The First Three Minutes

"Another one that has to be on any list like this is The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winner. It’s a relatively slim volume, in which he describes what happened in the first three minutes of the Big Bang, as it was known and understood back then [1977]. We’ve learned a fair amount since then and some of the details in his original version are a little off, but the basic picture is still incredibly accurate. It’s just a really great description of the beginning of the universe, and almost every book on cosmology will include some variants of Weinberg’s description because he walks through it in such a clear way."

"Not only is it the beginning of the universe, it’s the beginning of books about the universe — as far as I’m concerned. Until 1965, there was no evidence whatsoever that the universe had a beginning. The Penzias and Wilson findings begin there and it took another decade or so before anyone actually said ‘Yes, you were right.’ So, when Weinberg wrote The First Three Minutes, he was, essentially, the first popular science writer to take the subject up and run with it. He did it in a way that ought to appeal to every journalist’s heart. First of all, he’s got the title The First Three Minutes . You can’t beat it. I always say that the best books tell you in a sentence all you need to know about them — like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . It’s not about the rise of the Roman Republic. In the case of Crime and Punishment you get the crime and you get the punishment. In the case of The First Three Minutes , that’s also what you get. It’s a book that confines itself almost in its entirety to what happened sometime during the first second and it more or less stops at two minutes fifty-nine. After that, he says, nothing else interesting happened for the next 430,000 years. It’s full of wonderful lines like that. “Einstein remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was comprehensible.” It instantly became a bestseller and that is quite a rare thing. There’s always a reason why a book becomes an instant bestseller. In the case of Weinberg, it became a Fontana Modern Classic because it sold a lot. You saw people reading it. And when you read it, you worked out why. It was an example of clarity and focus and sympathy for the unaware. He handles the timing of immense events happening inside a space so short that we can’t really imagine it at all and yet we can and we have and he’s imagined it beautifully. Like Haldane, he has a gift for saying things that you don’t forget. Einstein remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was comprehensible. Weinberg tops that by saying, very near the end, that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless — which, again, is a line that you don’t forget. And to have written a line that you don’t forget is, in itself, an achievement that very few of us are going to be able to record. All of his books are distinguished by a preparedness to be wrong. In two of his books he observes that we might just be too stupid to understand what’s going on, in the sense that you can’t expect a dog to understand chemistry. Yes, queerer than we can suppose. I suppose, in a way, we’ve described an arc with these books and I didn’t know that when I chose them. There is a logic to the succession of them. There was a mix of reasons for that. I could have chosen any one of at least three books by Richard Dawkins and at least three books by Richard Fortey. Then there is Edward O. Wilson for whom I have an unequivocal admiration. Lawrence Krauss is no mean thing. I’ve known Paul Davies for years and I think his stuff is terrific. In the end, I decided that I would sit on all of the ones who are still alive, except for Steven Weinberg. All the others are dead. The reason I’m happy to talk about the Weinberg is because even before preparing for this interview I’d already read it three times. The most recent was only a couple of years ago. I chose to re-review it because I enjoyed it so much. That tells you something about a book. Books that endure have a value that ephemeral books cannot ever match. Yes, I wanted books that I wouldn’t wish to be without. That’s a very large group, by the way, and is immensely catholic. There are brilliant women scientists and there are brilliant women science writers like Lisa Randall. Weinberg had the advantage because he was the first. In that sense, Homer had the advantage because he was the first. We’re always going to read Homer. In the case of Weinberg, once he’d written The First Three Minutes he’d set a standard for everyone else that follows."

"First of all, Steve Weinberg is arguably the most brilliant physicist of the last many decades. He’s an absolute luminary. I’ve had the opportunity to meet and talk with him a few times and it’s an incredible experience. He’s a genius in every measurable way. He also happens to be a really good writer and communicator. I’ve liked all of the books of his I’ve read, but I picked The First Three Minutes because it is the classic book about the Big Bang and the first three minutes of our universe’s history. “When people hear about the Big Bang, they’re tempted to think of an explosion, something that happened somewhere in space. That’s not what we mean.” The book describes the quark-gluon plasma that existed and how it underwent phase transitions and how different kinds of particles and energy transformed through this and eventually created light elements and nuclear fusion in the first minutes and seconds. When I set out to write At the Edge of Time , I was giving myself the task of writing an updated version of The First Three Minutes, because it was written before we discovered a number of things about the early universe and about cosmology . As I carried out the task of writing it, my book evolved into something quite different, but that’s really what motivated me: I felt that somebody needed to write the 21st century version of Weinberg’s classic story. When Weinberg was writing no one knew about inflation, no one knew about dark matter or dark energy. A lot has changed, but it’s the same basic picture. The funny thing is that when he wrote that book, it was strange for a particle physicist to do cosmology. He was an outsider to that field and that was really out of the ordinary. Today, a lot of cosmologists are particle physicists. I’m one. I trained as a particle physicist and I gradually meandered my way through scientific subjects to cosmology, but I’m not rare. There are lots of us doing that today. Particle physics played an enormous and important role in the early universe and there are lots of parts of cosmology you simply can’t do without a background in particle physics. There are other parts of cosmology you can’t do without being an expert in relativity. There are other parts of cosmology you can’t do unless you’re an expert in computer simulation. It’s a multidisciplinary subject and takes many different expertises to do well."