Ancient Web: John Baez Tried to Put the Universe on Three Timelines

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

How do you fit the entire universe onto one webpage? John Baez answered by arranging everything from breakfast-sized human history to black-hole evaporation into three directions of time.

Read A Brief History of the Universe.

The page is signed by Baez and dated August 28, 2012, on his University of California Riverside web space. It is newer than the first wave of homepages, but it preserves a distinctly independent educational format: one large annotated document, with links placed directly beside ideas and a bibliography at the end.

Baez offers three ways to read: backward from the present, forward from the Big Bang, and forward into the unimaginably distant future. The same universe becomes a different story depending on where the reader starts.

A scale problem solved with headings

Counting backward, the timeline moves from the computer, telephone, writing, and cities to human origins, dinosaurs, continents, and the first life. Its links open additional explanations of subjects such as the Younger Dryas, continental drift, and mass extinctions.

The second section treats cosmic history as a sequence of changes in temperature and physical behavior. Baez describes recombination, the separation of neutrinos, the formation of light atomic nuclei, and the period in which particles became bound into more familiar matter. The temperatures are there to give a sense of the enormous physical extremes involved.

The future-facing section projects the Sun's red-giant phases, possible galactic collisions, the eventual decline of star formation, and processes that may unfold after ordinary stars have exhausted their fuel. It makes clear that such projections depend on assumptions and will not capture discoveries or interventions no scientist could predict in advance.

Its very age is informative. The document estimates the Big Bang at 13.7 billion years ago and includes human-prehistory dates that deserve reconsideration as evidence improves. These are 2012 entries, not a 2026 scientific consensus. The page itself warns that its figures are approximate.

Baez finishes with books, papers, links to longer discussions, and an almost breathless summary of cosmic evolution in short phrases. That is the value of a standalone scholarly webpage: a curious reader can follow the scale of the question, then branch into the evidence without leaving the author's original structure.

Explore the three timelines and references.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.