This book grew out of a talk i gave at the dedication of the undergraduate science center at Harvard in November 1973. Erwin Glikes, president and publisher of Basic Books, heard of this talk from a mutual friend, Daniel Bell, and urged me to turn it into a book.
At first I was not enthusiastic about the idea, Although i have done small bits of research in cosmology from time to time, my work has been much more concerned with the physics of the very small, the theory of elementary particles. Also, elementary particle physics has been spending too much time away from it, writing non-technical articles for various magazines. I wanted very much to return full time to my natural habitat, the Physical Review.
However, I found that I could not stop thinking about the idea of a book on the early universe. What could be more interesting than the problem of Genesis? Also, it is in the early universe, especially the first hundredth of a second, that the problems of the theory of elementary particles come together with the problems of cosmology. Above all, this is a good time to write about the early universe. In just the last decade a detailed theory of the course of events in the early decade a detailed theory of the course of events in the early universe has become widely accepted as a 'standard model'.
It is a remarkable thing to be able to say just what the universe was like at the end of the first second or the first minute or the first year. To a physicist, the exhilarating thing is to be able to work things out numerically, to be able to say that at such and such a time the temperature and density and chemical composition of the universe had such...
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