The Big Bang model, or theory, is the prevailing cosmological theory of the early development of the universe.[1] The theory purports to explain some of the earliest events in the universe (but not the absolute earliest state of things, or where it comes from). Our universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state that expanded rapidly (a "Big Bang"). There is little consensus among physicists about the origins of the universe itself (i.e. just as evolution seeks to explain our past only after the origin of life, the Big Bang theory explains only what happened after the uncertain origin of the universe). What is clear is that the Big Bang caused the young universe to cool and resulted in the present diluted state that continues to expand today. Based on the best available measurements as of 2010, the original state of the universe existed around 13.7 billion years ago, which is often referred to as the time when the Big Bang occurred. The theory is the most comprehensive and accurate explanation supported by scientific evidence and observations.Georges Lemaître proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, he called it his "hypothesis of the primeval atom". The framework for the model relies on Albert Einstein's general relativity and on simplifying assumptions (such as homogeneity and isotropy of space). The governing equations had been formulated by Alexander Friedmann. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the distances to far away galaxies were generally proportional to their redshifts—an idea originally suggested by Lemaître in 1927. Hubble's observation was taken to indicate that all very distant galaxies and clusters have an apparent velocity directly away from our vantage point: the farther away, the higher the apparent velocity.
If the distance between galaxy clusters is increasing today, everything must have been closer together in the past. This idea has been considered in detail back in time to extreme densities and temperatures, and large particle accelerators have been built to experiment on and test such conditions, resulting in significant confirmation of this theory. On the other hand, these accelerators have limited capabilities to probe into such high energy regimes. There is little evidence regarding the absolute earliest instant of the expansion. Thus, the Big Bang theory cannot and does not provide any explanation for such an initial condition; rather, it describes and explains the general evolution of the universe going forward from that point on. The observed abundances of the light elements throughout the cosmos closely match the calculated predictions for the formation of these elements from nuclear processes in the rapidly expanding and cooling first minutes of the universe, as logically and quantitatively detailed according to Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
Fred Hoyle is credited with coining the term Big Bang during a 1949 radio broadcast. It is popularly reported that Hoyle, who favored an alternative "steady state" cosmological model, intended this to be pejorative, but Hoyle explicitly denied this and said it was just a striking image meant to highlight the difference between the two models. Hoyle later helped considerably in the effort to understand stellar nucleosynthesis, the nuclear pathway for building certain heavier elements from lighter ones. After the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964, and especially when its spectrum (i.e., the amount of radiation measured at each wavelength) was found to match that of thermal radiation from a black body, most scientists were fairly convinced by the evidence that some version of the Big Bang scenario must have occurred.
