2

THE BIG BANG

HOW AND WHY DO INDIVIDUALS
CHANGE THEIR MINDS?

SY 2019-20
UNIT 2
LESSONS

2.0 How Did Our Understanding of the Universe Change?

How did our ideas that all the planets in our solar system revolve around the sun and the Universe
is expanding develop? Scientific theories change as better observations and new experiments
provide new insights into accepted beliefs.

2.1 The Big Bang

The Big Bang is where Big History begins. Everything that’s ever existed – including you – traces
back to this unimaginably profound event.

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LOOKING BACK
WHAT HAPPENED
IN UNIT 1?

Unit 1 introduced the Big History course and shared four main themes: Big History, scale,
origin stories, and thresholds of increasing complexity.
• Big History tells the 13.8-billion-year story of the Universe.
• All communities have created origin stories to answer important questions about life and the
Universe. Big History is a modern, scientific origin story told by a global community.
• Thresholds of complexity are a foundation of Big History: they’re fragile, diverse, precise, and
they led to entirely new things in the Universe.

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KEY CONTENT
A BIG HISTORY OF
EVERYTHING
Video

• Big History begins with the Big Bang, a moment scientists are currently unable to describe with
any degree of certainty.
• The Universe appears to emerge from nothing, but scientists cannot describe the moments
before the Big Bang or the moment of the Big Bang itself. Major questions surround the origin of
the Universe.
• While four fundamental forces were created by the Big Bang, gravity has played the most
influential role in the history of the Universe because it can operate over the largest scales.
• The nature of gravity helped define the future development of the Universe. If gravity had been
stronger, everything would have collapsed on itself. If gravity had been weaker, stars, planets,
and other complex combinations of matter could not have formed.
• The Big Bang set the history of the Universe in motion.

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13.8
THRESHOLD 1—
THE BIG BANG
Video

• This video states that the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago. Recent observations
(announced after after this video was made) show that the Big Bang happened before that–
about 13.82 million years ago!
• The initial moments after the Big Bang saw the creation of time, space, matter, and energy, so
we know a lot about what happened a few moments after the Big Bang. What is not clear are
the moments immediately before or immediately after the Big Bang. What made the Big Bang
possible and why it happened remain mysteries to scientists.
• Just after the Big Bang, the temperature and pressure in the Universe were so high that matter
and energy were an interchangeable blur. As the Universe cooled and became less dense, the
basic forms of matter and the four fundamental forces also appeared. This developments
occurred incredibly quickly, probably within a billionth of a second after the Big Bang!
• The matter and energy that formed after the Big Bang took a variety of forms. Among the four
forms of energy, gravity and electromagnetism were the most important.

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PTOLEMY, COPERNICUS, AND
GALILEO
Articles / Cynthia Stokes Brown

In this set of articles, Cynthia Stokes Brown provides biographies of key figures who contributed to
our changing view of the Universe.
• Ptolemy created the view of the Universe that dominated European thought for over 1,000
years.
• Copernicus was troubled by inconsistencies in Ptolemy’s work and believed that putting the Sun
at the center of the Universe resolved many of these problems.
• Galileo used a telescope to observe the surface of the Moon, the moons of Jupiter, the phases
of Venus, and sunspots. His observations provided important evidence for Copernicus’s idea of
a sun-centered Universe.

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WHAT’S NEXT?

In Unit 3, the first stars will appear. We will learn:

• How stars formed
• About the life (and death) of a star
• About the origin of heavy chemical elements in aging and dying stars
• How views of chemical elements changed over time

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