One of my favorite TV shows was the Big Bang Theory. It was on for a number of years and is still being re-run on various channels today. I thought it was a pretty funny show, but the Big Bang elicits serious discussions and is truly hard to understand for most people.
According to a lot, if not most, scientists, our universe started out as this really small piece of matter and metamorphosed into an ever-expanding universe. But some creation scientists don’t believe it happened.
Explanations of the Big Bang usually cause headaches to people like me. I’ve heard the theory described something like this — A really long time ago there was nothing, and suddenly there was a whole lot of nothing, which was actually something, but nobody could really see it, even if there was somebody there, which there wasn’t.
See what I mean?
The Big Bang Theory was announced in 1948 by Russian-American physicist George Gamow, saying it was based on Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Cosmological Principles.
Here’s what (I think) it says….
Some 12 to 14 billion years ago, maybe longer, the portion of the universe we can see today was only a few millimeters across (that’s a little smaller than a gnat) and extremely hot. The bang being mentioned is the expansion of this small, hot dense state into the vastly expanding and much cooler cosmos that we currently inhabit. The universe is still expanding, gradually increasing the distance between our galaxy and other galaxies.
For a theory to be taken seriously on its way to becoming accepted as fact, it has to undergo rigorous testing. Since 1948, when Gamow first mentioned it, scientist have found the Big Bang Theory consistent with a number of important observations:
• Astronomers can observe the expansion of the universe.
• There is an observed abundance of helium, deuterium, and lithium in the universe — three element that scientist think were synthesized primarily in the first three minutes of the universe.
• The existence of significant amounts of cosmic microwave background radiation.
The cosmic microwave background radiation is an important observation because radiation appears hotter in distant clouds of gas. Since light travels at a finite speed, we see these distant clouds at an earlier time in the history of the universe, when it was denser — and hotter.
One big question is whether the currently expanding universe will continue to expand or will it ultimately contract and implode. Apparently contraction is a definite possibility.
There’s a bunch more to the theory, like about how space and time are altered by gravity, and the possible shape of the universe — is it saddle-shaped, ball-shaped, flat or, as some think, doughnut-shaped. And is the universe open or closed — is it infinite or not.
The doughnut shape is an example of a closed universe — in such a universe, you could start off in one direction and, if allowed enough time, ultimately return to your starting point. If the universe is infinite, you would never return. I’m not sure what universe Star Trek operated in… I would guess it wasn’t an infinite universe, or Kirk and Spock would never have returned for all those re-runs.
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