The Beginning Of Time :: essays research papers fc

The Beginning Of Time There was a period in history when the beginning of the world in which we live in was a expressed through legends and myths, now, through the use of increasingly advanced scientific equipment we can see that the universe is more vast and complex than ever imaginable. The purpose of this paper is to bring light to some of the modern beliefs regarding the origin of the universe by answering a series of questions. What are the commonly excepted theories of the evolution of the universe? What is meant by the "Big Bang Theory" and how does it work? And how our planet and solar system developed from The Big Bang? This paper will use scientific data to base the evolution of our universe around The Big Bang. At the present time there are two theories which are used to explain the creation of the universe. The first theory is the infamous Big Bang Theory, which will be detailed later. The second is the Steady State Theory. (Weinberg, 1977) The later hypothesis was created to replace the common belief that the universe was completely static. The expansion of the universe was discovered in 1929 when Edwin Hubble discovered that every galaxy in the universe was moving away from each other, this meant that the universe was expanding. Hubble found the movement of the galaxies by using a phenomenon known as the Doppler effect. This effect caused bodies moving away from an observer to have a "red-shifted" spectrum (the light spectrum of the body had been shifted closer to red) and bodies moving towards an observer to be "blue-shifted" (Hawking, 1988) The expansion was traced backwards through time to discover that all the galaxies had originated from the same point. It was later believed that all matter spawn from that "center of the universe" discovered by Hubble, by means of some sort of enigmatic portal. Matter would collect outside this singularity and form every moon, planet, and star known today. The Steady State Theory was very attractive because it featured a universe with no beginning or end. The theory meant that scientist had to abandon the laws of conservations of mass and energy. It seemed plausible that the aforementioned laws of physics could breakdown at a certain point but more and more evidence gathered against the Steady State Theory, leading to unending modifications to it. Until finally the theory was dropped completely with the discovery of the smooth microwave background radiation (radiation so ancient it had shifted right out of the visible spectrum into microwave radiation). A smooth background to the universe suggested that it was hot and uniform - the