Remember the TV show Saved By The Bell? It was a high school comedy that was popular when I was in Junior High, and it was, of course, completely preposterous and cheesy. Like what you’d get if you married Beverly Hills: 90210 with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and then cleaned it up to make…

This was the third and final piece of the puzzle that led to the acceptance of the Big Bang and the rejection of all alternatives: the discovery of the background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The “leading theory” before this was discovered was the Steady-State theory. Sure, they knew of Hubble Expansion. But…

This is the second key prediction of the Big Bang: the Universe was, before any stars formed, made up of about 75% Hydrogen and 25% Helium, and much less than 1% of all other elements combined. How does the Big Bang predict this, and how to we observe it? Well, remember we said the Universe…

This is the first of the key predictions of the Big Bang theory, that everything in the Universe will expand according to Hubble’s Law, or that the speed that other galaxies recede from us is proportional to their distance from us. Let’s jump into the details of why the Big Bang predicts it, and how…

Here’s a really fundamental question, and yet one that I think that most people don’t know the answer to: How do we know that the Big Bang is the right theory of the origin of the Universe? There are a bunch of alternative theories out there, after all, like Plasma Cosmology, the Steady-State Theory, and…

Starts with a bang reader Zrinka asks us how rainbows work, and that’s a great question for the weekend, since I’m driving up to Portland, OR right now. (The desert is lousy for rainbows when it doesn’t rain!) So you’ve seen something like this before, although maybe yours isn’t as famous as Galen Rowell‘s: So…