The first three minutes
We will go from t = 0.01 s to t = 106 years. Of particular interest
is the formation of the first nuclei. First we need
So what happened?
The story is worked out by starting with
- the current (badly known) density of matter
in the universe,
- the temperature of the cosmic background radiation.
The surprising fact one learns from this is that there are a lot
more photons than protons.
(number of photons)/(number of protons) ~ 109
This tells us that in the early universe there were lots of photons
for every proton.
From this information, one works backwards in time. We will start in the middle and work forward.
Davison E. Soper, Institute of Theoretical Science,
University of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403 USA
soper@bovine.uoregon.edu