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Physicists believe that between the Planck time and a hundredth of a second ATB, the universe behaved in a very similar way,
passing through at least two analogous phase transitions. At temperatures above 1028 Kelvin, the three nongravitational forces
appeared as one, as symmetric as they could possibly be. (At the end of this chapter we will discuss string theory's inclusion of the
gravitational force into this high-temperature merger.) But as the temperature dropped below 1028 Kelvin, the universe underwent a
phase transition in which the three forces crystallized out from their common union in different ways. Their relative strengths and
the details of how they act on matter began to diverge. And so, the symmetry among the forces evident at higher temperatures was
broken as the universe cooled. Nevertheless, the work of Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg (see Chapter 5) shows that not all of the
high-temperature symmetry was erased: The weak and electromagnetic forces were still deeply interwoven. As the universe further
expanded and cooled, nothing much happened until things simmered down to 1015 Kelvin—about 100 million times the sun's core
temperature—when the universe went through another phase transition that affected the electromagnetic and weak forces. At this
temperature, they too crystallized out from their previous, more symmetric union, and as the universe continued to cool, their
differences became magnified. The two phase transitions are responsible for the three apparently distinct nongravitational forces at
work in the world, even though this review of cosmic history shows that the forces, in fact, are deeply related.

A Cosmological Puzzle

This post-Planck era cosmology provides an elegant, consistent, and calculationally tractable framework for understanding the
universe as far back as the briefest moments after the bang. But, as with most successful theories, our new insights raise yet more
detailed questions. And it turns out that some of these questions, while not invalidating the standard cosmological scenario as
presented, do highlight awkward aspects that point toward the need for a deeper theory. Let's focus on one. It is called the horizon
problem, and it is one of the most important issues in modern cosmology.

Detailed studies of the cosmic background radiation have shown that regardless of which direction in the sky one points the
measuring antenna, the temperature of the radiation is the same, to about one part in 100,000. If you think about it for a moment,
you will realize that this is quite strange. Why should different locations in the universe, separated by enormous distances, have
temperatures that are so finely matched? A seemingly natural resolution to this puzzle is to note that, yes, two diametrically
opposite places in the heavens are far apart today, but like twins separated at birth, during the earliest moments of the universe they
(and everything else) were very close together. Since they emerged from a common starting point, you might suggest that it's not at
all surprising that they share common physical traits such as their temperature.

In the standard big bang cosmology this suggestion fails. Here's why. A bowl of hot soup gradually cools to room temperature
because it is in contact with the colder surrounding air. If you wait long enough, the temperature of the soup and the air will,
through their mutual contact, become the same. But if the soup is in a thermos, of course, it retains its heat for much longer, since
there is far less communication with the outside environment. This reflects that the homogenization of temperature between two
bodies relies on their having prolonged and unimpaired communication. To test the suggestion that positions in space that are
currently separated by vast distances share the same temperature because of their initial contact, we must therefore examine the
efficacy of information exchange between them in the early universe. At first you might think that since the positions were closer
together at earlier times, communication was ever easier. But spatial proximity is only one part of the story. The other part is
temporal duration.

To examine this more fully, let's imagine studying a "film" of the cosmic expansion, but let's review it in reverse, running the film
backward in time from today toward the moment of the big bang. Since the speed of light sets a limit to how fast any signal or
information of any kind can travel, matter in two regions of space can exchange heat energy and thereby have a chance of coming
to a common temperature only if the distance between them at a given moment is less than the distance light can have traveled
since the time of the big bang. And so, as we roll the film backward in time we see that there is a competition between how close
together our spatial regions become versus how far back we have to turn the clock for them to get there. For instance, if in order for
the separation of our two spatial locations to be 186,000 miles, we have to run the film back to less than a second ATB, then even
though they are much closer, there is still no way for them to have any influence on each other since light would require a whole
second to travel the distance between them.128 If in order for their separation to be much less, say 186 miles, we have to run the
film back to less than a thousandth of a second ATB, then, again, the same conclusion follows: They can't influence each other
since in less than a thousandth of a second light can't travel the 186 miles separating them. Carrying on in the same vein, if we have

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The discussion conveys the spirit of the issues involved although we are glossing over some subtle features having to do with the motion of light in an expanding universe that affect the
detailed numerics. In particular, although special relativity declares that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, this does not preclude two photons carried along on the
expanding spatial fabric from receding from one another at a speed exceeding that of light. For example, at the time the universe first became transparent, about 300,000 years ATB,
locations in the heavens that were about 900,000 light-years apart would have been able to have influenced each other, even though the distance between them exceeds 300,000 light-
years. The extra factor of three comes from the expansion of the spatial fabric. This means that as we run the cosmic film backward in time, by the time we get to 300,000 years ATB, two
points in the heavens need only be less than 900,000 light-years apart to have had a chance to influence each other's temperature. These detailed numerics do not change the qualitative
features of the issues discussed.