STEADY STATE THEORY
The Big Bang theory states that the Universe originated
from an incredibly hot and dense state 13.7 billion years
ago and has been expanding and cooling ever since. It is
now generally accepted by most cosmologists. However,
this hasnât always been the case and for a while the Steady
State theory was very popular. This theory was developed
in 1948 by Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), Herman Bondi (1919-
2005) and Thomas Gold (1920-2004) as an alternative to
the Big Bang to explain the origin and expansion of the
Universe. At the heart of the Steady State theory is the
Perfect Cosmological Principle. This states that the
Universe is infinite in extent, infinitely old and, taken as a
whole, it is the same in all directions and at all times in the
past and at all times in the future. In other words, the
Universe doesnât evolve or change over time.
The theory does acknowledge that change takes place on a
smaller scale. If we take a small region of the Universe,
such as the neighbourhood of the Sun, it does change over
time as individual stars burn up their fuel and die,
eventually becoming objects such as black dwarfs,
neutrons stars and black holes. The Steady State state
theory proposes that new stars are continually created all
the time at the rate needed to replace the stars which
have used up their fuel and have stopped shining. So, if we
take a large enough region of space, and by large we mean
tens of millions of light years across, the average amount
of light emitted doesnât change over time.
The Steady State theory gets round this by assuming that
new matter is continuously created out of nothing at the
