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
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