In the 1960s, however, the steady state theory suffered a devastating blow when two radio engineers working at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, discovered some mysterious radiation coming from space. This radiation was not coming from a particular direction; rather, it was coming equally from all directions. In fact, it appeared to be coming from the universe itself. Penzias and Wilson soon learned that scientists had been predicting that, if the universe began in a single explosion around fifteen billion years ago, then some of the radiation from that fiery blast would still be around. This radiation was expected to have a temperature of around a few degrees above absolute zero. Penzias and Wilson’s radiation measured slightly less than this number, and they realized to their astonishment that they had encountered a ghostly whisper from the original moment of creation.
Numerous other findings—including data from NASAs Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite—have now confirmed the existence of this primordial background radiation. Based on the Big Bang theory, scientists are able to predict how much hydrogen, lithium, deuterium, and helium should exist in the universe. These predictions are in remarkable congruence with the actual amounts of those elements that we find today. In 1970 physicist Stephen Hawking and mathematician Roger Penrose wrote a famous paper that proved that, given general relativity and the amount of matter in the universe, the universe must have had a beginning. As Hawking states in A Brief History of Time, “There must have been a Big Bang singularity.” Astronomer Martin Rees notes that numerous lines of evidence have now converged that have discredited the steady state theory and confirmed the Big Bang theory.”
