The First Three Minutes

A few weeks ago my wife and I watched on PBS Nova.  We missed the first few minutes of the show and were not able to get the name of the show.

Over the weekend I was on Skype talking with my sister that lives on the East Coast.  We talked about the Nova program, which she was also able to view.  The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg, winner of the 1979 Nobel Price for Physics, came up during our conversation so I ordered a copy on Amazon.

The book is quite interesting and relevant to the Nova show we watched.  Weinberg did a good job by separating concepts and explaining them as simply as possible and separating it from mathematics.  The mathematics is incorporated into a single section at the end of the book.

It is quite interesting to see how human ingenuity and intelligence has been able to come up with different theories about the origin of the universe.  Some of the hypotheses have been corroborated to some extent with science experiments.  Some of the experiments have been conducted on earth while others in space.  This takes us to the point of NASA and the future and role of the USA in space exploration.  Mr. Obama apparently does not see much value in NASA.  Hopefully the next administration will be better educated in order to understand the value of science for our country and humanity in general.

The book has an interesting section, which was written years after the original book.  It provides the author with the opportunity to fill the reader with developments after the late1970s when the book was first printed, to 1993.  The font of this section is quite smaller.  It was hard to read.

Weinberg concludes the book with the following sentence:  “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”.  Something to think about.

Enjoyed the book.  It is easy to read.  It is interesting to say the least, how humans have been able to build a model of how the universe was started millions of years ago.