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The only thought experiment that made any sense of this was that space itself was expanding and carrying all the objects in space with it. In the same way, if you take a pen and draw several dots on an deflated balloon in a straight line at 1 millimeter increments and then inflate it, you will find that the distance between the dots increases as the balloon expands, and the farthest dots from each other expand at an increased rate compared to the closer dots because the space on the surface of the balloon is expanding. Hubble’s findings are that the distant galaxies looked like they were receding from us at speeds proportional to their distances. This proportion later became known as the Hubble Constant and it is a unit of measurement that describes the expansion of the universe.

Physicist Robert Dicke predicted that The Big Bang Theory would give scientists an age of the universe based on low level radiation throughout the universe. A horn antenna picks up radio waves. In 1964 two researchers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, found that everywhere they looked in the sky with their horn antenna, they heard a slight noise. Because it was a uniform noise in all directions, scientists believed that it could only be one thing - the remnants of the Big Bang. Based upon how close to Absolute Zero the noise was, scientists determined that the universe was 13.7 billion years old. They called this noise the Cosmic Microwave Background. With this information, The Big Bang Theory became something even the government was now interested in exploring because it now seemed more like a fact and not a theory.

The Big Bang

The Big Bang Theory

"“The creation myth, like many others, tries to answer the questions we all ask. Why are we here? Where did we come from?” -Professor Stephen Hawking. It is not heretical to call The Big Bang Theory a myth, because a theory, by definition, is not a fact, but a supposition based on a set of facts.

The Big Bang Theory was born in 1931. George Lemaitre read about Hubble’s findings In 1931 on the expanding universe and he published a paper where he concluded that because the universe is expanding in all directions away from us, it had to have originated at a finite point in time. In other words, if time ran backwards, we would see that the universe would collapse on itself at one single spot in space - a “singularity”. Lemaitre said that when the universe was located at that one single spot in space, it was a single particle, a “primeval atom”, which then exploded and expanded, creating the universe, space and time. Lemaitre is the father of The Big Bang Theory.

In the beginning, scientists believed that the universe was in a steady state - neither expanding or collapsing. The Big Bang Theory, like any good creation myth, had a beginning and an ending. The Big Bang Theory was conceived out of the astronomical observations of Edwin Hubble. In the year 1919, Hubble became an astronomer who worked at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. At that time, astronomers generally thought that all that existed of the universe was the stars of the Milky Way Galaxy which they believed to be about 300,000 light years across, and that these stars and the universe itself existed in a steady state, but they were all about to change their perspective.

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