The Big Bang
Assuming that it did happen and modern scientific thinking believes it did and that it was at a point where all time and space existed in a singularity surrounded by nothingness, we are not talking vacuum here, we are talking the absence of existence (don't try and think about this too much it makes your head hurt, like me just accept it), the singularity suddenly popped into existence and expanded to galactic nay universal proportions and indeed is still going.
So having accepted that the Big Bang came from nothingness then how could it have made a noise? There was no air for sound to travel through - in fact there was no anything and for that matter who would have been around to listen?
Remember 'in space no one can here you scream' let alone in nothingness.
So how come it was named so wrongly? Well enter stage right Fred Hoyle 'tother famous Yorkshire bloke who vehemently opposed the 'expansionist' theory and in a 1950 radio interview sarcastically referred to the theory as the Big Bang. This rather neat piece of branding caught peoples imagination and the name stuck. Fred Hoyle also often gets attributed with creating the original theory and for old Fred that must have been rather annoying to say the least!
Things did not get much better for Freddy boy, without doubt he was a genius with many ground breaking theories of the universe but having equally as many hair brained and indeed controversial including nostrils pointing downward to stop germs from space settling in there. With these ideas he had upset academia (us Yorkshire folk have a habit of doing that!) - his rightful Nobel Prize actually went to his research assistant.
In the end, credit where credit is due. He was knighted and has many other academic and scientific honours. He also wrote over a dozen sci-fi books including A for Andromeda and even has an asteroid named after him and who would not want that?
mmm... "comet cuttsy, collision course earth"
No comments:
Post a Comment