The Big Bang (cont’d) But perhaps the biggest piece of evidence in support of The Big Bang is the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). As we have seen, the Universe was very hot and dense in its early stages. In the 1960s, Robert Dicke, David Wilkinson, and Jim Peebles argued that we should still see the glow of our early Universe, the light of which would be reaching us now. However, because space has expanded rapidly for 13.7 billion years, this light would be extremely red shifted (see page 1). In fact, its wavelengths would have elongated to a point where it no longer conformed to the visible light spectrum; its wavelengths would be long enough to turn it into microwave radiation. Coincidentally, two American physicists (Penzias and Wilson) were testing a very sensitive microwave detector. To their surprise, they detected extra “noise” coming equally from all direction. The noise was coming form outside the atmosphere. When Penzias and Wilson heard of Dicke and Peebles theory, they immediately made the connection; the noise they were detecting was the CMBR their counterparts had predicted! The CMBR lends very strong weight to The Big Bang Theory. It is known to many as The Big Bang’s smoking gun; just like a gun, we might have missed the “bang” but we can certainly detect whether the gun has been fired by the smoke it omits. The uniformity of the CMBR across the Universe furthers the point. We might not see The Big Bang, but we can certainly detect its traces. Having provided sufficient evidence of The Big Bang Theory, one must remember that it is just a theory. A theory is an idea, a framework that attempts to make sense of all observations and data we have so far. Currently, The Big Bang Theory is the only prominent idea with sufficient evidence. This may change in the future if different observations prove otherwise. For now, we are quite confident of the general idea of The Big Bang, though its details are under constant revision. In conclusion, we know that the Universe is currently expanding and has done so for billions of years. We predict with sufficient confidence that a very long time ago, all matter (the entire Universe we see today) was compacted and compressed together in a space no larger than a pin prick. Then, for some reason, there was a “bang” where space and time were created, expanding the Universe and distancing matter and energy apart. Though we are not able to detect any trace of the first 300,000 years of this event, light would eventually escape, the traces of which (called CMBR) are detected by our microwave sensors to this very day. Before moving on to how stars, our Sun and Earth were formed, let us first investigate the creation of the Universe as narrated by the Holy Quran. Is it compatible with current findings? Does it support any particular theory of origin?
Posted on: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 05:37:16 +0000