This is the story of how the Big Bang evolved from a left-field proposition to an excepted explanation of how the universe began. Lost Horizons: The Big Bang, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, BBC 2013
At the centre of this debate were two opposing theories: the first is that the universe has always been around ... the brainchild of Fred Hoyle ... Professor Hoyle passionately disagreed with the second idea - that the universe somehow was created out of nothing in an almighty explosion. ibid.
In 1949 he [Hoyle] coined the term Big Bang. ibid.
But as soon as you delve deeper into the atom things get stranger. Hidden within the maze of mathematics were the descriptions of an array of sub-atomic particles no-one had ever seen before. ibid.
When we move to scales beyond our imagination, the universe behaves in extraordinary ways. Jim Al-Khalili, Secrets of Size: Atoms to Supergalaxies II: Going Big
The distance between the Earth and Sun is actually a very significant figure in astronomy. ibid.
It’s thought that most if not all stars have heliospheres. ibid.
In the beginning – the universe was a bit of a let-down really. The real moment of creation came a hundred million years later – the Cosmic Dawn. It’s the moment the first stars were born. The moment that lit up the universe. Horizon: Cosmic Dawn: The Real Moment of Creation, BBC 2015
The Dark Ages are the last great frontier in our cosmic history. ibid.
Stefan's [Keller] star ... from only the second generation of stars ever made. ibid.
Volker’s [Bromm] model has given us an image of these first stars. ibid.
Their huge size ... They burnt through their fuel incredibly quickly ... A hyper-nova: the biggest explosion ever in the universe. ibid.
Astrophysicists believe that Space and Time began 15 billion years ago in one shattering moment: the Big Bang. They are now uncovering the entire life story of the universe from its cataclysmic birth to its final extraordinary death. Unfolding Universe, 2002
When did the clocks start ticking? Twelve billion years ago there was absolutely nothing: no matter, no space, no time. We may never know how or why it happened, but a seething mass of energy smaller than an atom grew from nothing ... A giant fireball of unimaginable heat. Universe: Big Bang
Hidden in the interference of a badly tuned TV set is the energy signal left from the first second of the universe. The discovery of the Big Bang was one of the great scientific discoveries of all time even though it was an accident. This is the Horn Antenna at the Bell Research Labs in New Jersey. Its unusual funnel shape was designed to collect faint radio waves from early communications satellites. It was being used for an entirely different experiment when it detected something truly remarkable: a discovery that would win two American scientists the Nobel Prize. In 1964 Bob Wilson and his colleague Arno Penzias ... had no idea where the signal was coming from ... What Wilson and Penzias had stumbled across was a background of microwave radiation, a faint afterglow of the battle that defeated anti-matter twelve billion years before. ibid.
Edwin Hubble took the first steps toward forecasting the fate of our entire universe ... He made the astronomical discovery of the century: that the universe was expanding. ibid.
Rather than slowing down, the universe is speeding up. The galaxies are moving apart faster than ever before. ibid.
The Big Bang singularity gave rise to the entire universe, which includes Space, Time and all the matter that fills it. A similar type of singularity is a white hole – a theoretic object that arises in Einstein’s theory of Gravity. It’s essentially a black hole in reverse. A point of singularity where matter is ejected. Consequently, some scientists have wondered if the universe could have been created from a white hole. The Universe s2e2: Cosmic Holes, History 2007
Physicists speculate that if nature uses white holes then they could have been an important element in the earliest stages in the universe. Perhaps even in the formation of the universe itself. ibid.
Whereas the Big Crunch fits the Christian vision of the end, Science has yet another theory: that it may instead all end in ice. Ultimately, it depends on whether the momentum of the expansion of the universe can overcome the collapsing attraction of Gravity. The Universe: Cosmic Apocalypse
When the particles collide they break open and throw out a shower of even smaller particles .... Within these super-heated collisions a completely new form of matter appears: and this matter contradicts the earlier theories about the nature of the universe: because it’s not a gas but a liquid. Birth of the Universe, 2006
Finally the universe will die, and all that will be left is cold, dark and lifeless space. ibid.
In one scenario Gravity pulls the universe back into itself ... This is the Big Crunch ... Then there’s the Big Chill. The universe expands until the nuclear furnaces that power all the stars burn out. The universe grows cold and dies. Then again there could be a much more spectacular end in which everything is ripped to shreds down to the last atom. Death of the Universe, 2008
Not only is the universe expanding, it’s speeding up. ibid.
If dark matter is the victor, the universe might collapse. If dark energy rules the cosmos, it could rip to shreds. ibid.
This is the Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson, just a couple of hours from Los Angeles. In the 1920s this was the best telescope in the world. And it’s the instrument that Edwin Hubble chose for his survey of galaxies. Hubble’s twin weapons were the sheer volume of data he collected and an ability to cut through it to see what it meant. In the 1920s Hubble helped solve a huge debate about the size of the universe. Using this telescope Hubble proved that the universe was much bigger than anyone had thought, filled with galaxies some of them unimaginable distances from the Earth. Dr Janet Sumner, interview The Cosmos: A Beginner’s Guide, BBC 2007
A few minutes were all Gamov needed. In that time all the hydrogen and almost all the helium was made. That’s about 98% of all the atoms in the universe today. Or as Gamov put it, our universe was cooked in less time that it takes to cook a dish of duck and roast potatoes. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Atom: The Key to the Cosmos, BBC 2008
The first stars ignited the universe into what must have been the most amazing firework. The universe went from the dark ages to an age of splendour when the first stars began to illuminate the gas in majestic fashion. Professor Carlos Frenk
The entire cosmos will die. Professor Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe: Destiny 1/4, BBC 2011
The largest and most complex scientific experiment ever attempted. The Large Hadron Collider or LHC has just one simple but audacious aim: to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang. Brian Cox, The Big Bang Machine, BBC 2011
It tells us how the fundamental constituents of the cosmos took on their form. ibid.
In the beginning there was nothing. ibid.
What is mass and why does it exist? ibid.
The Higgs mechanism works by filling the universe with a field – a Higgs Field ... Particles acquire mass by interacting with the Higgs Field. ibid.
It’s a law of quantum physics that all fields must have an associated particle. ibid.
Leidermann called it the God Particle. ibid.
Building an instrument capable of recreating the early universe and finding the massive Higgs Boson has taken decades. ibid.
Here is evidence of a neutrino caught on film. ibid.
For some theorists finding nothing at the LHC is actually the most exciting prospect. ibid.
A living cosmos might be the only way our cosmos can be. Brian Cox, Wonders of Life I: What is Life? BBC 2013
Dark Energy: an inexplicable force that is trying to push everything apart. How will this struggle end? Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman: Beyond the Darkness, Science 2010
The Big Bang ... It’s the best theory yet of what happened at the beginning of Time. But a new generation of scientists are daring to contemplate what was once thought impossible: are we wrong about the Big Bang? Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman: What Happened Before the Beginning?
What happened before the universe began? ibid.
Forty years after two radio astronomers first heard a faint whisper from our own cosmic birth ... the WMAP image only describes a minuscule variation in temperature. ibid.
In 2001 two of the leading cosmologists in the world published a paper suggesting an even more radical approach ... Our universe may not be the only one. ibid.
String Theory was developed in the last thirty-five years. ibid.
The incredibly strange world of eleven-dimensional space. ibid.
Out of string theory comes M theory. ibid.