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Evidence ID: COS-EV03
Evidence: Friedman-LeMaître Theory - Big Bang Model
Summary: Alexander Friedman and Georges LeMaître were the first to develop models of an expanding universe with a singularity beginning. Their models later became known as the Big Bang model.
Description: During the 1920s the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgian astronomer Georges LeMaître decided to take Einstein’s original equations from the General Theory of Relativity at face value. As a result, they came up independently with models of an expanding universe. They, like Sir Arthur Eddington, exposed Einstein's fudge factor.
The Friedman-LeMaître model eventually came to be known as the Big Bang theory. Their model predicts an absolute beginning of our expanding universe. It traces the expansion of the universe back in time to a singular point of origin.
Using the Friedman-LeMaître model, everything gets closer and closer together as we go back in time. The envelope of space gets smaller and smaller. Eventually, space and time converge onto a singular point of origin. At that point we reach the space-time boundary.
The space-time continuum can be represented geometrically as a cone. What is significant about this is that while a cone can be extended indefinitely in one direction (upward), it has a boundary point in the other direction (downward). Because this vertical direction represents time and the boundary point lies in the past, the model implies that past time is finite and had a beginning.
Because space is the arena in which all matter and energy exist, the beginning of space-time is also the beginning of all matter and energy. It is the beginning of the universe.
Like Einstein, Friedman and LeMaître concluded that space, time, and matter were all created simultaneously and are inter-dependent. Moreover, Friedman and LeMaître demonstrated that because the universe is continually expanding, it must have had a singular point of origin.
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