At first there was nothing. No time, no space (time and space are connected dont'cha know)....

 

and then bang...

 

can someone, anyone describe the first minutes (within reason).

Between 10^-43 seconds and 10^-32 seconds, there was a very high concentration of very hot matter and antimatter, and there were more quarks than antiquarks, and gravity is the only separate force. Between 10^-32 and 10^-6 seconds, leptons formed and electroweak unification forces came into being, and then between 10^-6 and 225 seconds, quarks bind to form protons and neutrons, and then from there it was onto ions, then atoms, then stars and galaxies.

Fafalone, I am impressed. I have read several books on the subject which run pages and pages....and finally I forget what the question was in the first place.

 

My God, you did it in two sentences.

You need pages and pages to get in all the details... but that's basically what happened... and before 10^-43 seconds, we have very little idea what the universe was like. We're still working on the first part after that, where the idea of a Grand Unified Theory comes into play.

Faf, you never cease to amaze me!

don`t s`pose you got any pics of it as well? (wouldn`t surprise me).

You can certainly tell who goes to the superior University! (sorry Blike)

It all comes down to football, Nebraskas coming to get you Faf.

The first few seconds of the universe is how it appears to us now through some very serious observation to the best of our abilities. I think Faf did a great job summarizing it but that is only the best description so far. We can't see smaller than an electron, we can't split time to isolate the generation of a photon and we have trouble figuring out where a photon really is.

We look at a forest that an elephant walked through and try to describe the elephant from its travel.

Just keep an open mind that it is just starting to get interesting.

Just aman

Here (EDIT: YT), this is a GREAT site for a good summary on how it all began . It has some interesting pics (not photos of course:))

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/universe/historysans.html