ENGLISH LANGUAGE FOR PHYSICS EDUCATION

INDIVIDUAL TASK
“TOPIC AND MAIN IDEA”

NAME : YULI

NIM : 18033022

MAJOR : Physics Education

LECTURER : Fanny Rahmatina Rahim, S.Pd.,M.Pd.

PHYSICS MAJOR

FACULTYOF MATH AND SCIENCE

PADANG OF STATE UNIVERSITY

2020
 The Big Bang Theory: How the Universe Began
The Big Bang theory represents cosmologists' best attempts to reconstruct the 14 billion
year story of the universe based on the sliver of existence visible today.Different people use the
term "Big Bang" in different ways. Most generally, it illustrates the arc of the observable
universe as it thinned out and cooled down from an initially dense, hot state. This description
boils down to the idea that the cosmos is expanding, a broad principle analogous to survival of
the fittest in biology that few would consider debatable.
More specifically, the Big Bang can also refer to the birth of the observable universe
itself — the moment something changed, kickstarting the events that led to today. Cosmologists
have argued for decades about the details of that fraction of a second, and the discussion
continues today. 

 The classic Big Bang theory

For most of human history, observers of the sky assumed it eternal and unchanging.
Edwin Hubble dealt this story an experimental blow in the 1920s when his observations showed
both that galaxies outside the Milky Way existed, and that their light appeared stretched — a
sign that they were rushing away from Earth.
George Lemaître, a contemporary Belgian physicist, interpreted data from Hubble and
others as evidence of an expanding universe, a possibility permitted by Einstein's recently
published field equations of general relativity. Thinking backwards, Lemaître inferred that
today's separating galaxies must have started out together in what he called the "primeval atom."
The first public use of the modern term for Lemaître's idea actually came from a critic —
English astronomer Fred Hoyle. On March 28, 1949, Hoyle coined the phrase during a defense
of his preferred theory of an eternal universe that created matter to cancel out the dilution of
expansion. Hoyle said the notion that "all matter of the universe was created in one big bang at a
particular time in the remote past," was irrational. In later interviews, Hoyle denied intentionally
inventing a slanderous name, but the moniker stuck, much to the frustration of some.
The Big Bang is a really bad term," said Paul Steinhardt, a cosmologist at Princeton. "The
Big Stretch would capture the right idea." The mental image of an explosion causes all kinds of
confusion, according to Steinhardt. It implies a central point, an expanding frontier, and a scene
where light shrapnel flies faster than heavier chunks. But an expanding universe looks nothing
like that, he said. There's no center, no edge, and galaxies large and small all slide apart in the
same way (although more distant galaxies move away faster under the cosmologically recent
influence of dark energy).
Regardless of its name, the Big Bang theory found widespread acceptance for its
unparalleled ability to explain what we see. The balance of light with particles like protons and
neutrons during the first 3 minutes, for instance, let early elements form at a rate predicting the
current amounts of helium and other light atoms.
"There was a small window in time where it was possible for nuclei to form," said
Glennys Farrar, a cosmologist at New York University. "After that, the universe kept expanding
and they couldn't find each other, and before [the window] it was too hot."
 A cloudy plasma filled the universe for the next 378,000 years, until further cooling let
electrons and protons form neutral hydrogen atoms, and the fog cleared. The light emitted during
this process, which has since stretched into microwaves, is the earliest known object researchers
can study directly. Known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, many
researchers consider it the strongest evidence for the Big Bang.

 An explosive update
But as cosmologists pushed farther back into the universe's first moments, the story
unraveled. General relativity's equations suggested an initial speck of unlimited heat and density
— a singularity. In addition to not making much physical sense, a singular origin didn't match
the smooth, flat CMB. Fluctuations in the speck's formidable temperature and density would
have produced swaths of sky with different properties, but the CMB's temperature varies by just
a fraction of a degree. The curvature of space-time also looks quite flat, which implies an
initially near-perfect balance of matter and curvature that most cosmologists find improbable.
Alan Guth proposed a new picture of the first fraction of a second in the 1980s, suggesting that
the universe spent its earliest moments growing exponentially faster than it does today. At some
point this process stopped, and putting on the brakes produced a dense and hot (but not infinitely
so) mess of particles that takes the place of the singularity. "In my own mind I think of that as the
Big Bang, when the universe got hot," Farrar said.

The inflation theory, as it's called, now has a plethora of competing models. Although no
one knew much about what made the universe expand so rapidly, the theory has grown popular
for its ability to explain the seemingly improbable featureless CMB: Inflation preserved minor
fluctuations (which developed into today's galaxy clusters), while flattening the major ones. "It's
a very sweet story," Steinhardt said, who helped develop the theory. "It's the one we tell our
kids."

 Beyond inflation
Recent research has introduced two wrinkles into the inflation theory's cosmic narrative.
Work by Steinhardt and others suggests that inflation would have stopped in some regions (such
as our observable universe) but continued in others, producing an array of separate territories
with "every conceivable set of cosmological properties," as Steinhardt puts it. Many physicists
find this "multiverse" picture distasteful, because it makes an infinite number of untestable
predictions.
On the experimental front, cosmologists expect that inflation should have produced
galaxy-spanning gravitational waves in the CMB just as it produced slight temperature and
density variations. Current experiments should be sensitive enough to find them, but the
primordial space-time ripples haven't shown up (despite one false alarm in 2014).
Many researchers await more precise CMB measurements that could kill, or validate, the many
inflation models that still stand. Other physicists, however, don't see the cosmos's smoothness as
a problem at all — it started off uniform and needs no explanation.
 While experimentalists strive for new levels of precision, some theorists have turned
away from inflation to seek other ways to squash the universe flat. Steinhardt, for instance, is
working on a "big bounce" model, which pushes the starting clock back even further, to an
earlier period of contraction that smoothed space-time and set the stage for an explosive
expansion. He hopes that before too long, new signatures, in addition to problems like the lack of
primordial gravitational waves, will set cosmologists up with a new creation story to tell. "Are
there any other observable features to look for?" Steinhardt said, "Ask me again in a few years
and I hope to have an answer."

 The topic of the above paragraph is THE BIG BAG THEORY.

 The main idea of the paragraph is “The Big Bang theory represents cosmologists' best
attempts to reconstruct the 14 billion year”