Steven Weinberg really knows his stuff! Of course, one would hope that he does, seeing as he is a Nobel Laureate and a professor of theoretical physics at the universities of Colombia, Harvard, California, Texas and MIT. But even from reading the first couple of pages of ‘The First Three Minutes’, you can tell the superior expertise Weinberg possesses in the field of quantum cosmology. His writing style leaves no room for unnecessary waffle or fluff, and every line sounds as if it comes from some specialist textbook read by university students. The depths of the detail covered in the book far surpasses other books I have read previously, and yet it still feels as if only the tip of the iceberg has been covered. The pure extent of knowledge covered by ‘The First Three Minutes’ makes it a fascinating and challenging read to any budding physicist.

The book’s story opens with a simple statement - “In the beginning there was an explosion”. From here, Weinberg follows a perhaps more unusual narrative, detailing not what happened next, but how we know there was an explosion. The first third of the book lays out the justification and explanation of this simple sentence, spending time to map out the discovery of the expansion, from Hubble’s work to the discovery of the CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation). Next we delve a bit deeper into the beginning – what was there after the explosion occurred? This chapter provides us with insight into the standard model of elementary particles – the fundamental constituents of the universe as we know it. Only now, after covering the consequences and proofs of the big bang theory, comes the chapter which shares its name with the book’s title - ‘The First Three Minutes’. This chapter slowly unfurls, frame by frame, the evolution of the first three (and three quarter) minutes after the first one-hundredth of a second after the big bang. It depicts the growth of the universe from 100,000 million degrees Kelvin and made of a balance of electrons, positrons, neutrinos, anti-neutrinos and photons, right through the rapid cooling to a temperature of 300 million degrees Kelvin and a composition of a few electrons and protons, and many photons, neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. Finally, Weinberg turns to the prospects ahead, including the first one-hundredth of a second, which at the time of writing was an unclear stage in the history of the universe, as well as intriguing questions such as what came before the big bang (if there was really any concept of time before), what the ultimate fate of the universe will be, and why the CMBR was not searched for, but discovered by accident.

Despite being quite a short read, it did take me some time to finish ‘The First Three Minutes’. Weinberg’s prose style of writing is at times difficult to follow and paired with the challenging subject material makes for a sometimes tough read. Although puzzling through the questions and insights is fascinating, it takes dedication to sit down and read the book for a long period of time. What I found most challenging was that Weinberg frequently expressed equations and numerical data in word form. This is undoubtedly in an attempt, like other science books, to attract the interest of the general public, however, I feel that in light of the depth and breadth of the content of the book, the readers would have been willing and able to deal with a few equations and statistics expressed in a more conventional and easier to follow manner. I know that I, for one, would have sometimes preferred them presented as an equation to help with the clarity of thought – to me it is a lot more challenging to digest “x is inversely proportional to y” than to digest x ∝ y^-1.

Furthermore, you must consider that this book was written in 1977. Physics has advanced at such a rate in the past 40 years since it was written that some of the information is now out of date, or missing altogether. For example, the 32 page discussion about the CMBR was written semi-blindly, as it had been discovered only 12 years previously and the COBE satellite, which mapped and instigated the CMBR to glean precise and fascinating information had only just been proposed, let alone launched. Furthermore, fundamental concepts and theories within physics now were rarely mentioned or explored in the book. For example, only two types of neutrinos are mentioned (the tau neutrino was discovered in 2000 and a fourth, sterile neutrino has been theorised for some time but by no means confirmed), and the only mention of dark matter, one of the biggest mysteries of modern physics, was only mentioned once, in the afterword written in 1993. So despite the informative nature of the book, I was forced to take it in the context of when it was written, unsure about the current, more up-to-date conclusions on these matters.

Despite this, I do feel like I have a much broader and well established base of understanding about the very beginning of our universe, and that ‘The First Three Minutes’ was well worth reading. I shall leave you now with the strangely inspirational closing paragraph from the book, which I think is a notion both Weinberg and I can both agree about:

“But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”