The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe Audio CD – Unabridged, August 1, 2013

I grew up(in the 1980s) with a pretty good Science library to check out. My father's bookshelves had things like "The Exploding Universe" from Nigel Henbest, Crease and Mann's "The Second Creation", "Catalog of the Universe", the Particle Physics - the High Energy Frontier from a Stanley Livingston. We got him Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time." I grew up thinking there were tons of these Big Bang Cosmology books.And maybe there are but I'm forgetting the names. But, this book - Steven Weinberg's "First Three Minutes" was a bit epochal. For thousands of years, people have written mythological accounts of the creation of the Universe. But, the 20th century saw a Mathematical account of everything from atoms to the stars - and even the Universe itself!This book gives the first account of this Scientific view of where the Universe comes from, which kind of grew out of a century of science that no human had ever experienced before. This is continuing in the 21st century. But, the 20th century witnessed going from the Wright brother's airplanes to landing on the Moon. And we saw comparable progress in Science.There were books before it - George Gamow's "Creation of the Universe" and Sir Arthur Eddington's "The Expanding Universe." My father had a hard copy original of Sir Arthur Eddington's book as well! Those are really the two main books on Big Bang Cosmology before "First Three Minutes." And really, after reading George Gamow's book, I kind have this feeling that Steven Weinberg felt the need to make a more scientific book on Big Bang Cosmology than George Gamow's book.George Gamow's book is good. He addresses how Astronomers came to know of the helium/hydrogen ratio of the Universe; something Weinberg doers not fit into his book actually! Sir Arthur Eddington's book is almost certainly out of date. The discovery of the Cosmic Background Radiation came decades after Eddington's effort. George Gamow actually predicts it in his book! But, George Gamow's numbers are all very preliminary. He does back of the envelope calculations okay! George Gamow's book makes for fascinating historical reading but are very much out of date scientifically.Some will say Steven Weinberg's "First Three Minutes" is out of date. He publishes in 1977, and Alan Guth would soon shock the world with his Inflationary Big Bang Cosmology(for which Steven Weinberg could only exclaim "why didn't I think of that!?"). But besides Inflation and the Hubble Space Telescope making the date of the Big Bang precise to a few decimal places, the Particle Physics and the Cosmic Background Radiation ideas are all very accurate and presented for the first time all in one book.The Inflationary Big Bang Cosmology does not disprove the Big Bang Cosmology that was discovered before it. It generalizes it - much as Newton's physics derives the previous Keplerian laws from the inverse square law. Or, Quantum Mechanics derives the laws of chemistry and generalizes beyond. For more of the nature of how science works, I recommend Jacob Bronowski's "Origins of Knowledge and Imagination." And I can't help maybe pointing out my book - the Gospel of Truth - Mathematics as the Holistic Viewpoint." I prove and go beyond Jacob Bronowski's "Origins of Knowledge" book, and show that explains and gives unified view of all of Human history - a rational scientific view of all of Human history.Steven Weinberg's "First Three Minutes" certainly gives the Particle Physics account of the Big Bang Cosmology. But, if you want to learn about the 20th century Particle Physics, I'd recommend Crease and Mann's equally Monumental "The Second Creation."

After so many years since it was first published in 1970s, this Weinberg's work remains a science writing classic as a first book to the public to explain the Big Bang theory. Naturally it has two beginning chapters to describe Hubble view of the expanding universe via his discovery of the Red Shift and the Bell Lab discovery of the isotropic cosmic background radiation.Weinberg then discusses the first three minutes in 6 frames beginning from first frame at .02 second when the temperature cooled down to 10 to the 11th K and consisting mainly of leptons such electrons, positions, and neutrinos, and, to 3 minutes and 46 seconds when the temperature cooled to 0.9 x 10 to the 9th K allowing neutrons to fuse into helium forming stable nuclei, I.e. nucleosynthesis. The third minute is significant because of nucleosynthesis without which the universe's matter cannot be formed. As a particle physicist, Weinberg offered a very detailed particle physics process of the Big Bang which makes this work unique in itself. He also provided a mathematical supplement at the end for anyone who wants to see the equations involved. After many decades, this book remains a helpful work to understand Particle physics of the Big Bang theory written at a time when physicists were still at the beginning of researching in quarks.

The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe by Steven Weinberg is an in-depth look at the Big Bang and the events following it. The author did not lie when he promised to stay out of the more complex math and quantum mechanics involved in his study of the physics of universal expansion, but he dives right in to everything else. It contains a large amount of complex information in a deceptively short space, with sentence structures to match. This is a hard read, and though this high school chemistry student can force down most of the information in the book, some of it was a few inches over my vertically challenged head.The First Three Minutes does do a "bang up" job of explaining the Big Bang and universal expansion and a few lengthy digressions, but it had a very irritating aspect. It is broken up by the history of dozens of scientists throughout. Parentheses containing only obscurely relevant information about each one are persistently present. For example, a piece of data is given regarding the scattering of two electrons due to magnetic repulsion. This is followed by parentheses containing the date the method of calculation to find their rate of separation was worked out, who figured it out, what college he professed at, and a random bit of information about the method he used, in that order. This, while a possibly interesting tidbit to some, disrupts the discussion of Feynman diagrams. Instances like this occur on most pages, sometimes without parentheses. I found this very distracting from the already difficult reading material.The information in this novel was interesting and useful, but the writing style was a nightmare. If you want a really specific in-depth rendition of the Big Bang and universal expansion, the ways it is being studied, and the people studying it or its components directly or indirectly, and you have some extra time, patience, and brain cells to burn then go for it. This is an informative book by an extremely credible author and, though it may be worth the challenge to read, I did not personally find it enjoyable.

essential for anyone interested in how our universe began....why is left to fantasy.

Product came promptly and Weinberg is brilliant