Pretty much ever since, physicists, too, have been divided about how the universe began—and what happened before it began.
In 1927, Belgian Catholic priest and theoretical physicist Georges Lemaître drew upon Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity to hypothesize a universe that began with a single point, a so-called “primordial atom,” before expanding to its present size. Two years later, American astronomer Edwin Hubble lent further support to this hypothesis when he observed that distant galaxies were rapidly receding from Earth in nearly all directions.
Fast-forward three decades, and in 1965 Bell Labs scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the predicted “afterglow” of energy remaining from the initial Big Bang, further cementing Lemaître’s hypothesis into what we now call the Big Bang Theory.
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