Book Review

It is astonishing that scientists can say with assurance anything quantitative about the first few minutes of the universe. This superbly written, elegantly crafted and reasoned book shows that we can, from observations of the world today, say a great deal about the beginnings some 15 billion years ago. Weinberg, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979, wrote the book "for one who is willing to puzzle through some detailed arguments, but who is not at home in either mathematics or physics." Take Weinberg at his word: the highest mathematics you will need will be the arithmetic of very large numbers, but understanding the puzzles he solves requires close reading, and probably rereading.

The First Three Minutes was hailed as a landmark when it first appeared in 1977. What is perhaps as rare as the book's originality and readability is the book's staying power. The beginning two-thirds of the book carefully lays the foundation for Weinberg's frame-by-frame description of the first three minutes, starting one-hundredth of a second after the beginning, as the temperature of the world cooled from 100,000 million degrees to 900 million degrees and the helium and heavy hydrogen were formed. His arguments and conclusions are not changed by the paradigm-changing observations and new theories of recent decades. His story is as modern and relevant today as it was in 1977.

~ Lee Grodzins, Ph.D., Physicist, Professor Emeritus, MIT
(Review written May, 2004)