The Big Bang Theory: The Origin Of The Big Bang Theory

Presently, the Big Bang theory is the most logical scientific explanation of how the universe began. The majority of cosmologists favor the Big Bang theory and the idea that the expanding universe had an initial, incredibly hot and dense start (Peterson 232). According to the Big Bang theory, at one point in time, more than 12 billion years ago, matter was condensed in a single place, and a huge explosion scattered matter out is all directions (“Big Bang Theory” 403). At the moment of its origin, the universe was infinitely dense and hot, but as the expansion occurred, the universe cooled and became less dense (Narlikar 12). The debris the spewed from the initial explosion became the building blocks of matter, forming the planets, stars, and galaxies (Narlikar 12). Officially, the Big Bang model is called the standard cosmological model (SCH), and it has been the most widely accepted theory of the origin of the universe since the 1960s (Rich and Stingl 1). Most astronomers are in agreement that the universe’s beginning can be traced back to 10 to 15 billion years ago following some type of explosive start (Narlikar 12). Big Bang theorists have estimated the actual bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago and was followed by an inflationary period that created time, matter, and space (Rich and Stingl 1).

While the 1930s was not a tremendous period of cosmological, scientific advances, it was the epoch of the theory that the universe began with some explosion of a singularity of matter. In 1927, George Lemaître, an astronomer and Roman Catholic priest, was the first person to offer the theory that the universe was generated from an explosion of a primeval atom (Rich and Stingl 1). Lemaître’s findings were published in the 1931 scienc...

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...xies were indeed older” (“Big Bang” 1).

Throughout the mid-20th century, the Big Bang theory and the steady-state theory dominated scientific thinking about the origin of the universe; however, discoveries in the1960s dealt a serious blow to the steady-state model. The discover of radiation in microwaves hurt the steady-state theory. Following World War II, Martin Ryle led a study at Cambridge in which he tested over 2,000 different radio sources from outside the Milky Way, and he concluded that the different radio sources showed a different distribution, thus supporting the Big Bang theory (“Big Bang” 1). In the early 1960s, Robert Dicke of Princeton University verified Gamow’s idea that there was a microwave background in the sky consistent with an initial explosion (Cowen, “Journey” 394). Further support for the Big Bang model came in 1963 when two scientists