29.3 The beginning of the universe

Learning objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe what the universe was like during the first few minutes after it began to expand
• Explain how the first new elements were formed during the first few minutes after the Big Bang
• Describe how the contents of the universe change as the temperature of the universe decreases

The best evidence we have today indicates that the first galaxies did not begin to form until a few hundred million years after the Big Bang    . What were things like before there were galaxies and space had not yet stretched very significantly? Amazingly, scientists have been able to calculate in some detail what was happening in the universe in the first few minutes after the Big Bang.

The history of the idea

It is one thing to say the universe had a beginning (as the equations of general relativity imply) and quite another to describe that beginning. The Belgian priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître was probably the first to propose a specific model for the Big Bang itself ( [link] ). He envisioned all the matter of the universe starting in one great bulk he called the primeval atom , which then broke into tremendous numbers of pieces. Each of these pieces continued to fragment further until they became the present atoms of the universe, created in a vast nuclear fission. In a popular account of his theory, Lemaître wrote, “The evolution of the world could be compared to a display of fireworks just ended—some few red wisps, ashes, and smoke. Standing on a well-cooled cinder, we see the slow fading of the suns and we try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds.”

Abbé georges lemaître (1894–1966).

Physicists today know much more about nuclear physics than was known in the 1920s, and they have shown that the primeval fission model cannot be correct. Yet Lemaître’s vision was in some respects quite prophetic. We still believe that everything was together at the beginning; it was just not in the form of matter we now know. Basic physical principles tell us that when the universe was much denser, it was also much hotter, and that it cools as it expands, much as gas cools when sprayed from an aerosol can.

By the 1940s, scientists knew that fusion of hydrogen into helium was the source of the Sun’s energy. Fusion requires high temperatures, and the early universe must have been hot. Based on these ideas, American physicist George Gamow ( [link] ) suggested a universe with a different kind of beginning that involved nuclear fusion    instead of fission. Ralph Alpher worked out the details for his PhD thesis, and the results were published in 1948. (Gamow, who had a quirky sense of humor, decided at the last minute to add the name of physicist Hans Bethe to their paper, so that the coauthors on this paper about the beginning of things would be Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow, a pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta, and gamma.) Gamow’s universe started with fundamental particles that built up the heavy elements by fusion in the Big Bang.