist first.
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