Customer Reviews (1)

The Three Minutes that Never End
The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe by Steven Weinberg is an in-depth look at the Big Bang and the events following it.The author did not lie when he promised to stay out of the more complex math and quantum mechanics involved in his study of the physics of universal expansion, but he dives right in to everything else.It contains a large amount of complex information in a deceptively short space, with sentence structures to match.This is a hard read, and though this high school chemistry student can force down most of the information in the book, some of it was a few inches over my vertically challenged head.
The First Three Minutes does do a "bang up" job of explaining the Big Bang and universal expansion and a few lengthy digressions, but it had a very irritating aspect.It is broken up by the history of dozens of scientists throughout.Parentheses containing only obscurely relevant information about each one are persistently present.For example, a piece of data is given regarding the scattering of two electrons due to magnetic repulsion.This is followed by parentheses containing the date the method of calculation to find their rate of separation was worked out, who figured it out, what college he professed at, and a random bit of information about the method he used, in that order.This, while a possibly interesting tidbit to some, disrupts the discussion of Feynman diagrams.Instances like this occur on most pages, sometimes without parentheses.I found this very distracting from the already difficult reading material.
The information in this novel was interesting and useful, but the writing style was a nightmare.If you want a really specific in-depth rendition of the Big Bang and universal expansion, the ways it is being studied, and the people studying it or its components directly or indirectly, and you have some extra time, patience, and brain cells to burn then go for it.This is an informative book by an extremely credible author and, though it may be worth the challenge to read, I did not personally find it enjoyable.
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Product Description
This digital document is an article from Daedalus, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2005. The length of the article is 5320 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Physics & history.
Author: Steven Weinberg
Publication: Daedalus (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 134Issue: 4Page: 31(9)

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