The First Three Minutes: A Modern View Of The Origin Of The Universe

It is an extraordinary fact that we, a small scrap of biological matter inhabiting a negligible space in an obscure corner of the Universe and having come into existence a mere eyeblink ago, we can comprehend the whole Universe right from its very beginning! Steven Weinberg (1979 Physics Nobel prizewinner) has written a gem of a little book first published in 1977, a classic that deserves to be on every shelf and that everyone should read. He explains, using only school arithmetic, precisely what happened at the Big Bang, and precisely how we know it. In a mere 50,000 words or so, a little book, Weinberg shows how the longstanding belief in an eternal Universe was overturned. This old belief underpins Newtonian (and Aristotelian) physics, and was universally believed until about 1950. But the discovery by Penzias & Wilson of the Cosmic Microwave Background in 1965 dramatically overturned this consensus and replaced it with a Universe finite in both time and space. Of course, Penzias & Wilson's observation of the CMB was only the final piece in the puzzle of the new cosmology. The expansion of the Universe first proposed by Hubble with his explanation of stellar redshift in 1929 (together with Penrose & Hawking's gravitational singularity theorem in 1970), the understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis summarised by Hoyle, Fowler and the Burbridges in 1957, the observation of the H/He ratio in the Universe by Suess & Urey in 1956, and the theoretical prediction of this first suggested by the famous Alpher Bethe Gamow paper of 1948 which also made very clear that the early Universe had to be hot, all made an environment in which the importance of the 1965 CMB observation could be immediately recognised. Subsequent discoveries and developments have served only to underline this new consensus; for example, the strictly black body nature of the CMB was established in 1990 at extraordinary accuracy by the COBE ("Cosmic Background Explorer") satellite. There are many profound problems remaining in cosmology, but however it is understood it is clear that our Universe had a beginning in time. In my opinion, Weinberg's book is a tour de force of an elegantly simple explanation of the biggest fact underlying who we are. And he doesn't tell us fairy stories : he doesn't oversimplify. This is really the way things are, and you can understand it too! Buy the book!

It had to be a winner after watching Steven on world science festival on YouTube. It didn’t disappoint. Such an important time of the world’s existence and he explains it in simple detail , both factual and conceptual. A must read if this is the time you are looking to explore.

Weinberg is at home both in cosmology and in elementary particles, so i just trust him that he made a very good selection of what topics to present. His writing style is similar to what he radiates on photos: composed, not exuberant. His sentences are all clear and simple. In the preface Weinberg writes that he intends his book for people who do not speak his language, meaning he bans formulas (but not numbers of temperatures, particle proportions etc.) into mathematical supplements, and shows some pictures and graphics but only few x-y-plots with explicite numbers. As a consequence the book gets longer, and the information gets more diluted. I really liked the tables, mathematical supplements, and also the afterword (written in 1993) at the end of the book, but was a bit bored in the main part of the book (150 pages), because the pace was too slow for me. To note: Physical quantities are given in cgs units, and large numbers are first given in long words, and then sometimes in the much shorter power of ten notation; e. g. on page 101: fifteen hundred thousand million degrees Kelvin (1.5x10^12 ° K).

when you here it all from the horses mouth as it were then it all becomes real - even if the material is all fantastically unreal! I mean - the first 3 minutes of the universe ! extraordinary concepts dealt with in straightforward understandable language... true scholarship..

Good quality book.

Nicely structured with just enough detail/repetition to allow non-scientists with maths and physics at A-Level etc to follow. This is not for those without any background knowledge though. Or close-minded creationists who choose to ignore what science can observe!

Brilliant!

What an interesting book. Well written and set out. Great for someone studying their A levels as additional reading to the coursework

Un libro ameno y muy interesante. Lectura muy recomendable. Una dosis concentrada de cultura y conocimientos para disfrutar de la lectura.

I am a physicist and I really enjoied how this book explains the history of the Universe from the beginning, focusing also on the observative data that suggested us the standard model of the Big Bang. Reading this book you can see how the standard model explains all the observations and you can see in which fiele soffrire cosmology did we have to work in late 1970s, when the book was written. There is also an appendix in which Weinberg shows the progresses done from 1970s to 1993. The book is old and it does not contain very recent discoveries in cosmology, lime the acceleration of the expansion or the maps of the CMB, but it gives a very nice overview of the main topics in cosmology. As a teacher of physics I think that the book can be read by an interested secondary school student. The explanations are clear and do not need any specific knowledge in physics, astronomy or maths.

Steven Weinberg is one of the luminaries of the quantum mechanics world, so how did he write about cosmology? Very well. Much of tyne book is speculation, but when you go so close to God (creation) how can you say anything with certainty? Well conservation laws still apply (or assumed to apply), and you can assume by model that universe was a tiny ball, this leads to some rather interesting conclusions. Want to hear about Creation and something more specific than 'big bang', then there's no better book than this. Note that they're are no equations here. This is not a substitute for narlikar or other cosmology textbooks, but is a popular science read, and is not from a popular science writer but an extremely accomplished physicist. Note 2: it was written in 1978,but standard model hasn't changed, for string theory based popular science books (not fully accepted by scientific community), you may want to check out michio kaku

A very clear explanation of the facts and a good speculation of what was about to happen next. What is fascinating is that Weinberg asks questions that he couldn't have answered back then, but that led to a lot of the outcome as has been proven experiment today. Sometimes the question is more important than the answer itself.

ESTE LIBRO ES UN PARTE AGUAS EN LA LITERATURA CIENTÍFICA, NOS DA CONOCER LO QUE PUDO HABER OCURRIDO DENTRO DE LOS 3 PRIMEROS MINUTOS DEL UNIVERSO, TODO ESTO SIN FANTASÍAS, SOLO CIENCIA.