In the 1930s, most scientists, including Einstein, had models for the Universe that considered it to be static in size. These models were never seen as fully satisfactory, and were about to change, thanks to a Belgian Priest name Georges Lemaître.
Born in 1894 in Charleroi, Belgium, Lemaître, who was drawn to both science and theology, served as an artillery officer during World War I before pursuing studies in theoretical physics, and becoming a clerical man in 1923. In 1927 he had a breakthrough idea that would rock the world, he published a paper with a solution to the equations of General Relativity for the case of a always expanding universe.
The paper remained unknown for years, not getting much traction. But then, Hubble observed that the distant galaxies all appeared to be receding from us at speeds proportional to their distances, which made people question a static universe, and the paper surged in popularity. Lemaître then thought about the logical next step: if the universe is expanding, it means that it had to have started in a much smaller condensed state at one point, where it started.
The coining of that beginning to be “Big Bang” is actually coming from adversaries of the theory. The term was actually coined by a British astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, during a radio broadcast in 1949, who was a proponent of a rival theory called the “steady state” theory. Sometimes your adversaries can create the best marketing campaign for you.
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