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Big Bang

Not who you're looking for? Others named Big Bang: hypothetical begin of the Universe through expansion out of · album by Los Enanitos Verdes · 1988 video game · Milestone Comics event published by DC Comics

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Overview

Big Bang: The most important scientific discovery of all time and why you need to know about it is a book written by Simon Singh and published in 2004 by Fourth Estate. Big Bang chronicles the history and development of the Big Bang model of the universe, from the ancient Greek scientists who first measured the distance to the sun to the 20th century detection of the cosmic radiation still echoing the dawn of time. The book discusses how different theories of the universe evolved, along with a personal look at the people involved. Before Big Bang theories The book takes up how the inaccuracies of the theories of Copernicus and Galileo lead them to be dismissed. Copernicus and Galileo used false arguments to persuade people that the Earth went in circles around the Sun, and that the Sun was the center of the universe. Both these statements were alien to the public at the time, and are still alien to a modern public. Only the finally mathematically correct interpretation of Johannes Kepler made the theories accepted, within a single generation. As Singh points out, the old generation must die before a new theory can be accepted.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable quotes

“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.”
— Fred Hoyle, BBC radio broadcast, 1949. Reprinted in April 1949 in The Listener.
“This circumstance of an expanding universe is irritating.”
— Albert Einstein, quoted in "Have Astronomers" by Robert Jastrow, The New York Times (June 25, 1978)
“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened—the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery... That it happened is reasonably clear. All the matter in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density—a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures—perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimensions at all.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)
“[Big Bang theory] suggested that matter and motion originated rather as Genesis [in the Bible] suggests, ex nihilo, out of nothing, in a stupendous explosion of light and energy.”
— Newsweek magazine of November 9, 1998.
“I'll say only this: if we're going to throw the idea of the Big Bang overboard, we won't have much left of current astrophysics and cosmology”
— Charles Sheffield, The Spheres of Heaven (2001), , p. 334 (Chapter 23)
“... et al. (2003) ... say “The remarkable agreement between the density inferred from / values and our measurements is an important triumph for the basic big bang model.” This was certainly true given the size of the s on both and the at the time.”
— ,

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

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Not who you're looking for? Others named Big Bang: hypothetical begin of the Universe through expansion out of · album by Los Enanitos Verdes · 1988 video game · Milestone Comics event published by DC Comics

Overview

Big Bang: The most important scientific discovery of all time and why you need to know about it is a book written by Simon Singh and published in 2004 by Fourth Estate. Big Bang chronicles the history and development of the Big Bang model of the universe, from the ancient Greek scientists who first measured the distance to the sun to the 20th century detection of the cosmic radiation still echoing the dawn of time. The book discusses how different theories of the universe evolved, along with a personal look at the people involved. Before Big Bang theories The book takes up how the inaccuracies of the theories of Copernicus and Galileo lead them to be dismissed. Copernicus and Galileo used false arguments to persuade people that the Earth went in circles around the Sun, and that the Sun was the center of the universe. Both these statements were alien to the public at the time, and are still alien to a modern public. Only the finally mathematically correct interpretation of Johannes Kepler made the theories accepted, within a single generation. As Singh points out, the old generation must die before a new theory can be accepted.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable quotes

“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.”
— Fred Hoyle, BBC radio broadcast, 1949. Reprinted in April 1949 in The Listener.
“This circumstance of an expanding universe is irritating.”
— Albert Einstein, quoted in "Have Astronomers" by Robert Jastrow, The New York Times (June 25, 1978)
“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened—the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery... That it happened is reasonably clear. All the matter in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density—a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures—perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimensions at all.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)
“[Big Bang theory] suggested that matter and motion originated rather as Genesis [in the Bible] suggests, ex nihilo, out of nothing, in a stupendous explosion of light and energy.”
— Newsweek magazine of November 9, 1998.
“I'll say only this: if we're going to throw the idea of the Big Bang overboard, we won't have much left of current astrophysics and cosmology”
— Charles Sheffield, The Spheres of Heaven (2001), , p. 334 (Chapter 23)
“... et al. (2003) ... say “The remarkable agreement between the density inferred from / values and our measurements is an important triumph for the basic big bang model.” This was certainly true given the size of the s on both and the at the time.”
— ,

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.