Beyond the First Three Minutes

I did not choose the title of this talk, but in its use of the word "beyond" to refer to looking backward in time, I think that in fact it's a very apt title. As you may know, one of the great works of English legal history is a book called "Domesday Book and Beyond" by Frederick William Maitland. In this work, Maitland explored the Domesday land survey that was ordered by William the Conquerer in 1085, trying to figure out what life was like in England in the period before the Norman conquest, when England was governed by people who didn't keep records as well as the Normans. And in the same way, cosmologists look back to certain great epochs in the history of the universe, such as the recombination of hydrogen atoms when the universe was half a million years old, and the formation of helium nuclei when the universe was three minutes old, epochs which have left an observationally accessible imprint on the present universe that we can study directly, in order to try to figure out what ties beyond, what happened in the inaccessible times before those epochs. In this talk, I'm going to be discussing what happened before the epoch of nucleosynthesis at the end of the first three minutes. I will divide my history for convenience into four eras in which interesting events of different sorts were taking place, events whose analysis will require physical principles and mathematical methods of rather different kinds.