Simple history of the universe

Everything, including the spaces between that we now see in a sphere 13.7 billion light-years across was contained in a pinpoint 13.7 billion years ago. As far as we can tell, it wasn't all there was, and the rest of what there was was similarly compressed. This superhot pinpoint expanded and cooled through exotic states until about 700,000 years after the big bang, where matter had condensed out and energy was low enough for atoms to form. At this point the universe became transparent with a temperature of 3000 kelvins. It was cool enough for matter and physics as we know it today to happen, with most of the energy in the universe transformed into atoms of hydrogen and helium. The leftover 3000k thermal radiation wavelength stretched along with the universe, and we see the leftover as the cosmic background radiation at about 3 kelvin today. In addition to this normal matter and energy, there seems to be dark mass, which interacts gravitationally equally to normal matter but which we haven't seen except for gravitational effects that indicate that it's about 90% of the known universe, and dark energy, that seems to be associated with how big space has gotten.
In normal and dark matter, gravity causes clumping, forming stars when the hydrogen eventually falls together tightly enough to light off a fusion reaction because of the gravitational packing and heating. This fusion reaction can produce all the light elements. If a big enough star is formed, a supernova can result in higher grade fusion that can almost instantaneously form all of the heavier elements.
Later stars in the aggregations called galaxies sweep up the remnants of earlier explosions and you get something like the solar system.
In solar systems, most of the matter clumps into the star, which lights off your fusion furnace. In our solar system this happened about 4.5 billion years ago. The rest of the matter condenses into planets and smaller pieces. These get cold enough for chemistry to happen. In at least one case, life has resulted.