The Meaning of “Big Bang”

What does “Big Bang” actually mean? What was the origin of these two words? It has often been said that the expression “Big Bang” began as an insult. Even if this were true, it would be just an irrelevant part of the whole issue. There are many more as-pects hidden under this name, and which are seldom explained. They will be discussed in this work. In order to frame the analysis, help will be sought from the highly au-thoritative voices of two exceptional writers: William Shakespeare and Umberto Eco. Both Shakespeare and Eco have explored the tension existing between words and the realities they name. With the conclusion that names are, in general, just labels, simple stickers put to identify things. And this includes those given to great theorems or spectacular discoveries. Not even “Pythagoras’ theorem” was discovered by Pythago-ras, as is now well-known. Stigler's law of eponymy is recalled to further substantiate those statements. These points will be at the heart of the investigation carried out here, concerning the very important concept of “Big Bang”. Everybody thinks to know what “the Big Bang” is, but only very few do know it, in fact. When Fred Hoyle first pro-nounced these two words together, on a BBC radio program, listeners were actually left with the false image that Hoyle was trying to destroy. That is, the tremendous ex-plosion of Lemaître’s primeval atom (or cosmic egg), which scattered all its enormous matter and energy content throughout the rest of the Universe. This image is abso-lutely wrong! As will be concluded, today the label “Big Bang” is used in several dif-ferent contexts: (a) the Big Bang Singularity; (b) as the equivalent of cosmic inflation; (c) speaking of the Big Bang cosmological model; (d) to name a very popular TV pro-gram; and more.