For thousands of years, science struggled to uncover the mysteries of the universe.
The Ancient Greeks believed the universe to be a sphere of fixed stars with smaller spheres moving planets around a central Earth. Even in the 16th century, Copernicus, who correctly placed the sun at the center instead of Earth, still envisioned the universe as a singular solar system enclosed within a celestial sphere.
However, over the following centuries, humanity began to glimpse the true scale of the cosmos, discovering that it consisted of numerous stars clustered into vast formations known as galaxies.
In the late 1920s, the universe revealed one of its most profound secrets: it was expanding. Contrary to the previous belief of a static and unchanging cosmos, observations showed that distant galaxies were moving away from each other, implying that our universe, far from being stable, was born from a small burst of energy and has been expanding ever since.
This revelation fundamentally challenged scientific and philosophical views, initiating a new chapter in cosmology, the scientific study of the universe. Surprisingly, this groundbreaking insight was pre-empted by a mathematician more known for weather predictions.
In May 1922, Alexander Friedmann, a Russian mathematician and meteorologist, published a paper based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity. His work proposed various potential scenarios for the universe's history, including one of cosmic expansion starting from a singular point. Remarkably, without relying on astronomical observations, Friedmann had already anticipated what is now known as the Big Bang theory.
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