First Second Third Fourth Fifth Sixth Seventh.

  Pressing the reset button. A clean slate. A fresh start.

  Everything begins with the First Second. . . .

the first second

Imagine shrinking a proton down to a billionth of it's normal size... Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Bang. You are ready to start a universe.
And so from nothing, our universe begins.
In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics...
A fraction of a moment after the dawn of creation, the universe underwent a sudden dramatic expansion. It inflated— in effect ran away with itself, doubling in size every 10(-34) seconds. The whole episode may have lasted no more than 10 (-30) seconds— that's one million million million million millionths of a second— but it changed the universe from something you could hold in your hand to something at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger. Inflation theory explains the ripples and eddies that make our universe possible. Without it, there would be no clumps of matter and thus no stars, just drifting gas and everlasting darkness.

— From Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.