How Sure are we that the Big Bang is Correct?:
[Via Starts With A Bang]
Recently, a discussion started in one of my comment threads about whether the Big Bang was necessarily valid or not, and whether there were any reasonable alternatives. The answer is that not only is the Big Bang the best theory to explain the start and evolution of the Universe, it’s the only one that doesn’t make incorrect predictions. Let’s see this in action.
This all started in the late 1920s, when we realized that spiral nebulae were not just galaxies, but that these other galaxies were nearly all moving away from us. Moreover, the ones that were farther away from us were moving away faster than the ones that were nearer to us. This lead us to the picture that the Universe was expanding, like so:
After a little bit of math to go along with this, we quickly realized that the Universe is acting much like the Earth would if you had detonated a huge bomb at the center:
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A very nice example of science. Observations lead to hypotheses which lead to logical conclusions. Testing these conclusions leads to either greater support of the hypotheses or their modification.
This post provides some nice data demonstrating that the Big Bang theory explains a lot of observable data, not simply that the galaxies are all moving away from us.
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