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 the expansion described by the standard Big Bang theory. The theory of cosmic inflation preserves the successes of the Big Bang while providing a natural explanation for some of the mysterious features of the universe. The theory has also received striking support from observations of the cosmic microwave background, the radiation that has filled the sky since around 380,000 years after the Big Bang. In the theory of inflation, the rapid initial expansion of the universe is caused by a hypothetical particle called the inflaton. The exact properties of this particle are not fixed by the theory but should ultimately