It all started with a Big Bang. Or maybe it didn’t. In the mid-20th century, most physicists were split on how the universe began — or if it even had a beginning at all. Today, scientists agree that the Big Bang theory best describes the birth of our universe nearly 14 billion years ago. The idea now has a lot of observational evidence, but in the 1940s and ’50s it was still widely debated. The Big Bang theory roused the public and religious realms perhaps even more than the scientific community, which had previously accepted an idea called the steady state model. “It was not only a scientific controversy, it also included some broader aspects, ideological and religious aspects. And that was one reason why it was so publicly controversial,” says Helge Kragh, a science historian and professor emeritus at the Niels Bohr Institute. “The steady state theory was, especially in England, often associated with atheism, and the Big Bang theory with Christian theism.” If the universe had a creation point, then it probably had a creator, the thinking went.
Read More: What Came Before the Big Bang?
