FT259

Big Bangs are staples of cosmo­logy and controversy. According to orthodox cosmology, our Universe began about 15 billion years ago in a ‘Big Bang’, in which all matter and energy (interchangeable as they are) was created in an instant, followed by a rapid period of expansion, stabilisation, galactic formation, and, eventually, highly charged cosmological theorising. Although this cosmic origins story is the most familiar, it is by no means without alternatives, the best known of which is the ‘steady state’ theory. Unfortunately, if some of its advoc­ates are correct, then the steady state theory has been unfairly suppressed by a cosmological orthodoxy of the sort which infuriated Charles Fort.