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But what the hell. Welcome!
I'm just wanting to know if any one thinks they can prove the theory.
I can't
prove we aren't all in the Matrix. But I
can lay out some of the basic evidence behind Big Bang cosmology. Accepted theories in science are about the accuracy of predictions in comparison to competing theories, not about absolute proof, simply because none of us are omniscient. All of science retains a degree of tentativeness, even when we're really, really sure.
The "Big Bang" is often though of as a massive explosion at the beginning of time, rather like a Universe-sized nuclear bomb going off at the beginning of time. It;s frequently portrayed this way in popular media, right up to "science" articles in the news.
It's wrong. Completely.
The name "Big Bang Theory" was created by a detractor, a scientist who believed in a static, unchanging Universe as was popularly accepted at the time. The term was meant as mockery. Unfortunately, it has a nice ring to it, and so it's stuck with us, causing confusion and misunderstanding ever since.
There was no "explosion" in the sense of a bomb.
There was (and
is) expansion.
The first and best observation that led to the formation of Big Bang cosmology is the redshift of light from other galaxies as discovered by Hubble. You know the change in sound you hear as an approaching car passes you? It's called the "Doppler effect," and it's caused by the sound waves of an approaching source being squished together (since the source is moving along with the sound waves and sound travels at a defined speed in an atmosphere) making the sound frequency higher, and the sound waves of a receding source being spread out as it moves farther away from you.
Light does the same thing. If an object is moving rapidly towards you, the light being emitted by that object will shift toward the blue or ultraviolet end of the light spectrum. If an object is moving away from you, the light will shift toward the red end f the spectrum.
Hubble observed that galaxies seem to have a redshift, meaning they;re all moving away.
But what was
more interesting is that the farther away a galaxy is, the
more redshift is observed.
That means that the farther a galaxy is from us, the
faster we're moving apart. And this is constant throughout the entire Universe.
The only currently viable explanation is that
space itself is expanding, like a balloon being blown up. If you draw two dots on a balloon, and then inflate it, the dots will move farther and farther apart. The farther apart you draw the dots on the balloon, the
faster they'll move apart as you inflate it, because every part of the balloon is expanding and there's more expanding balloon between two dots that are farther apart.
The Universe appears to be doing something similar. The space between all objects is growing, so farther-away objects move away even faster than nearby ones.
If the Universe is expanding
with time, then that means if we look back in time we would see the Universe getting smaller and smaller, until eventually the entire Universe would exist as a single dimensionless point that contains all of the mass/energy we see all spread out today.
We tested that prediction by taking various measurements, including the observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is something like an echo of the Universe when it was compressed into a much smaller amount of space than we see today.
There was no explosion, there is simply the expansion of space. As we try to simulate the Universe in its first few moments, "weird" things start to happen, because of the extreme density of mass involved with squishing everything that is into such a tiny amount of space. We call the Universe at the first moment a "singularity," because it's a point at which traditional physics starts to break down.
This view of the Universe is accepted as generally correct because of the accuracy of its predictions. Modeling based on this theory tells us certain other things we should see if we look, and when we look, we observe what was predicted. No other model currently makes such accurate predictions and explains the observations we've made, and so we have high confidence that the Big Bang theory is on the right track.
Does that answer your question?
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