The big bang theory is widely accepted because there is strong evidence in its favor, and because it

arises naturally from the General Theory of Relativity, which is itself a well-tested theory. There have
been several alternative models since the Big Bang was proposed in the late 1940s, but most of them
failed observational tests. There is one currently supported alternative theory, which is more difficult to
test, but relevant evidence should be forthcoming in the next few years.

What is the evidence for the big bang? In order to establish this, we need to know what the Big Bang
model predicts. Basically, we have the following arguments:

1. In the Big Bang model, the universe is expanding – that is, the spaces between galaxies get larger over
time. Incidentally, this is NOT the galaxies rushing away from each other through space: it is the
expansion of space itself, rather in the way that spots on a spotted balloon get further away from each
other as you blow up the balloon. This expansion was firmly established by Edwin Hubble and Milton
Humason in 1931 (after an earlier but much less precise determination by Hubble in 1929), based on
their distance measurements combined with spectroscopic evidence that had been accumulating since
1915 (it is often suggested that this was an unexpected discovery by Hubble, but that is not the case).
This counts as a successful prediction, because the equations that describe the Big Bang expansion had
first been written down by Aleksandr Friedman in 1922, and later rediscovered by Georges Lemaitre in
1927. (Hubble does not seem to have known about these predictions when he wrote his papers; he does
not mention them.) However, it is not a unique prediction: other models, such as the Steady State
model of Hermann Bondi, Tommy Gold and Fred Hoyle, also predict expansion. So we can’t really count
it as strong evidence in favour of the Big Bang theory.

2. In the Big Bang model, the universe has a finite age – if we run time backwards, everything becomes
closer and closer together, and hotter and hotter, until you arrive at the beginning of time when the
universe was (at least in the original version of the theory) infinitely hot and dense. Because light does
not travel infinitely fast, when you look at distant galaxies you are seeing them as they were a long time
ago. Therefore, the Big Bang predicts that distant galaxies should look much younger than the nearby
galaxies we see around us. This turns out to be true: distant galaxies do look different from nearby ones,
and some of those differences suggest that they are younger. The most obvious difference is that far
more distant galaxies have active nuclei – that is, their central regions are emitting vast amounts of
energy at all sorts of wavelengths – radio waves, X-rays, infra-red. This is probably caused by matter
falling on to an extremely massive black hole (about 100 million or more times the mass of the Sun). The
point is that we can calculate how long this kind of extreme activity is likely to last, and the result is
much less than the age of our own Galaxy, or indeed our own Sun. So it is to be expected that such
activity would be much more common when the galaxies were all much younger, and this is a good
explanation of why we now see it as much more common in galaxies that are very distant (and so seen
as they were billions of years ago).
This genuinely is evidence in favour of the Big Bang, because the most popular alternative model of the
1950s – the Steady State – held that although the universe was expanding, it was nevertheless infinitely
old (new matter being continuously created to balance the expansion and keep the number of galaxies
per billion cubic light years constant). The Steady State would have expected that galaxies would appear
to have the same average age at any time, and thus at any distance – so there should not be more active
galactic nuclei at large distance. This observation, which was first made in 1963, is therefore evidence
against the Steady State.

3. The Big Bang predicts that the early universe was very hot and very dense. This is because as you run
time backward, the galaxies get closer and closer together, so eventually they all merge into one big
lump. Therefore the early universe in the Big Bang model should be very dense. This was realised
already in the 1920s: Georges Lemaitre talked about “the primeval atom”. Also, when something
expands it usually cools down, because you are spreading energy over a greater volume, so the early
universe should be very hot – this wasn’t really pointed out until the work of George Gamow and his
students in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

This has two consequences. The first is that about 3 minutes after the Big Bang, the temperature of the
universe is comparable to the central cores of stars, where nuclear fusion reactions take place.
Therefore, the free protons and neutrons that were formed even earlier can combine to make the first
few nuclei of the periodic table: deuterium (the heavy isotope of hydrogen, with one neutron bound to
one proton), the two isotopes of helium (He-3, with one neutron and two protons, and the much more
common He-4, with two of each), and a little bit of lithium-7 (3 protons and 4 neutrons). Furthermore,
the nuclear physics reactions contributing to this have been studied in the laboratory, and we know how
they work, so we can calculate how much of each isotope should be made. It turns out that the amount
of deuterium, in particular, is a very good test of the Big Bang, because deuterium is not made anywhere
else: stars actually destroy deuterium, converting it to helium-4. The amount of deuterium we observe is
as the Big Bang calculations predict, and it is consistent with the amount of He-4 we observe (He-4 _is_
made in stars, but the amount that we see in the universe is far too much to have been made by all the
stars that have ever lived: most of it was made in the early universe). This is very good evidence for the
Big Bang, because not only does deuterium exist in the universe, it exists at exactly the level predicted
by the Big Bang calculation.

The second effect of the hot, dense early universe is that hot, dense materials give off light (think of a
red-hot poker, a glowing coal, molten metal, an old-fashioned tungsten-filament electric light). What is
more, the light that they give off is very precisely understood: it follows a law called the Planck function
(first worked out by Max Planck in 1901), which depends only on the temperature of the material.
Therefore, if the early universe was hot and dense, there should be left-over light from that period, and
it should obey the Planck function – although, because of the cooling effect of expansion, its
temperature should now be only a few degrees above absolute zero. This low temperature puts it in the
microwave region of the spectrum, with wavelengths of millimetres (unlike visible light, which has
wavelengths of tenths of a micrometre). This radiation was predicted by Gamow’s group in 1950, but
nobody in 1950 knew how to detect these wavelengths, and the prediction was forgotten. It was
rediscovered in 1965 by a group led by Bob Dicke at Princeton, and the same year it was observed –
accidentally – by Penzias and Wilson. By 1968, it has been observed at enough wavelengths to show that
it followed the Planck function, as far as could be checked (we now know that it follows the Planck
function very precisely indeed). This was compelling evidence for the Big Bang – no other theory (then
or now) could explain why the universe should contain a background radiation that obeyed the Planck
function for a temperature a few degrees (2.725, to be precise) above absolute zero. The Big Bang has
been the standard theory of cosmology ever since, and nobody has come up with any evidence to
contradict this.

The modern alternatives to the Big Bang accept pretty much all the evidence above. The main area of
disagreement is what happened in the very early stages, long before even the formation of elements at
3 minutes. The standard description of this since 1981 has been a theory called “inflation”, which its
inventor Alan Guth calls “a prequel to the Big Bang.” Inflation holds that a tiny tiny fraction of a second
after the beginning, there was a brief period of enormously rapid expansion, much much faster than the
speed of light (don’t panic – nothing can move THROUGH space faster than the speed of light, but space
itself can expand as fast as it wants), and that our entire visible universe sprang from an incredibly small
piece of pre-inflation space, about 1/100-billion times the diameter of an atomic nucleus. This explains
why the universe we see is so uniform in all directions, which was a puzzle in the original big bang
model. However, some theorists think that instead, the stage for the Big Bang was set by a collision
between entire universes. These theorists believe that there are more than 3 space dimensions, and
that our 3-dimensional universe is moving in a 4th space dimension and periodically collides with
another 3-dimensional universe. The collision wipes out all the features of the universe and looks to
later observers just like a Big Bang (which I suppose it literally was, but not in the way intended in the
standard Big Bang!).

It is hard to tell the difference between the Big Bang + inflation model and the extra-dimensional
collision model, because after the first tiny fraction of a second they basically look exactly the same. The
possible solution is that inflation predicts faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime – “primordial
gravitational waves” – which leave faint swirling imprints in the microwave background. You may
remember that there was a big news story about a year ago, when a telescope called BICEP2 claimed to
have found evidence for this swirling pattern. It turns out that they were probably wrong – they had
underestimated the effects of dust in the Milky Way Galaxy – but more sensitive studies of this effect
are being carried out. The extra dimensions model does not predict these patterns, so if they are found
it will be evidence against extra dimensions and in favour of inflation.