What evidence supports the big bang theory?

(1) On January 17, 2012 at 8:58 pm Dfoofnik [2550] said:

Relocated (duplicates some material)

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The Big Bang is a useful model, and probably the best current model to help us understand what happened in the early stages of our universe. But the model/theory is not without problems. It seems that we may have to make some odd assumptions about the velocity of light in the first moments after the Big Bang in order to arrive at the universe we observe. It is also odd that the current theory seems to predict a much more uniform distribution of energy than we observe. It is also strange that an intuitive grasp of a big bang would suggest an expanding sphere of material, but observations and some theoretical work lead us to believe that no matter where you are in the universe, you will find matter more or less evenly distributed no matter where you look. Just as the concept of "point" particles in classical physics had to be radically re-thought in light of quantum theory, perhaps the idea of a big bang "locus" has to be, well, exploded.

If we consider that space itself did not exist prior to the expansion of energy that we call the 'big bang', then space would have come into existence along with the expansion. Thinking about it from this point of view, then every point in the universe has an equal claim to being the 'point' at which the expansion began. I think that more correctly this means that the very idea of a 'starting point' (along with our casual and parochial image of bang, or explosion) is not tenable. A

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