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Nothing actually went Bang in the Big Bang, it was not an explosion at all. The term “Big Bang” is a huge misnomer coined by the theory’s biggest detractor, Fred Hoyle, and I have no idea why it stuck.
The Big Bang is actually an expansion of space. The entire universe was originally compressed in a space smaller than a proton, very hot and dense, and then space began to rapidly expand, with the matter and energy inside it cooling, combining, and transforming into the states we see it in today. The motions of the galaxies we see now when we look at them with our telescopes bear witness to this origin, as does the pervasive hum of microwave radiation at certain frequencies observable in every direction you point a suitable antenna. This is the Cosmic Microwave Background I mentioned above, and it is the afterglow of the Big Bang.
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel has many articles on these modern theories of cosmology, you can look for his page on BigThink if you want to know more. GoComics strips out my attempts to post direct links there.
We ourselves may not have been around when it happened, but all the stuff we can see was around back then in some form. Our study of the laws of nature that the stuff around us seems to obey allows us to infer how stuff will behave in the future and how it behaved back in the past as well.
For example: our observations of distant galaxies tell us that they are almost all moving away from us at tremendous speeds. That implies that in the past those galaxies must have been closer together. This then further implies that even deeper into the past everything in the universe must have once been concentrated at a very small point. That’s what led science to the theory of the Big Bang.
t’s the opening of the vocal part of the Ninth Symphony, just before the musical rendition of Schiller’s Ode to Joy. In full: “Oh friends, not these sounds! Let us instead strike up more pleasing and more joyful ones!” (“O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere!”)
It is to be remembered that 1962 was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the trade embargo was imposed against Cuba (that remains in force as of this day in 2023) only a month prior to this strip’s publication. The U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers was exchanged for a Soviet spy also a month before. It was a time of rather messy foreign relations for the US and its allies.
Nothing actually went Bang in the Big Bang, it was not an explosion at all. The term “Big Bang” is a huge misnomer coined by the theory’s biggest detractor, Fred Hoyle, and I have no idea why it stuck.
The Big Bang is actually an expansion of space. The entire universe was originally compressed in a space smaller than a proton, very hot and dense, and then space began to rapidly expand, with the matter and energy inside it cooling, combining, and transforming into the states we see it in today. The motions of the galaxies we see now when we look at them with our telescopes bear witness to this origin, as does the pervasive hum of microwave radiation at certain frequencies observable in every direction you point a suitable antenna. This is the Cosmic Microwave Background I mentioned above, and it is the afterglow of the Big Bang.
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel has many articles on these modern theories of cosmology, you can look for his page on BigThink if you want to know more. GoComics strips out my attempts to post direct links there.