The Big Bang’s Early Visionaries Were Beset by Bad Luck

For a theory of the universe as successful as the Big Bang, it may come as a surprise to realize how many complications its promoters had to stumble through.

Not only did he introduce the phrase “Expanding universe,” he deserves, some argue, to be known as “The father of Big Bang,” because he was the first to correctly apply general relativity to cosmology, the development of the universe.

Reaching back to Friedmann, he proposed his Primeval Atom hypothesis, essentially the Big Bang 1.0, that the universe must have initially started from a fantastically dense kernel and expanded outward.

One immediate consequence of such a hot big bang model, they pointed out, is that radiation from the primeval fireball-now known as cosmic microwave background radiation-should still permeate the universe, albeit at very attenuated wavelengths.

The discovery of what turned out to be the cosmic microwave background radiation was seen to be the strongest evidence for the Big Bang, an echo, in terms of radiation, of the explosion of the early universe.

Source: The Big Bang’s Early Visionaries Were Beset by Bad Luck

Originally published at Cogly.