We’ve all heard about it. Something like the Universe starting from a very small point exploding and
creating space. Today I want to share some history of the discoveries that corrected ideas prevalent
for centuries, starting with Aristotle back around 500 B.C.
Astronomers had a few theories about how the universe “is”, among many ancient creation myths too numerous to mention here. The more accepted theory was called the “Steady State”, which meant the universe always has been and will continue- time is infinite both in the past and in the future. Einstein started to make waves with his equations published in 1911 that stated that light was affected by gravity and these equations suggested that the Universe was either expanding or contracting, neither of which he liked. But was light affected by gravity and could it be proved? Then in about 1919 a British researcher traveled to the coast of Africa to view a total eclipse of the sun to measure the location of several stars on the opposite side of the sun during the eclipse and found their position shifted from known positions and thereby proved the star’s light was indeed shifted by the sun’s gravity. Then in 1922 a Russian physicist worked Einstein’s equations to show that an expanding universe was perfectly possible and in 1927 Father Lamaitre proved those equations required an expanding universe and not a collapsing one. He went on to say that the universe started at a point, called the “primeval atom” of infinite density and heat where the laws of physics were unknowable. Einstein and most physicists disagreed but were subsequently proved wrong, to which Einstein commented that his thinking was the biggest blunder of his career. Nice to know that someone like Einstein can be wrong!
Around the same time Edwin Hubble and his assistant was observing the universe and discovered that the Milky Way was not the whole universe, as was thought at the time, and that little blurry objects were not Milky Way stars but separate galaxies! And then in studying these galaxies determined that they were speeding way from us and each other, like dots on an expanding balloon. This showed that the universe was expanding and became one of the biggest discoveries in history. Also, they were not only speeding away from us but were accelerating at the same time. They determined this by the “red shift” of the light from these galaxies and to keep this blog from becoming too long, I won’t write about here but encourage you to read up on how we can determine the speed of something light years away.
Newton started this understanding with his amazing experiments on light and we now can know so much about our world from studying light.
The last vital proof of the Big Bang happened in the mid 1960’s. Princeton physicist Bob Dicke said that right after the bang all the new tiny universe was super-hot and wondered where all the heat went. As it all cooled the heat was trapped in the universe and the heat would produce gamma rays that had cooled into radio waves and would still be present. Long story short, a team at Bell Labs had a radio antennae for their research and always had an annoying “hiss” that their antennae was picking up. After trying desperately to get rid of the hiss, even to washing the bird droppings off their big dish, they read a paper proposing the existence of background radiation from the radio waves that came from the cooling off of the gamma rays and realized they had discovered it. It was the Big Bang billion degree heat that cooled to 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, and it was everywhere. Then in the 1990’s NASA’s COBE satellite found that the radiation was in clumps that showed that there are aggregates of matter that formed the stars and planets and everything else.
The Big Bang: when time and space started about 13.8 billion years ago.
References:
A Brief History of Almost Everything, Bill Bryson, c.2003
A Beautiful Question, Frank Wilczek, c.2015
Is Atheism Dead?, Eric Mataxas, c.2021