Abstract
The laws of physics determine the entire history of the Big Bang, as a consequence of the conditions that exists at its beginning. It’s as if one had wound up an old-fashioned clock and then released the mechanism to do its own thing.
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Notes
- 1.
As kinetic energy is a positive quantity, its average can be zero only if the kinetic energy of every constituent is zero.
- 2.
To agree with observation, the temperature would have to be low, which is why it’s called Cold Dark Matter.
- 3.
We’ll see in Chap. 10 what may have happened at much earlier times.
- 4.
As the mass of the proton and neutron are almost the same, the proportion of4He by weight is practically equal to \(2n/(n + p)\) where n is the number of neutrons in a region and p is the number of protons. This is equal to \(2/(1 + p/n)\), which means that indeed \(p/n = 7\) corresponds to 25 % by weight of4He.
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Lyth, D.H. (2016). In the Beginning. In: The History of the Universe. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22744-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22744-3_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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