For centuries scientists thought the Universe always existed in a largely unchanged form, run like clockwork thanks to the laws of physics. But a Belgian priest and scientist called George Lemaitre put forward another idea. In 1927, he proposed that the Universe began as a large, pregnant and primeval atom, exploding and sending out the smaller atoms that we see today.
His idea went largely unnoticed. But in 1929 astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the Universe isn’t static but is in fact expanding. If so, some scientists reasoned that if you rewound the Universe's life then at some point it should have existed as a tiny, dense point. Critics dismissed this: the celebrated astronomer Fred Hoyle sarcastically called this concept the “Big Bang Theory"
