I’ve never been able to understand this phenomenon. How is it proof of the Big Bang?
In: 7
**ELI5**
In the next town over, they’re blasting away rock with dynamite, to make a new Amazon warehouse.
BOOM!
You’re a town away, but you still hear the boom. In fact, it’s so loud, that it has this echo. You hear the boom, but then the boom takes a few seconds to “fade out”.
Now imagine the boom is even bigger! It’s so big, it takes AN HOUR to fade out. You sit there after the big boom, and the sound gets gradually less and less until you have to strain to hear it. But you can still hear it up to an hour later. That was a mighty big boom!
Imagine the creation of the universe as the biggest boom ever.
The “sound” from it is STILL fading away, today, billions of years later.
That “sound” is very faint now, and you can’t even really hear it, you need special equipment just to detect it.
Scientists have “proven” that the echo of a big boom that we can barely detect today, is evidence of something really really big happening many billions of years ago.
(**THIS WAS ELI5** — So it’s not really sound, it’s radiation, but the concept still holds).
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