Was There a Big Bang ?

CIENCE IS a congeries of great quests, and cosmology is the grandest of the great quests. Taking as its province the universe as a whole, cosmology addresses the old, the ineradicable questions about space and time, nature and destiny. It is not a subject for the tame or the timid. For the first half of the 20th century, cosmology remained a discipline apart, as a clutch of talented but otherworldly physicists peeped inconclusively at a universe they could barely see: Albert Einstein, of course; the Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter; the Belgian abbot Georges Lemailtre; and the extraordinary Russian mathematician and meteorologist Aleksandr Friedmann, destined to die young, or so the story has it, from exposure to the elements 'suffered while soaring above Moscow in a weather balloon. When in 1917 Einstein published his first estimates of the size and shape of the universe, telescopes could not penetrate the heavens beyond the Milky Way. Like a sailor endeavoring to measure the depth of the sea from the shore, astronomers lacked the means to probe the heavens further or to probe them in detail. This has now changed. Information pours from the night skies, terrestrial telescopes hissing and