Georges Lemaître and technology subjects in the December 1932 issue of Popular Science. Lemaître himself also described his theory as "the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation"; it became better known as the "Big Bang theory," a pejorative term coined during a 1949 BBC radio broadcast by the astronomer Fred Hoyle, who was then still a proponent of the steady state universe and remained so until his death in 2001. Lemaître's proposal met with skepticism from his fellow scientists. Eddington found Lemaître's notion unpleasant. Einstein thought it unjustifiable from a physical point of view, although he encouraged Lemaître to
String theory helium, and the existence of a cosmic microwave background, there are several questions that remain unanswered. For example, the standard Big Bang model does not explain why the universe appears to be same in all directions, why it appears flat on very large distance scales, or why certain hypothesized particles such as magnetic monopoles are not observed in experiments. Currently, the leading candidate for a theory going beyond the Big Bang is the theory of cosmic inflation. Developed by Alan Guth and others in the 1980s, inflation postulates a period of extremely rapid accelerated expansion of the universe prior to