The First Three Minutes

 

INTRODUCTION

 

As our observations become more numerous, our instruments more precise, and our modeling efforts more sophisticated, cosmology is ever more confident that everything began in the Big Bang.   That is to say, all the scientific evidence and theoretical improvements continue to indicate that the universe must have had a non-physical beginning.   This is because it is logically impossible for natural forces to create anything from a state in which there was no nature or natural law.

 

Rather the cause of creation must therefore have been something above nature or “super-natural”.  The only other phenomena that many claim is in this category is human consciousness and our sense of a free will.  To the extent these exist, they must necessarily be free of a strictly mechanistic clock-work determinism.  From these considerations, belief in a creator is both simple and reasonable.

 

Penrose and Hawking hoped to find a natural cause of creation and failed.  Instead they proved that any universe of any shape obeying Einstein’s General Relatively must have had a creation event.

 

OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE

 

Expanding Universe

   The rate of expansion is the Hubble constant.

Abundance of Elements

   From nuclear binding energies and other considerations we calculate that the universe should have been about 75% hydrogen isotopes and 25% helium and a trace amount of lithium and that is exactly what we observe.

Cosmic Microwave Background

    The universe looks like a black body that was initially at a much higher temperature.

Large Scale Structure

    The universe is made up of galaxies as predicted.

 

THEORETICAL

 

From the laws of science that we successfully use to predict current affairs, we can extrapolate backwards in time to surmise what things must have been like in the past.

 

 Indeed, the universe appears to be extremely homogeneous on large scales.  Of course this is not a local phonemena where the Earth’s surface is much unlike that of the moon or planets or the sun.  But if we group all the matter in hundreds of millions of light years, each box contains almost exactly the same amount of stuff in the form of mass and energy and all at the same average temperature.   This could only have happened if everything was close enough to be in thermal equilibrium and then underwent a catastrophic inflation fast enough so as to avoid temperature and density gradients.  And so our calculations indicate this must have happened perhaps 10**-36 to 10**-32 seconds after the creation event.

 

TIMELINE

 

The Beginning

Inflation

Quark Plasma

Proton Formation

Nuclear Fusion begins and ends with the creation of Helium

Neutral Hydrogen forms and the universe becomes transparent