During 340 BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle stated that the earth was a round sphere and not a flat plate. All well and good, but he also believed that the earth was stationary and that the sun, moon, planets and stars moved in circular orbits around the earth. Then in 1514 a Polish priest called Nicholas Copernicus had the idea that the sun was stationary at the centre and the earth and other planets revolved around the sun.
Eventually that theory was taken seriously but it was not until 1609, shortly after the telescope was invented, that the Italian Galileo Galilei whilst looking through his telescope at the planet Jupiter discovered that it was accompanied by several moons that orbited around it. This implied that everything did not
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In other words the universe is expanding. This means that at earlier times objects would have been much closer together. In fact, it seems that there was a time, about ten to twenty thousand million years ago, when they were all at exactly the same place and when, therefore, the density of the universe was infinite. This discovery, finally brought the question of the beginning of the universe into the realms of science.
Hubble’s observations suggested that there was a time called the Big Bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. One could almost say that time had its beginning. One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning.
The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe. However, the approach that most scientists actually follow is to separate the problem into two parts. First, there are the laws that tell us how the universe changes with time. Second, there is the initial state of the universe. Also, today scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories – the general theory of relativity and quantum