Most people are familiar with the Big Bang. It’s a name adopted by the scientific world to describe the origin of the universe, a point of ‘singularity’ at the centre of the original black hole where everything, including space and time, came into existence.

Wikipedia defines it as:

‘The initial singularity was a singularity of infinite density thought to have contained all of the mass and space-time of the Universe before quantum fluctuations caused it to rapidly expand in the Big Bang and subsequent inflation, creating the present-day Universe.’

Except it didn’t…

Not everyone agreed with the idea of the Big Bang. One of its chief opponents ironically gave it its name: Professor Sir Fred Hoyle. The ‘big bang wars’ of the 1950s onwards were very bitter, as an outspoken Yorkshireman battled with the Cambridge establishment, of which he was a member, though he eventually resigned, saying it was impossible to work with the politics, there.

Hoyle was a brilliant astro-physicist who had objected to the idea that the universe had a start point. He argued that nature never did that; that time was a subjective thing and that everything should continue to be set within the understanding of Einstein’s laws, which required that time and space didn’t just disappear… or appear. The counter-theory, which had the weight of historical opinion behind it, was named the ‘Steady State’.