The phrase 'Big Bang ' was born in the 1950's (back when Rick was a kid, saying stuff like 'cool') by Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle.

At the time there was a raging debate over two competing theories about the origin of the universe. Hoyle's theory was the steady state model, which proposed that the universe was eternal, was being continuously created and would have a future much like the present.

The dynamic evolving model was the other, and involved a moment of creation, a finite history and a future very different from the present.

Hoyle used the term 'Big Bang' as a put down of the competing theory on a BBC broadcast where he told listeners "on scientific grounds this Big Bang assumption is much less the palatable of the two." Instead, the catchy Big Bang moniker caught on with the theories critics, fans, and the general public alike.

Enforcing creation myths was asource of priestly power in early societies and both the Catholic Church and Stalinist Russia put to death those who dared to dissent from their creation othodoxies.

Today some of the most heated arguements among astronomers and physicists spring from such cosmological loose ends as dark energy and dark matter.

What came before the Big Bang?

It was not an explosion in space but an explosion of space, time, energy, and matter. Somehow a speck of matter no bigger than the head of a pin some 14 billion years ago produced todays' hundreds of billions of stars.

I first heard of the "big bang" theory in the 60s, I think. Ah, the 50s; those were the days, when the future held promise, and Republicanism stood for fiscal responsibility and individual freedom, as contrasted with today's social/religious/police state, war on the environment, and record deficit spending.

Makes me glad I'm not American, Rick!

The ripping open of space and time in a universe that has no center.

Perhaps the Big Bang never happened. We are so close, only nanoseconds away from the beginning of time, but we still haven’t been able to prove what happened at the exact beginning of time. There are other theories, but most astronomers and physicists seem to believe that the massive explosion and expansion happened. One day we will be able to say exactly what happened.

As Noble prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann said: "It is the most persistent and greatest adventure in human history- this search to understand the universe, how it works, and where it came from."

As I have said before, bearing in mind the cyclical nature of so many Natural processes, I have a strong suspicion that the 'Big Bang' has happened many times before and will happen again many times again in the future.
What 'everything' collapses to and what it expands to, I have not the slightest idea, but nonetheless I'm pretty sure there was no first beginning and there will be no end to 'everything' that exists; everything is just 'born' and it just 'dies' to be reborn again. It begins again each time after it collapses and it ends again when it becomes too big.

We are but a temporary phase of its processes, probably evolving on a different mix of atoms contained in a different planet each time a new expansion occurs in a new big bang.
I can't prove it, but it smacks of having high possibility to me with my restricted and imaginitive knowledge and background!

In previous big bangs then, it is likely that there evolved life and sentience. With billions of years to play with they should have invented ways to survive the demise of their universe. Where are they? What are the issues with recognising them?

I am not so sure about that.
It seems easy to conclude that matter in some form or other would survive - experts must think so because they currently observe matter and choose the Big Bang theory as most likely at present.
I wonder what other 'things' like information, and if it exists, 'spirit' might survive. They may in any case be 'resurrected', but the idea would feel more comfy if 'blueprints' of these, in some form or other, survived big bangs and collapses (rather than that they became consequential from reconstituted matter).

There are some interesting consequences of this theory erg., resurrection - we've been here before, 'going to another place', deja vu across explosions, parallel worlds (are they serial instead?).

Do parallel worlds ever meet? The branes might help out here. When branes kiss dp they spawn a new little universe? And the old ones remain? Why does one have to "end" for another to begin?

Lots of questions there: no, no, yes, and it doesn't.

Maybe this is it? There has been only one universe, and this is it. And we are the only life forms that have evolved because it takes 13.5 billion years for life, found here on our planet, to evolve. And we will be the only life form out there because God did create the universe for us and it and all of it's mysteries are and is our Eden.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4161323.stm

....new info confirming the Big Bang theory....

Well, I still argue that something had to start whatever it was the started the cosmos, unless you were to believe in spontaneous combustion, which I don't.

What was the spark? What made it spark? Was it a spark?

One object must affect an another object to create motion!

Postulating something causing the universe leads to infinite regress. What created god? If god was self-created, then why not the universe? It's simpler. Adding unnecessary complexity may be imaginative, but it is lacking in critical thinking.

is curved space very regular. if not then why shouldn't parallel lines meet?

If parallel lines meet, then the point of intersection forms an angle between the lines, violating the definition of parallel (angle equal zero).

And infinity.....

....the vanishing point!

Start counting and when you get to infinity I will concede the point.

Yes, but will your matter still be your matter then?

the task of 'getting to infinity by counting' is impossible by definition of 'infinity', Trip

Rick is toying wich'a

'infinity' is a funny word, most conceive of it as some tangible boundary that is really really really really far away (or big, or whatever) but it is really just the label for a 'thought horizon' encountered when contemplating an unbounded process (such as counting)