s vied with each other, though LemaГ®tre's steadily gained more advocates. The critical confirmation of the Big Bang theory came in 1964. That year, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two scientists working for Bell Laboratories, noticed that background microwave radiation, a residual form of energy from the Big Bang, permeated the universe, confirming an idea first propounded by Soviet physicist George Gamow and American physicist Ralph Alpher in the late 1940s.
With the development of ever more powerful computers to crunch the numbers in the 1980s, and the deployment of the Hubble Space telescope in the 1990s, which allowed for observations above the distortions of the Earth's atmosphere and radio waves, astronomers were able to make ever more detailed pictures of the universe and ever more precise timelines for the Big Bang. Key to this was a worldwide study in the 1980s and 1990s of supernovas, immense outpourings of radiation caused by the collapse of massive stars, which pointed to yet another anomaly about the universe. Rather than expanding at a constant rate, it seemed to be accelerating. This led to the conclusion that there must be a dark energy in the universe working to counteract gravity. One recent hypothesis states that space actually consists of negative pressure, which grows as the universe expands thereby causing that expansion to accelerate since there is not enough matter-even with dark matter factored into the equation - to put a brake on the expansion. According to British scientist Robert Caldwell, this accelerating expansion may lead to what he calls the "big rip, "in which galaxies, stars, and even atoms are eventually torn apart by the force of dark energy, leading to the destruction of matter in the final seconds of time at the end of the universe. Much of this work on dark matter and energy remains hypothetical, of course, as it has been impossible to detect either of these two phenomena.
As the twenty-first century dawns, scientists-like the ancients long before them - are still grappling with the very moment of creation, before the radiation, inflation, and Planck eras. Many believe that unveiling that moment is connected to the development of a Grand Unified Theory, a single explanation that fits all of the known laws of the universe-including Einstein's General Relativity Theory and quantum mechanics, the study of energy and matter at the sub-atomic level-into a single equation. As British physicist Stephen Hawking notes, "At the Big Bang, the universe and time itself came into existence, so that this is the first cause. If we could understand the Big Bang, we would know why the universe is the way it is. It used to be thought that it was impossible to apply the laws of science to the beginning of the universe, and indeed that it was sacrilegious to try. But recent developments in unifying the two pillars of twentieth-century science, Einstein's General Theory of Relativit...
