Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Notation and Conventions
- Part I 100 Years of Cosmology
- Part II Newtonian Cosmology
- 5 Newtonian Cosmology
- 6 Dark Energy Cosmological Models
- 7 The Early Universe
- 8 The Inhomogeneous Universe
- 9 The Inflationary Universe
- Part III Relativistic Cosmology
- Part IV The Physics of Matter and Radiation
- Part V Precision Tools for Precision Cosmology
- Appendix A SI, CGS and Planck Units
- Appendix B Magnitudes and Distances
- Appendix C Representing Vectors and Tensors
- Appendix D The Electromagnetic Field
- Appendix E Statistical Distributions
- Appendix F Functions on a Sphere
- Appendix G Acknowledgements
- References
- Index
7 - The Early Universe
from Part II - Newtonian Cosmology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Notation and Conventions
- Part I 100 Years of Cosmology
- Part II Newtonian Cosmology
- 5 Newtonian Cosmology
- 6 Dark Energy Cosmological Models
- 7 The Early Universe
- 8 The Inhomogeneous Universe
- 9 The Inflationary Universe
- Part III Relativistic Cosmology
- Part IV The Physics of Matter and Radiation
- Part V Precision Tools for Precision Cosmology
- Appendix A SI, CGS and Planck Units
- Appendix B Magnitudes and Distances
- Appendix C Representing Vectors and Tensors
- Appendix D The Electromagnetic Field
- Appendix E Statistical Distributions
- Appendix F Functions on a Sphere
- Appendix G Acknowledgements
- References
- Index
Summary
The study of the very early Universe has given birth to a discipline that is broadly referred to as astro-particle physics, a subject that sits on the border of high energy particle physics, nuclear physics and astrophysics. Astro-particle physics has proven to be a wonderful symbiosis of experimental physics and experimental astrophysics in which the early Universe is, in effect, a high energy physics laboratory. Arguably, it was Gamow and his collaborators, in the immediate post World War II decade, who took the first tentative steps in this direction by arguing that the early Universe was the site of synthesis of the chemical elements.
The physics domain of cosmic nucleosynthesis is the first few minutes of the Big Bang. Hayashi (1950) took the first step further back into the past and towards the Big Bang itself with his exploitation of weak interactions to describe what had happened just prior to the period of nucleosynthesis. Since then, particle experiments have pushed back our understanding of the physics of matter to the point where we can now discuss the period before the first micro-seconds of the cosmic origin within the context of known high energy physics.
Early Thermal History
Astro-particle physics inevitably brings in an even wider domain of physics than the classical cosmology of general relativistic models. Some fine texts have been written on this subject from a variety of points of view and at different levels. The approach used here is to explain the physics of the early Universe with a view to understanding what precision cosmology has to say about the particle and nuclear physics aspects of the earliest moments after the Big Bang.
The first steps in this direction were taken by Gamow and his co-workers during the first decade after the Second World War. Gamow had realised that the wartime research into nuclear physics could answer some important questions about his concept of the early Universe that he had started working on prior to 1939. We can trace back Gamow's interest in a Big Bang Universe to Gamow and Teller (1939a,b) in which he had described a simple idea for the formation of galaxies, and no doubt his interest extended back to his brief association with Friedmann.
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- Precision CosmologyThe First Half Million Years, pp. 154 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017