I have no particular interest in trying to educate mswas in modern cosmology, but just in case anyone else is reading this, I wanted to address the idea that the Big Bang theory is “unverified” or “unverifiable”.
Part of this I was able to come up with off the top of my head, and much of it I’m cribbing from Wikipedia. I don’t claim to be an expert on this, or even terribly knowledgeable about cosmology as laymen go, but I have had some formal and informal schooling on this, and I think I know enough about the science (and about how Wikipedia works) to grasp the basic details (and also to have noticed if some nitwit had just vandalized the Wikipedia article to say that “We know the Big Bang is true because the unicorns told us so”–or even to spot more subtle forms of vandalism).
1.) The observed expansion of the Universe. We can observe the Universe to be expanding based on observed redshift of distant galaxies; we can tell that light from distant galaxies has been “redshifted” from well-established principles of spectroscopy; spectroscopy is dependant not only on astronomical observations but can also be studied on labs right here on Earth. The idea of a Doppler shift producing a “red shift” when an object is receding from the observer is also something that can be studied and tested right here.
The pattern of red shifts is not only consistent with a large-scale general expansion of the Universe–that is, expansion at the scale of galactic clusters and so on; the possible expansion of your waistline is not related–but it is also inconsistent with, say, a really big explosion inside space. It is consistent with a general expansion of space itself. The classic analogy (which I learned as a liberal-arts major undergrad mumblety-mumble years ago) is that our space is the Flatland-style surface of a 3-D balloon that’s being blown up. From every point on the balloon, a Flatlander will perceive himself to be at the center of a general expansion, with more distant objects receding more quickly, which is (analogously speaking) exactly what we see in three dimensions. (I don’t pretend that I can directly visualize a fourth spatial dimension, nor do I pretend to understand how our 3-D space can be so expanding without being “embedded” and “expanding into” a higher 4-D space, but I don’t find my inability or unwillingness to have mastered the math of that is enough to make me reject what the scientists are saying here.)
- The famous three Kelvin microwave background radiation. When things get hot, they “glow”; they give off electromagnetic radiation. There is a relationship between something’s temperature and the wavelength (for visible light, the color) at which it radiates. Again, this is stuff that can be experimented on in labs right here. The properties of the 3 Kelvin radiation in terms of its uniformity and so on are such that it very well matches the Big Bang theory’s prediction of a cosmic microwave background radiation.
(Note that the expansion of the Universe was discovered first, and then the Big Bang theory was developed in order to explain the observation. The microwave background radiation was predicted by the theory, although the exact details of what was actually found were in turn used to further refine the theory.)
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Another thing the Wikipedia article points out is the relative abundance of primordial elements. The elements in your body, in the air you breathe, and in the things all around–trees and tables and computers–were formed in massive stars that then exploded in supernova explosions. However, those stars themselves had to be made of something–lighter elements, mostly hydrogen, some helium, and a trace of lithium–and the Big Bang theory in turns explains where those building blocks for stars came from, and (roughly at least) why they are in the proportions we observe them to be in.
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Finally, there is the large-scale structure of the Universe we see. When we look further out in space, we look further back in time, and we see different conditions–quasars and very young stars instead of the more sedate galaxies and older stars of the here-and-now.
With the observed structure of the Universe, especially at very large scales, we again see a pattern where theory makes predictions, and then the observations that are actually made are used to further refine and shape the theory.
None of this is to say that the Big Bang theory won’t be further refined, or that there aren’t important things we don’t yet undertand about the Universe, or even that it’s impossible that the Big Bang theory won’t just be refined and modified but might actually be entirely supplanted some day. But it is an important theory, with solid evidence for it, one of the pillars of modern science, and is accepted–for very good reasons–by the vast majority of people who take the time and effort to study these things.
Incidentally, note how easy it is to say “Oh, there’s no evidence for that!”, and how many words it takes to refute such a claim, if one wishes to go beyond just saying “Is too!”
