History of creationism the universe was concentrated into a single point, a "primeval atom" where and when the fabric of time and space came into existence. However, in the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist subscribed to a view that the universe is in an eternal steady state. After Lemaître proposed his theory, some scientists complained that its assumption that time had a beginning amounted to a reimportation of religious concepts into physics. When the expression "Big Bang" was coined by Fred Hoyle in 1949, he meant it to be slightly pejorative, but the term stuck and gained currency. Lemaître himself concluded
History of the Big Bang theory of the primeval atom) that the universe began with the "explosion" of the "primeval atom" — what was later called the Big Bang. Lemaître first took cosmic rays to be the remnants of the event, although it is now known that they originate within the local galaxy. Lemaître had to wait until shortly before his death to learn of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, the remnant radiation of a dense and hot phase in the early universe. Hubble's Law suggested that the universe was expanding, contradicting the cosmological principle whereby the universe, when viewed on sufficiently large distance