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 from a hot dense state. Objects such as quasars and radio galaxies were observed to be much more common at large distances (therefore in the distant past) than in the nearby universe, whereas the Steady State predicted that the average properties of the universe should be unchanging with time. In addition, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 was considered the death knell of the Steady State, although this prediction was only qualitative, and failed to predict the exact temperature of the CMB. (The key big bang prediction is the black-body spectrum of the CMB, which was