Robert McNees on Spoutible

Happy birthday to the term "Big Bang”!

Fred Hoyle, defending his steady state theory on the BBC, accidentally coined the term for the prevailing model of the early Universe #OTD in 1949. He was criticizing "the hypothesis that all matter of the universe was created in one big bang."

The passage from a BBC interview with Hoyle reads:
We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one
big bang at a particular time in the remote past. It now turns out that in some respect or other all such theories are in conflict with the observational requirements. And to a degree
that can hardly be ignored. Investigators of this problem are like a party of mountaineers attempting an unclimbed peak.

12:18 PM - Mar 28, 2023

Robert McNees

@mcnees

In response to Robert McNees.

The idea of a "Big Bang" goes back as far as Lemaître, who in 1927 imagined tracing an expanding universe backwards in time.

In a 1931 letter to Nature he articulated how this process leads to an early state where concepts like space and time break down.

https://www.nature.com/articles/127706b

The passage from Lemaître's letter reads:
"Now, in atomic processes, the notions of space and time are no more than statistical notions; they fade out when applied to individual phenomena involving but a small number of quanta. If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta. If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time. I think that such a beginning of the world is far enough from the present order of Nature to be not at all repugnant."

12:21 PM - Mar 28, 2023

Robert McNees

@mcnees

In response to Robert McNees.

Today we use the term Big Bang in two distinct ways.

There is the "hot big bang," for which we have incontrovertible physical evidence: At some point in the far past, about 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was in an extremely hot and dense state from which expansion proceeds.

12:22 PM - Mar 28, 2023

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