IN THE BEGINNING - cont.

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Lemaître’s theory didn’t immediately win a lot of converts. Einstein, for one, remained unconvinced. It wasn’t until Edwin Hubble discovered that almost every galaxy was rushing away from Earth— and that the farther away the galaxy, the faster it was receding—that Einstein came around.  Although Lemaître’s conception of the Big Bang was prophetic in many ways, his idea about the initial state of the universe is almost the polar opposite of what we think today.

     Instead of a complex initial structure that broke apart to form the universe’s basic constituents, scientists now believe that the universe started out very simple and then grew more complex as it evolved.
Expanding Universe
Learn more about:

Edwin Hubble

The Hubble Constant

Georges Lemaître

Albert Einstein

The Big Bang Universe

The Steady-State Universe

Fred Hoyle

       That idea first came from the Russian-born American physicist George Gamow in the 1940s. Working with his student Ralph Alpher, he envisioned the universe beginning with an extraordinarily hot Big Bang. As the universe expanded, this superhot primordial soup of protons, neutrons, electrons, and radiation grew steadily cooler, and the constituents began fusing into heavier elements. Helium formed first, followed by all of the heavier elements, with the process wrapping up within about half an hour.

        Not every scientist was happy with the idea that the universe was created in a Big Bang. To some, this suggested a creator as well as a creation; to others it simply ran counter to their beliefs in a universe that had always existed. Whatever the reason, many cosmologists searched for a theory of the universe’s formation that did not require a beginning.

        Austrian-born scientists Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi and British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle developed the most successful of these competing theories in 1948, at the same time Gamow was promoting the big-bang theory. Called the steady-state theory, it held that the universe had always existed and had always looked the way it does now.

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