The Big Bang
...is the sky blue? what makes the birds sing in the spring? all the way to what is that big yellow thing that moves about the sky every day? Throughout history, one of the most prodding questions of them all that we haven't exactly been able to answer until now is: How did the universe come to be?' The study of cosmology, or the study of the universe, plays a significant role in the answer to this question. Scientists have many theories about the creation of matter, but one seems much more prominent than the rest of its competitors: the Big Bang theory.
In 1927, the Belgian priest George's Lemaître was the first to introduce the theory that the universe began with the explosion of a single atom. A Graduate of Cambridge University, Lemaître reviewed the general theory of relativity. As with Einstein's calculations ten years earlier, Lemaître's calculations showed that the universe had to be either shrinking or expanding. But while Einstein thought it was an unknown force, a cosmological constant which kept the world stable, Lemaître decided that the universe must have been expanding. He came to this conclusion after observing the reddish glow, known as a red shift, around objects outside of our galaxy. If interpreted as a Doppler effect, this shift in color meant that the galaxies were moving away from us.
Some years later, Edwin Hubble found experimental evidence to help justify Lemaître's theory. He found that distant galaxies in every direction are moving away from us with speeds proportional to their distance. That means that things farther away from earth were moving away faster. In other words, the universe must be expanding. He announced his findings in 1929. The ratio of distance to redshift was 170 kilometers/second per light year of distance, now called Hubble's constant. The numbers were not exactly right, and improvements in measuring...
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