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Few scientific theories are as astonishing as "The Big Bang". The idea that the universe started out as a tiny ball and grew to the unimaginable size we observe today seems almost impossible to believe. Yet tens of thousands of physicists and astronomers, who study the universe every day, are convinced the "Big Bang" is actually happening. How can the rest of us decide if the theory is true or if our scientists have blundered? First let's try to understand the theory, and then we make up our minds.

When someone says "Big Bang" most of us think of an explosion, like a bomb going off. But that's not actually what the theory says. The real story is much stranger. At the beginning of time our universe was tiny. Not only was all the material and energy packed into a little ball, all of space itself was packed in there, too. There was no place outside the ball. We would not have been able to stand outside the ball and say, "Oh, look at the tiny ball", because "outside the ball" didn't mean anything. Everything and everyplace were inside in the ball.

At the beginning of time nothing exploded; space itself simply began rapidly expanding. The "new, bigger space" allowed all the material packed into the little ball to expand with it. This expansion is the Big Bang, and it is still going on today. How can space expand? I have no idea, nor does anyone else. But the evidence is all around us, as huge galaxies fly off in every direction. To add to the mystery, consider some recent findings from the latest generations of telescopes. In an explosion, the bits and pieces move fastest at first, and then slow down. Deep space images are providing evidence that, even with gravity trying to pull things back together, the expansion we call the Big Bang is speeding up! The bigger the universe gets, the faster it grows.

How do we get our head around that? Using our common sense, we don't. But Isaac Newton, back in the 17th century, provided us the way forward. You may recall that he developed a mathematical explanation of the laws of gravity. Rene Descartes challenged him because Sir Isaac didn't explain "the mechanism of gravity", how it works. Newton honestly replied that he did not know the mechanism, but he could confidently say gravity depended on the mass of the two objects involved, and the inverse square of their distance both mathematically and through measurement and observation.

Today we don't understand how space can expand, but our telescopes observe that it does. Everywhere we look galaxies are moving away from us. Our radio telescopes measure a background radiation right across the sky whose energy level indicates space is expanding in every direction. The mathematics of general relativity is also consistent with expansion. But perhaps most telling is the absence of dissent among scientists. Fred Hoyle, once the Royal Astronomer of Great Britain, took issue with the theory and fought it for decades. Eventually he conceded defeat. It's not hard to imagine that any scientist today who could disprove the Big Bang would do so, if only for the fame and likely award of a Nobel Prize. I think from this collection of mathematical, physical and social evidence we can conclude that, far from being a blunder, the Big Bang is both an amazing phenomenon and a well-proven theory.

Learn more about this author, Rob Drew.
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