610:029:004, First-Year Seminar: Explorations in Computing, Math, and Science
Homework 7. Due Thursday, October 25, 2007

• Read Wikipedia's entry on the Big Bang.
• Writing assignment:
  1. Summarize in a single paragraph, and in non-technical language, the three or four most most compelling observations which support the Big Bang hypothesis.
  2. In a second paragraph, describe an astronomical observation which you consider unexplained or inconsistent with the standard Big Bang model.
  3. In a third paragraph, refute and/or correct the following misconceptions about the Big Bang model (tip: Read the 2005 Scientific American article referenced in the Wikipedia article footnotes)
     1. Since the Big Bang predicts expansion, there must be a center of the expansion where nothing moves, but astronomers have not found it.
     2. Nothing is infinite in size, so the Universe must have an edge, but no one has detected any edges.
     3. The early Universe was supposed to be extremely hot, but the 'afterglow' (cosmic background radiation), detected in 1965, is radio waves. Why don't we see a bright visible glow?