The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe by Steven Weinberg

Back in February, when I was visiting my father in North Carolina, he recommended this book to me. The only copy on the shelf at the library was a reference copy unavailable for check out, so I put a circulating copy on request, which took several weeks to come in. I ended up reading it in early April and then took it with me to New York at the end of April and finished it on the plane ride there.

The book is a scientific description of the beginnings of the universe written for a lay reader. Steven Weinberg won the Nobel Prize in physics a few years after this book came out, recognizing work he had done several years earlier on the strong and weak nuclear forces.

This book explains what had recently, in 1977 when the book was originally published, become the “standard model” of a Big Bang followed by a rapidly expanding and cooling universe of matter and energy gradually coalescing into the stuff of the universe we see today. The model became standard only after 1965 when scientists were able to detect the background radiation that the Big Bang theory would predict.

The book begins, not as I expected with the first minute, but with several chapters of preparatory information. Following an introductory chapter, there’s a chapter discussing the evidence from the late nineteenth century that the universe is expanding based on the red shift of light emanating from sources moving away from us. Then a chapter about the cosmic background radiation remaining from fourteen billion years ago and how scientists detected it, more or less accidentally. (Scientists working on an entirely different project were bothered by persistent “noise” in their data.) Chapter four prepares the scene further with a discussion of the implications of the incredibly high temperatures present at the very beginning. It’s only chapter five when we finally get to the timeline, but Weinberg saves the first hundredth of a second for later. Chapter six is an interesting meditation on how the work of science is made difficult not only by the challenges of finding answers to complex questions, but even in knowing what questions to ask. Chapter seven circles back with a necessarily highly speculative discussion of that first one hundredth of a second. The book concludes with an epilogue chapter followed by several sections of reference material, a glossary, a mathematical supplement, and an afterword Weinberg wrote for the second edition in 1993, with updates on the science.

Though written for a lay audience, I confess much of Weinberg’s science is still beyond me. I could follow along well enough, but I can’t say I understand any more than I already did, having grown up with this description of the origins of the universe. The incredibly large numbers and temperatures and distances and densities, amaze me. Even more amazing to me is that human minds can deduce these descriptions of something so complex and remote. Though humbled by what I don’t know, I felt a little proud of myself for reading a book written by a winner of a physics Nobel Prize.

I was glad to read something that my dad recommended. We discussed it on the phone after I got back from New York. And I talked a little about the book in the sermon I wrote for the church the following Sunday, a sermon on the theme of creation timed for Mother’s Day.