The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg

The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
Since it was first published in 1977, Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes has
become one of the classics of its genre: non-mathematical yet conceptually complex physics
writing for the wider audience. Indeed, I have many fine memories of reading books like
Weinberg’s and being dazzled simply by the array of ideas that modern physics had to present,
long before I had even begun to become acquainted with the rigors of a formal physics
education. Yet Weinberg’s book is unique among even the best of its genre: published over
twenty years ago, The First Three Minutes seems to have barely aged at all. In a field like
cosmology, which seems to change by the week, this feat is truly remarkable.
The secret to the book’s longevity is that it does not attempt to do too much. The purpose
of The First Three Minutes is to communicate the standard model of the formation of the
universe to a relatively general audience. While many new details have been added to this model
since the time of writing, none of the book’s fundamental ideas have become outdated. The First
Three Minutes is decidedly not concerned with elucidating fringe theories or presenting far-
reaching speculations as if they were on the same footing as, say, Newton’s laws. Weinberg is
careful to argue each central idea thoroughly on the basis of empirical evidence and in general
maintains a thoughtful hierarchy among physical theories, in which the old and proven and the
new and speculative are recognized for what they are. This flavor of healthy skepticism becomes
simply delightful as we read, even regarding a now standard model of cosmology: “I cannot
deny a feeling of unreality in writing about the first three minutes as if we really know what we
are talking about” (p. 9).
In building his case for a model of the early universe, Weinberg employs an impressive
amount of conceptual framework from general physics. These concepts are presented in clear
language and thoroughly explored largely in purely physical terms: this is not physics by
analogy, and it is not an attempt to oversimplify difficult ideas. Indeed, a thoughtful reader will
likely come away with a conceptual understanding of many basic ideas comparable to that
expected by an introductory physics course. Speaking of these ideas—there are many of them.
By the end, the reader will be comfortably acquainted, for instance, with conservation of lepton
and baryon number, relativistic Doppler shifts, the black body spectrum, Hubble’s law, and the
nature of the universe’s expansion. The discovery and implications of the cosmic microwave
background radiation are discussed especially thoroughly and used to explore the fundamental
“theses” of cosmology, the homogeneity and isotropy of the universe.
The crescendo of The First Three Minutes is a description of the first three and three-
quarter minutes of the universe (Weinberg concedes understandable aesthetic interests in the
titling of his book). Starting from one-hundredth of a second after the Big Bang, Weinberg
describes a series of scenes in which we watch the universe evolve from an incredibly hot, dense
state of thermal equilibrium, gradually cooling and expanding until reaching a state in which the
simplest atomic nuclei can exist. A subsequent chapter explores questions relating to this first
hundredth of a second, providing an overview of the basics of particle physics, including
Feynman diagrams, the four fundamental forces, the quark model, and the idea of a unified field
theory. While much could of course have been added to this chapter since the time of the book’s
publication, it, like the rest of the book, remains a lucid and interesting introduction.
The First Three Minutes is not devoid of the human aspect of science. A number of
Weinberg’s experiences in the scientific community and thoughts on modern scientific method
enter either tangentially or directly. These range from a few entertaining anecdotes related to the
discovery of the cosmic microwave background (particularly, “dielectric material,” p. 46, is an
incomparable euphemism) to serious reflections on the isolation between theorists and
experimentalists and the gap between scientists in the West and those in the then Soviet Union.
Early on, Weinberg dedicates a few pages to sketching the evolution of cosmological ideas in the
history of thought, and later, examines the scientist’s attitude toward currently accepted theories:
when should they be upheld and in the face of what should they be abandoned? Many such parts
of The First Three Minutes are interesting from a purely historical or philosophical perspective.
(Alas, perhaps at the end also a weakness, as Weinberg writes, with utter seriousness, the
last line of the book, p. 155: “The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things
that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”—as if
science by itself should ever be expected to be an ultimate source of purpose for the whole of
humanity. But rather than critique these occasional ruminations, one could brush them aside
with a simple “Lighten up, professor,” preferably in Feynman’s voice.)
As supplements to the main text, The First Three Minutes contains a number of
peripherals to deepen the readers’ budding obsession with cosmology: a full glossary, extensive
reading list, reference tables, and—best of all—a mathematical supplement. Battle-hardened
physics students will likely take a special joy in seeing integrals in the back of a popular physics
book, and neophytes with some imagination and a bit of calculus will most likely devour the
extra pages of mathematical argumentation. Unfortunately, the mathematical appendix has not
become a trend in the pop physics genre.
More than twenty years since its original publication, Steven Weinberg’s classic The
First Three Minutes remains an accessible yet conceptually complex introduction to modern
cosmology’s basic picture of the universe following the Big Bang. Weinberg successfully
attempts to explain these physical principles in non-mathematical terms without resorting to the
strained analogies or oversimplifications common in this genre. The First Three Minutes is an
excellent starting point for anyone with an interest in cosmology, and its truly scientific sense of
skepticism will serve the reader well when approaching other such books.

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