Abstract. In the context of the half-centenary of Hagedorn temperature and the statistical bootstrap model (SBM) we present a short account of how these insights coincided with the establishment of the hot big-bang model (BBM) and helped resolve some of the early philosophical difficulties. We then turn attention to the present day context and show the dominance of strong interaction quark and gluon degrees of freedom in the early stage, helping to characterize the properties of the hot Universe. We focus attention on the current experimental insights about cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuation, and develop a much improved understanding of the neutrino freeze-out, in this way paving the path to the opening of a direct connection of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) physics in the early Universe with the QCD-lattice, and the study of the properties of QGP formed in the laboratory.
The big-bang model establishedWho today can remember that before 1965 the big-bang model (BBM) was challenged by those who had difficulty accepting that there is a beginning of time? And, even after the discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, announced May 1965, the idea that the primordial Universe had to be hot generated an additional challenge: how could all the energy in the Universe come from an initial space-time singularity? Such conceptual difficulties were exploited by those who did not like the hot BBM model. One of us can remember the scientific disputes.A literature search shows that Hagedorn's statistical bootstrap model (SBM) was an inadvertent solution to many conceptual difficulties. In fact, a who's who of cosmology of this period cites Hagedorn's work [1]. While it could sound presumptuous to claim that Hagedorn was the one who turned the corner in establishing the hot BBM as the standard cosmological model, at the least his contribution was very important.The Hagedorn SBM had a built-in feature that was needed, a divergence in the energy content even for a initial singular point volume. The way this works is rather easy to explain. It is convenient to introduce the hadron mass spectrum ρ(m), where ρ(m)dm = number of hadron states in {m, m+dm} .In Hagedorn's SBM, an exponentially growing mass spectrum ρ(m) ∝ m −a exp(m/T H ), is a natural solution. Thus we have within the partition function of a hadron gas comprising many different