Big Bang: While the West Reeled
While the West reeled from America’s stock market crash of 1929, another crisis was brewing in the field of cosmology. One of the most ambitious scientific theories in history — that the universe had a beginning — was beginning to take shape, ushering in a new cosmological paradigm. But the real heroes of the Big Bang revolution have been largely forgotten. A new book from Discovery Institute Press amends the record and tells the remarkable story. On a new episode of ID the Future, I read an excerpt from The Big Bang Revolutionaries, by distinguished astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet.
A scientific revolution occurs when a widely held picture of the universe undergoes a fundamental transformation. The Einsteinian cosmological revolution was the discovery of the expansion of the universe and the recognition that the cosmos emerged from a possible singular origin. But despite its name, Albert Einstein was not the key player in the development of these ideas. Philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer writes that scientific revolutions are “messy, full of unexpected twists and turns, and not without its casualties.” So it is with the Big Bang revolution.
In this brief excerpt from Chapter 1 of the book, Luminet sets the stage by describing the conditions in the early 20th century that inspired three gutsy pioneers to challenge conventional scientific wisdom to offer a compelling view of a singular creation of the universe. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
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