Currently, the Big Bang Theory is the most logical scientific explanation of how the universe began. Most cosmologists prefer the Big Bang theory and the idea that the expanding universe had an early, incredibly hot and dense beginning (Peterson 232). According to the Big Bang Theory, at some point in time, more than 12 billion years ago, matter was condensed into a single point and a huge explosion scattered the matter in all directions (“Big Bang Theory” 403). At the time of its origin, the universe was infinitely dense and hot, but when expansion occurred, the universe cooled and became less dense (Narlikar 12). The debris ejected from the initial explosion became the building blocks of matter, forming planets, stars, and galaxies (Narlikar 12). Officially, the Big Bang model is called the standard cosmological model (SCH), and it has been the most widely accepted theory of the origin of the universe since the 1960s (Rich and Stingl 1). Most astronomers agree that the beginning of the universe can be traced back 10-15 billion years ago, following some type of explosive start (Narlikar 12). Big Bang theorists estimated that the actual explosion occurred 13.7 billion years ago and was followed by an inflationary period that created time, matter, and space (Rich and Stingl 1). While the 1930s were not an extraordinary time of cosmological and scientific advances, it was the era of the theory that the universe began with the explosion of a singularity of matter. In 1927, George Lemaître, an astronomer and Roman Catholic priest, was the first person to propose the theory that the universe was created by the explosion of a primordial atom (Rich and Stingl 1). Lemaître's discoveries were published in 1931 in scienc......half an article...xies were really older” (“Big Bang” 1). Throughout the mid-20th century, the Big Bang theory and the constant-state theory dominated scientific thinking about the origin of the universe; however, the findings of the 1960s dealt a serious blow to the steady-state model. The discovery of microwave radiation damaged the steady state theory. After World War II, Martin Ryle conducted a study in Cambridge in which he tested over 2,000 different radio sources external to the Milky Way and concluded that the different radio sources showed a different distribution, thus supporting the Big Bang theory (“Big Bang"1 ) In the early 1960s, Robert Dicke of Princeton University tested Gamow's idea that there was a microwave background in the sky consistent with an initial explosion (Cowen, “Journey” 394). further support for the Big Bang model came in 1963 when two scientists