The big bang got its name from a man who thought the theory was total nonsense. The phrase originated 69 years ago today.

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No one knows what the big bang looked like, so here's a pretty picture of a big...something.
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The big bangis one of those theories that even the most casual student of science finds familiar and, at least at face value, is fairly easy to understand: we know the universe is expanding out in all directions, and some physicists figure there must have been a point when that whole thing started. All the matter in existence was packed up into a tiny, hot, dense little nugget, and then suddenly it wasn’t. Bang went the  universe, and it’s been growing ever since.
So it might surprise you to learn that the name of this popular origin story came from a guy who thought the whole idea was total nonsense. It all started on March 28, 1949, when physicist Fred Hoyle got on a BBC broadcast to discuss hisownideas about how the universe began—namely, that it didn’t actually begin. Hoyle didn’t think the universe had an exact starting point, and he championed what’s widely known as the steady state model: the notion that the universe is constantly making new matter everywhere, all the time, even if you stretch backward in time for infinity.
“He emphasized the contrast between the Steady State theory and ‘the hypothesis that all matter of the universe was created in onebig bangat a particular time in the remote past,’” historian Helge Kragh explained in the April 2013  edition of Astronomy & Geophysics, “which he found to be ‘irrational’ and outside science.”
This is widely accepted as the first use of the term big bang to describe the theory, and it almost certainly brought the phrase into popular use; the BBC circulated that first talk and several others featuring the new lingo in print and on the radio (though there was a bit of a gap before it really took off—science papers didn’t start using it regularly until the ‘60s, and it took a couple decades more for "the big bang" to become the preferred term amongst astronomers). But for the record, Kragh argued in his 2013 article that Hoyle didn’t use the phrase derisively—he was staunchly opposed to the big bang theory, but the name wasn’t necessarily intended to mock it. He just thought it was an apt description for the explosive idea, and that it highlighted the way in which it differed from the theory he championed.
Scientists have toyed with the idea of a universe with a finite beginning for hundreds of years, but explorations of that hypothetical event picked up in the 20th century. In 1931, following Edwin Hubble’s experimental observations of the universe’s constant expansion, Georges Lemaître proposed that a “primeval atom,” a sort of cosmic egg, had exploded to form the universe...

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