What Is Cosmic Inflation?

• Autores: Don Lincoln
• Localización: The Physics Teacher, ISSN 0031-921X, Vol. 62, Nº. 4, 2024, págs. 250-254
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • In 1927, Belgian priest and cosmologist G. Lemaître published an article that proposed that our universe was expanding.1 Lemaître’s idea was originally simply an explanation for the motion of what we now call distant galaxies; however, he broadened his ideas and presented these more ambitious thoughts to the British Royal Astronomical Society in 1931. At that meeting, he first publicly discussed his idea of a “primeval atom,” which was his term for the visible universe compressed to tiny size. He published this idea in 1931 in the journal Nature.2 We now call his idea the Big Bang, a term coined by astronomer Fred Hoyle on a BBC radio show in 1949.3