How did the Universe Begin?
There is strong evidence that the entire Universe sprang from sub-atomic dimensions 13.7 billion years ago in a violent event known as Inflation, but we understand almost nothing of what would have caused this to happen.
Scientists around the world are now racing to find important clues in the Cosmic Microwave Background, the faint relic of the primeval fireball that filled the early Universe.
Andrew E. Lange (1957-2010) was an astrophysicist and Goldberger Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
| How did the Universe Begin? |
| Related Links |
| Big Bang A collection of documentary films about the Big Bang theory, explaining how the Universe came into the existence out of nothing, the story behind the emergence of the Big Bang and the Big Bang Machine. |
| Origin of the Universe: The Big Bang The scientific story of creation begins 13.7 billion years ago in a circumstance of incredible temperature and density, when all matter and radiation was contained in a region smaller than an atom. |
| Echoes of the Big Bang We revisit the remnant radiation of the Big Bang that pervades the sky as the cosmic microwave background in the light of the recent Planck telescope mapping. |
| The Age of the Universe Detailed observations of galaxies, clusters, and the fine structures in the cosmic microwave background have refined the age of the Universe to 13.75 billion years. |
| The Early Universe (Carolin Crawford) We shall look at what happened during the 'dark ages' that span the period between the Big Bang and the first galaxies, and see how the very early Universe came to resemble the one we see around us now. |
| The Early Universe (MIT OCW) This provides an introduction to modern cosmology. The first part of the course deals with the classical cosmology, and later part with modern particle physics and its recent impact on cosmology. |
| Cosmology During this course, you'll have the opportunity to study the cosmos from the modern perspective - what we know and what we're not sure about. |