Why Big Bang?

[june5197]

After viewing a topic discussing the big bang, I started to wonder on how the event got this name... During the start of expansion, it couldn't of banged at all seeing as it was sorrounded in 'nothing' (i'm relating this point to the sound of a bang, nothing else).

It wasn't at all big... The start of the universe must of been infinitely small.

 

Ofcourse, this name is obvious today - the universe is the biggest 'thing' known, and using radio, can be heard as the bang is still going on. So yes, the name fits today, however, not at the start of what was the big bang.

[Strange]

The name was coined by Fred Hoyle, an astronomer who supported the "steady state" model. In the 1950s he did a BBC radio program explaining the two models. He thought that "big bang" was a snappy way of characterising the expanding universe model.

 

It is, as you say, inaccurate in all sorts of ways. That is often the case with "pop" terminology.

 

It is sometimes claimed that Hoyle intended it as a disparaging comment, but he always denied this and transcripts of the broadcast suggest he was pretty even handed. He was very good friends with Lemnaitre, one of the developers of the FLRW metric on which tjhe model is based.

[Carrock]

After viewing a topic discussing the big bang, I started to wonder on how the event got this name... During the start of expansion, it couldn't of banged at all seeing as it was sorrounded in 'nothing' (i'm relating this point to the sound of a bang, nothing else).

It wasn't at all big... The start of the universe must of been infinitely small.

 

Ofcourse, this name is obvious today - the universe is the biggest 'thing' known, and using radio, can be heard as the bang is still going on. So yes, the name fits today, however, not at the start of what was the big bang.

It's not at all clear how long inflation continued ( perhaps far longer than the minimum required to fit observations ), but at the end of inflation the (now) observable universe was certainly very small.

 

However it seems likely a much larger volume at that time was very similar to what we can see - no edge effects have been detected.

 

It could easily have been more than 30 billion light years in diameter back then. Enough to qualify as a big bang?