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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nate who wrote (446)	9/15/1999 11:43:00 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

Big Bang! or is it a fact based on the belief that it did happen Oh no, for the longest time any scientist worth his salt thought that the universe was a constant and likely infinite. The first little exception that put this to the test was brought up around the turn of the century (although there is some evidence that the greeks noticed this dilemma). If the universe were infinite and had existed for an infinite amount of time, then in every direction you looked in the night sky there would be a star, maybe far far away but since there was infinite time the light would eventually get here and so the whole night sky would be lit up. Instead it was clear to anyone who went out at night that the sky was mostly dark. That little puzzle simmered in the back of a few minds (maybe light travels only so far and then stops? maybe this, maybe that). In the 1930s a giant telescope was built outside Los Angeles. It was quite a feat to make a piece of glass for the mirror and get it set up. The first job for that telescope was to look at the light from distant galaxies. The colors of the light were examined to see what chemicals made up these galaxies to see if they matched the same kind of chemicals found in our own Milky Way. The chief astronomer, Hubble, noticed that the lines in the spectrum were skewed, furthermore they were skewed in a pattern. The skewing indicated that the source of the light was in motion (just as the whistle from a passing train is skewed in pitch as it moves by). The galaxies were all skewed in the same way, they were moving away from the Milky Way and the farther away a Galaxy was the faster it was moving away. Hubble whipped out his slide rule and determined from the speed and direction that all of these galaxies had to start from the same place some 20 billion years ago. The scientists around the globe were surprised, initially they were sceptical. They demanded more tests, they didn't trust Hubble to make the tests so new telescopes were built and others with a "show me " attitude looked for themselves. Predictions were made, and sought after, and found. The scientists had no choice but to change their view of the universe, the evidence was too overwhelming. Still, when I was a child our science class taught the steady state theory with the big bang as a yet unproven theory. This was science at it's best, the evidence pointed to something other than what they belived and so they changed their belief. TP