Rafael Integrates SPICE 1000 Precision Weapon With F-35
The Israeli-made glide bomb is being integrated with the stealth fighter in cooperation with Lockheed Martin, potentially paving the way for other F-35 operators to acquire the weapon
By Ami Rojkes Dombe, Israeldefense.co.il, 16/09/2026
Rafael Advanced Defense Systems is currently integrating its SPICE 1000 precision-guided glide bomb into the F-35 stealth fighter jet.
The project, being carried out in cooperation with the aircraft’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, represents a significant step that could eventually enable additional countries operating the F-35 to acquire the Israeli-made weapon.
The project is being carried out at Lockheed Martin facilities in the United States and is expected to be completed within the next few months. Once completed, the Israel Air Force will be able to deploy the weapon directly from its F-35I “Adir” aircraft.
The SPICE 1000 is an advanced autonomous air-to-ground weapon developed by Rafael as part of its SPICE family, a development that earned the company the Israel Defense Prize. The system enables precision strikes against high-value and strategic targets at ranges of more than 120 kilometers.
The weapon is equipped with a unique electro-optical seeker that uses Scene Matching algorithms, allowing it to operate autonomously and with a high degree of precision even in electronic warfare environments where GNSS is denied, as well as in complex operational scenarios.
Systems from the SPICE family have been sold to several countries and are operational with air forces around the world. In the Israel Air Force, the weapon has served as a key strike capability for years, with extensive operational use from the F-15 and F-16 fleets, including during operations against Iran.
Rafael Lockheed-Martin begins integrating SPICE 1000 precision weapon on F35 Adir, add strike reach beyond 120km
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Freedom, a beagle trained by Jeremy Ecker of The Bedbug Inspectors, demonstrates how he sniffs out bed bugs.
Any dog—even your own—can learn this valuable canine skill.
Lucky works for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. Her job is to track down spotted lanternfly eggs before they can hatch and cause trouble. She could have joined the police force, but during her training she discovered that would involve biting suspects—something she didn’t enjoy. So Lucky, a German Shepherd, joined the ranks of pest detection dogs, becoming the first dog in the United States trained to detect lanternfly eggs. Lanternflies are invasive pests that feed on a wide range of plants, damaging them in the process.
Lucky was a graduate from the Penn Vet Working Dog Center, founded by veterinarian Dr. Cynthia Otto. Many dogs from the program go on to be police dogs or search-and-rescue dogs, but Lucky became “the poster child for detection of spotted lanternfly,” Otto says.
A history of canine pest detection
Thanks to their extraordinary sense of smell, dogs have been helping humans hunt down pests for decades. In 1979, a former police officer who once trained dogs to detect drugs and explosives, set up TADD (Termite and Ant Detection Dogs) Services Corporation. The employees were a team of beagles, trained to sniff out termites and carpenter ants, both of which cause damage to wooden structures.
Carpenter ants can be highly destructive to buildings. Video: Where You Might Find Carpenter Ants, @TownandCountryPestSolutions
Research found that trained dogs could detect the presence of termites with about 96 percent accuracy, and dogs trained to find one termite species could also detect four other types. This suggests that the dogs can smell a shared, termite scent, possibly something in the termite’s tough outer shell, or gases like methane and carbon dioxide given off by termite colonies.
When bed bugs made a major comeback in the early 2000s, dogs were able to help, too. A 2008 study found that trained dogs could distinguish bed bugs from other household insects, like cockroaches, carpenter ants, and termites, with a 97.5 percent success rate. The dogs didn’t misidentify bed bugs when none were present, and could differentiate live bed bugs and their eggs from dead bed bugs, their empty outer shells, and feces with a 95 percent success rate.
More recently, researchers have been training dogs to detect a host of agricultural pests, including a bacterium that attacks citrus trees (Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus), wood boring longhorn beetles, and the spotted lanternfly.
Now Otto and her team are about to launch a project to see if dogs can help detect the New World screwworm. Unlike typical maggots that just feed on dead tissue, screwworm larvae eat live tissue as well.
“It’s just horrific, and it’s very devastating to the animals and to agriculture,” Otto says. The U.S. had previously wiped it out, but now it’s back, with several cases reported this year in cows, sheep, and dogs. If dogs can reliably find it, Otto hopes their work will create new approaches to eradicate the pest again.
How training works
Dogs typically join the program at the Penn Vet Working Dog Center when they’re about eight weeks old. They learn to associate the target odor with a reward, Otto explains. Trainers first use a synthetic odor, 1‑bromooctane, a safe chemical that’s uncommon in the natural environment, to teach the rules of the sniff‑and‑reward game, before switching to real targets like lanternfly eggs.
Most dogs are trained in multiple locations, with special emphasis placed on environments similar to where they’ll eventually be working, explains Otto. “They often start training in a simple environment and then as they progress, it gets more complex and more naturalistic.”
The length of training depends on several factors. One is the uniqueness of the target odor. Otto explains that teaching a dog how to detect a pest is harder than teaching it to detect an explosive.
With explosives, it’s often a simple “is it here or not?” problem. With pests, dogs have to tease out one very specific smell from a crowd of nearly identical smells, which makes the training much more demanding.
Other factors that influence the length of training are the dog’s history (For instance, have they already learned to use their nose to find things?) and their personality. Otto says that dogs are like people: Some are “big‑picture” while others are very detail‑oriented. For pest detection, the detail‑focused dogs tend to do better.
Cody, the german shepherd, will first sit when he has found a pest and then on command will point with his paw and nose where exactly they are. Image: David Cooper / Contributor / Getty Images
Pest detection is not an easy task to teach. Sometimes dogs learn to “cheat.” For example, if a trainer always presents a lanternfly egg on a piece of tree bark, the dog may decide that “tree bark = reward” and never truly learn to detect the egg itself.
The process of training dogs to detect pests has been a big learning curve for Otto and her colleagues: “What I like to say in our training is we’ve made every mistake, so we’ve learned a lot,” she jokes.
Could your pet dog help fight pests?
Some researchers are trying to see if people’s pet dogs can do pest detection work.
A 2025 study at Virginia Tech found that pet dogs, with only hobby-level scent training, could detect lanternfly egg masses 82 percent of the time in controlled conditions. In real-world settings, accuracy dropped to 61 percent, which is still better than many human searches.
Otto pushes back against the common misconception that only a few breeds can do this work. While some breeds may rely more on their sharp eyesight than they do on smell, such as sighthounds, “In general, most dogs are going to be pretty good at using their noses,” Otto says.
“In our program, we tend to use a lot of Labradors and shepherds, but so many different breeds are good at it and can be good at it.” What really matters is the dog’s personality and their motivation to do scent work, not their breed, she says.
The next few weeks offer plenty of celestial spectacles for the amateur astronomers among you to enjoy.
We had a summer of eclipses in the northern hemisphere, and we are going into a fall of bright planets and meteor showers. Though our friends in the south didn't get the solar eclipse, they will be seeing many of these upcoming astronomical sights, with the benefit of warmer nights as they hunt for the fireballs of the southern taurids.
First and foremost, it’s a full moon tomorrow. It’s the so-called Harvest Moon, which will be a stunning sight if you are looking at the sky with your naked eye. Not as stunning as the remaining three full moons of 2026, however, which will all be supermoons.
What's a supermoon, you ask? Well, the Moon gets closer and farther from Earth in its orbit, so when the full moon happens while it's at a closer point in that cycle, the Moon looks larger and brighter. The dates for the three full supermoons are October 26, November 24, and December 23.
If you have a telescope, you might be a bit annoyed that there is a full Moon tomorrow, because tomorrow also sees Neptune at opposition. Opposition is when Earth, the Sun, and that planet lie on a single straight line, so the planet, in this case the distant Neptune, is at its brightest and closest.
Neptune will continue to be bright for a while, however, so you still have time to see it at a later date. And if you are pointing your telescope at the sky, you might as well look for galaxy NGC 7331 and the supernova currently near its center as well.
When it comes to opposition, you have a better chance with Saturn. It will be at opposition next Saturday, October 4. It is already plenty visible, but it will get brighter, and the moon will be in its waning quarter so it won't compete as much as the full moon tomorrow. Also, there's no need for a telescope to see the "Lord of the Rings," you can see it with your naked eyes.
The trick to spotting a planet is simple. Unlike stars, planets don't twinkle. A star might as well be a point of light, so turbulence in the atmosphere makes this point move about. Planets are little disks, so turbulence doesn't have the same effect.
Saturn will be visible to the east in the early hours of the night, so look that way to spot it.
Last but certainly not least, the Southern Taurids meteor shower. This is one of the longest meteor showers we get, with fragments of comet Encke streaking across the sky from this week all the way to December.
The peak is expected to be the night of November 4 and November 5, which will be a fair night for meteor watching as the Moon will be in its waning crescent.
The Southern Taurids are known as the Halloween fireballs because they peak around the holiday. These meteors tend to have chonkier pieces than the average, and when it comes to meteors, size does matter, as larger ones are a lot brighter.
Same advice as with other meteor showers. Put your phone down and let your eyes adjust to the darkness. The Taurids radiate from the constellation of Taurus, so look for it (or the more iconic and nearby Orion).
The concentric feature in the East Margin of the Margin unit, Jezero crater, Mars.
Image credit: Bedford et al., doi: 10.1038/s43247-026-03997-9.
Using data collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover, planetary scientists have revealed that a geologically puzzling formation in Jezero crater experienced multiple distinct episodes of water-related alteration, deepening its significance as a target in the search for ancient signs of life on Mars.
NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater in February 2021 to investigate the geological record and look for signs of ancient life. Jezero crater is 45 km (28 miles) in diameter and is situated on the northwestern side of the 1,200 km (746-mile) Isidis impact basin, and northeast of the Syrtis Major volcanic province near a region known as Nilli Fossae. In new research, Purdue University planetary scientist Candice Bedford and colleagues focused on the Margin unit, a band of olivine- and carbonate-rich rock that traces the inner rim of the crater near an ancient lake shoreline.
Using chemical and imaging data gathered by Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument across more than 185 rock targets, they determined that the unit originated as a crystalline, olivine-rich igneous rock, likely formed by slow cooling deep within a magma body. “Igneous rocks are excellent record-keepers, particularly because mineral crystals within them preserve details about the precise moment they formed,” the researchers said. “In this case, they preserved an astonishingly complex record of water activity on early Mars.” Below what they believe was once the second terrace level of the ancient Jezero lake, the scientists identified evidence of three separate fluid-driven alteration events. First, carbon dioxide-rich fluids moving through cracks in the bedrock formed carbonate-rich deposits that later eroded into distinctive ridges. Later, exposure to lake water or shifting groundwater chemistry remobilized that carbonate and precipitated silica into pore spaces within the rock. Finally, hydrothermal fluids surged through younger fractures, depositing veins rich in fluorite and calcium-sulfate minerals, a signature more commonly associated with hydrothermal systems on Earth.
The authors also found signs that parts of the Margin unit were physically reworked by lake-shore or debris-flow processes. “Before we arrived at the Margin unit, the main hypothesis — derived from orbital observations — was that the carbonate seen from orbit formed from interaction with the lake that existed in Jezero crater,” Dr. Bedford said. “But now we know that this location became a sort of crossroads for aqueous systems.” “The Margin unit findings are important because Jezero crater sits inside one of the largest exposures of carbonate on Mars, so what we learn here reaches well beyond this crater.” “Some of the Margin unit rocks also contain silica,” added Dr. Eleni Ravanis, a planetary scientist at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. “Turning olivine into carbonate can leave silica behind, and we see more of that silica in rocks that sat below the water line.” The team’s results suggest the Margin unit’s alteration was driven by a combination of groundwater circulation and possible direct interaction with the Jezero paleolake over an extended period. “The Margin unit recorded a complex aqueous history driven by multiple alteration events from distinct groundwaters and/or exposure to the lake, cementing the Margin unit and the samples collected by Perseverance as primary targets of astrobiological interest,” the researchers concluded.
Their paper appears in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. _____ C.C. Bedford et al. 2026. Lake- and groundwater-associated alteration of the olivine-rich Margin unit in Jezero crater, Mars. Commun Earth Environ 7, 728; doi: 10.1038/s43247-026-03997-9
Scientists have demonstrated that the South American tiger cat complex Leopardus tigrinus consists of five genetically distinct species, including one entirely new to science.
The Leopardus tigrinus species complex is a group of small, spotted felines found across Central and South America and known variously as tiger cats, little spotted cats, or tigrinas.
Their subtle physical differences have made them notoriously difficult to classify, and previous efforts relying on limited morphological and mitochondrial DNA data produced contradictory conclusions.
“Much of the Earth’s biodiversity remains unknown, which poses a challenge to conservation planning in the face of rampant anthropogenic impacts,” said Dr. Jonas Lescroart, a researcher at the University of Antwerp and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, and his colleagues.
“A necessary step for biodiversity assessments is to correctly delimit species.”
“In this context, species complexes, due to their subtle boundaries, present a serious challenge to straightforward taxonomic assignment.”
“The tiger cat species complex presents one such example, having eluded taxonomic resolution since the description of its nominal species, Leopardus tigrinus, based on a single illustration of an animal from Cayenne, French Guiana.”
To resolve the puzzle, the authors analyzed complete genomes from 38 individuals across the genus Leopardus.
The Leopardus tigrinus species complex is a group of small, spotted felines found across Central and South America and known variously as tiger cats, little spotted cats, or tigrinas.
Their subtle physical differences have made them notoriously difficult to classify, and previous efforts relying on limited morphological and mitochondrial DNA data produced contradictory conclusions.
“Much of the Earth’s biodiversity remains unknown, which poses a challenge to conservation planning in the face of rampant anthropogenic impacts,” said Dr. Jonas Lescroart, a researcher at the University of Antwerp and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, and his colleagues.
“A necessary step for biodiversity assessments is to correctly delimit species.”
“In this context, species complexes, due to their subtle boundaries, present a serious challenge to straightforward taxonomic assignment.”
“The tiger cat species complex presents one such example, having eluded taxonomic resolution since the description of its nominal species, Leopardus tigrinus, based on a single illustration of an animal from Cayenne, French Guiana.”
To resolve the puzzle, the authors analyzed complete genomes from 38 individuals across the genus Leopardus.
They sequenced DNA from eight historical museum specimens, including skull fragments from Guyana that provided the first-ever genetic data from the species’ original type locality in the Guiana Shield, a population that had never before been molecularly sampled.
The genomic analysis confirmed five reciprocally distinct lineages within the complex, alongside the previously recognized southern tiger cat (Leopardus guttulus).
Among the findings was a previously unknown species, named Leopardus tilcayo, discovered in Bolivia’s Yungas cloud forests.
The researchers also identified a new subspecies from Peru’s Yungas region, Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo.
“Leopardus tilcayo is a small felid with a head-body length of 42.5-50.5 cm (17-20 inches) and a tail length of 25-26.5 cm (10-10.4 inches),” they said.
“It has a light brown dorsum, darker along the mid-dorsal ridge and paler toward the limbs.”
“The pelage is characterized by relatively large, irregular, dark brown to black rosettes, mostly open or partially closed, on a light brown to beige background.”
“Leopardus tilcayo diverged from the Leopardus tigrinus/pardinoides lineage nearly 1.4 million years ago, during the Early Pleistocene period,” they added.
“This period was marked by substantially fluctuating climatic conditions that led to the fragmentation of the montane forest, which likely facilitated geographic isolation.”
Beyond taxonomy, the new genomic data revealed a long-term population decline across nearly all tiger cat units dating back through the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs, with some lineages — including the newly described Leopardus tilcayo — showing population decreases of 60% or more.
“Altogether, our results clarify the evolutionary history of a complex radiation of wild cats, reveal novel taxa, and serve as a basis for conservation planning on behalf of these elusive wild cats,” the scientists concluded.
The discovery is described in a paper in the journal Current Biology.
Jonas Lescroart et al. Phylogenomics and museomics reveal five distinct species of tiger cats in South America. Current Biology, published online September 17, 2026; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.08.059
Timeline of the universe, from Big Bang to present day. The far left depicts the earliest moment we can probe so far, when a period of cosmic inflation produced a burst of exponential growth in the universe. For the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity. More recently, the expansion has begun to speed up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to dominate the expansion of the universe. Read more about this image from NASA.
You’ve probably heard of the Big Bang as the event that gave rise to our universe. You might know most cosmologists believe it occurred some 13.8 billion years ago. It’s hard to fathom that, at the moment of the Big Bang, all of the energy in the universe – some of which would later become galaxies, stars, planets and human beings – was concentrated into a tiny point, smaller than the nucleus of an atom. And it’s not just matter that was born in the Big Bang. In the view of modern cosmologists, matter and space and time all began when that microscopic point suddenly expanded violently and exponentially.
The first atoms are thought to have formed when the universe was around 400,000 years old. Before that, the universe was simply too hot and too energetic to let atomic nuclei capture electrons. The first stars sparkled into life, cosmologists believe, about 250 million years after the Big Bang, and the first galaxies shortly after that.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of an exceedingly distant galaxy called UDFj-39546284. This object has a redshift of z~10, meaning that it existed some 480 million years after the Big Bang. Image via NASA/ ESA/ Garth Illingworth/ Rychard Bouwens/ the HUDF09 Team/ Wikimedia Commons.
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Here’s another exceedingly distant (and therefore old) object, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016. Galaxy GN-z11, shown in the inset, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 3% of its current age. The galaxy is ablaze with bright, young, blue stars, but looks red in this image because its light has been stretched to longer spectral wavelengths by the expansion of the universe. Image via NASA/ ESA/ P. Oesch/ G. Brammer/ P. van Dokkum / G. Illingworth/ Hubblesite.
Big Bang is a theory
The Big Bang refers to a theory. How could it be otherwise? The current version of Big Bang theory – the one used most by modern cosmologists – is called the Lambda-CDM model. It postulates that our universe began at a specific instant, expanded to be flat (i.e. has zero curvature) and is made up of 5% baryons (i.e. the matter that makes up everything we see – galaxies, stars, planets, people), 27% cold dark matter (hence the “CDM” of the theory’s name) and 68% dark energy.
The Lambda-CDM model further states that the universe is expanding at a rate referred to as Lambda (the Greek letter) and is governed by the principles of Einstein’s General Relativity. The Lambda-CDM model has been spectacularly successful at explaining what we observe in the universe. It makes predictions repeatedly confirmed by observation. But it is not without problems; as with all scientific theories, the Lambda-CDM model continues to evolve.
Now let’s pause a moment, so that we might draw a distinction between the appearance of all that energy in the Big Bang and its sudden expansion. In that sense, the Big Bang was not the event that caused our universe. Rather, it was the event that gave birth to the universe. Why is this distinction important? It’s important because, although science has been able to establish a history of the universe right back to when that tiny point suddenly created our entire cosmos, what preceded it, the reason for that tiny point of energy being there in the first place, is unknown, and may forever be unknowable.
The unanswerable question
The Big Bang is the theory we have constructed for how the universe we see around us came to be. It does not attempt to answer the most common question we humans ask about the origin of the cosmos: why? And this question likely cannot be answered, because, by definition, whatever caused the appearance of that tiny point of energy, containing the seeds of everything that would ever be, was not of this universe.
Therefore, whatever caused the universe left no evidence of its existence for us to study, no clue as to what it was. It is also likely that, being something completely outside the universe, we would, in any event, be unable to comprehend it. The laws of physics, of motion, of gravity, of electromagnetism, of thermodynamics, simply did not apply at the moment of the universe’s birth because they did not yet exist: they certainly cannot describe the presence and origin of that tiny seed.
No answer
That has not stopped cosmologists, who study the history and large-scale structure of the universe, from trying to answer such questions, of course, because that’s the nature of science. Some people attribute the existence of that tiny seed of energy to a god, as humans have invented gods throughout the ages to explain things they could not understand, but there is absolutely no reason for believing that idea, other than perhaps wishful thinking. There is certainly nothing we observe in the history of the universe to suggest that its origin was anything other than a natural event, even if we cannot comprehend it. On the other hand, there’s nothing to suggest the origin of our universe was not caused by a god, either.
Artist’s representation of the history of the universe and the arrow of time. Big Bang theory implies that time moves in a single direction. However, scientists have discovered that, at the quantum level, in the realm of sub-atomic particles, many processes are what we call “time-reversible”: there is no distinction between past, present and future. Image via Forbes.
Time started with the Big Bang
The Lambda-CDM model also states that time itself started at the Big Bang, on the basis that if there are no events, there is no time to measure. This raises an old philosophical question of whether time is a human construct or exists independently of us. This question has taxed some of the greatest philosophers and scientists but has never been answered satisfactorily. Still, if we define time as the period which elapses between events, it is fair to say that time started with the Big Bang.
Another common question is: what happened before the Big Bang? That question can have no meaning if we accept the Big Bang was the start of the universe’s clock: it’s like asking what’s north of the North Pole. This answer, while demonstrating the irrationality of asking about a “before”, is not, however, satisfactory to humans accustomed to cause and effect: we reason that if the Big Bang was an event which was the result of something, some change, some instability, there had to be a before.
However, that is only in our experience, in the world we are familiar with, where an event always has a cause, and has absolutely no bearing on the universe coming into being because, again, the laws of physics, which in our world govern cause and effect, simply did not exist. And as if to underline how superficial, how biased, our perception of time, scientists have discovered that at the quantum level, in the realm of sub-atomic particles, many processes are what we call “time-reversible:” there is simply no distinction between past, present and future.
Space began at the Big Bang
It’s also important to realize that, at the moment of the Big Bang, there was no space and there were no dimensions. Space itself, and the dimensions within that space, came into being at that moment, as the bubble of energy expanded. This means that, contrary to what most people believe, the Big Bang was not an explosion. Think of anything exploding, and it explodes into a space, an area, which was there already. But in the case of the Big Bang, there was no preexisting space for an explosion to occur in.
A related question which is often asked is: where did the Big Bang happen? Those who ask this believe you can point at a location in the sky and say, “it happened there.” But the answer to the question is that the Big Bang happened everywhere. It’s just that everywhere existed within that tiny bubble of infinitely-hot expanding energy, because there was literally nothing outside it – no space, no dimensions, nothing. Watch any documentary about the Big Bang and it will show it as a huge explosion, viewed from outside. But such a viewpoint is impossible – there was no “outside”. One cannot, of course, blame filmmakers for this: there is simply no way to portray the Big Bang visually in a way which is scientifically accurate. It’s doubtful we even have the vocabulary to describe it, let alone portray it.
Space itself is believed to have been born in the Big Bang. Artist’s concept via Christine Daniloff/ MIT/ ESA/ Hubble/ NASA/ Phys.org.
Alternative theories?
If you find it difficult to get your head around the idea of the Big Bang happening everywhere, with no outside, at a particular moment when time started some 13.8 billion years ago, you are not alone. The human brain is not well equipped for dealing with such concepts. Even when Edwin Hubble, in the 1920s, demonstrated that the universe is expanding in all directions, and therefore, if you wind the clock back far enough, all of the universe must have occupied one tiny point, the idea that the universe had a definite beginning, and was therefore not infinitely old, was simply unacceptable to many.
Among these who rejected the Big Bang were prominent scientists: Einstein himself denied the idea of an expanding universe. Another scientist who rejected the notion of a universe of finite age was famed British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, the man who, more than any other individual, unlocked the mystery of how stars work.
Hoyle gave a series of lectures on BBC radio in the late 1940s and early ’50s, and, on one of these – on the BBC’s Third Programme broadcast on March 28, 1949 – he poured derision on the idea of the universe beginning at a fixed point in time and referred to cosmologists’ description of the event as a “Big Bang.” Unfortunately for Hoyle, the name stuck, and we’ve called this event the Big Bang ever since.
Fred Hoyle. He coined the term “Big Bang” to describe the event in which our universe was born, while explaining a rival theory, the Steady State theory, in a radio talk in 1949 Image via Britannica.com.Image via ExploringCosmos006.
Hoyle’s rejection of the Big Bang theory
Hoyle never accepted that the universe had a beginning, even until his death at the age at 86 in 2001. He became the leading proponent of Steady State Theory, which says that the universe has no beginning or end: it constantly regenerates itself, with new matter condensing out of nothing.
Hoyle’s blunt intransigence – he was from Yorkshire, an English county said to be famed for the plain-speaking and directness of its inhabitants – was not lessened by the subsequent success of Big Bang theory, not even after it successfully predicted the abundancies of light elements, such as hydrogen, helium and lithium, in the universe.
Nor did he come to accept the Big Bang when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the predicted Cosmic Microwave Background, the Big Bang’s dying echo, in 1964. Steady State Theory had predicted none of these things, nor did it have explanations for them.
It just wouldn’t work
Nor was Hoyle fazed when Alan Guth constructed the theory of Cosmological Inflation as a refinement to existing Big Bang theory in 1979. Inflation explains why the universe is the same temperature everywhere and is “flat”, amongst other features of the universe not hitherto explained, although it has yet to be observationally completely verified.
Even the year before he died, Hoyle published yet another scientific paper on Steady State theory, but by this time his ideas were completely rejected by most cosmologists. And, sadly for him, they were also rejected by the overwhelming observational evidence for the Big Bang. Steady State Theory just does not work, makes false predictions and is contradicted by what we actually see in the universe. As a hypothesis – lacking supporting observational evidence, it was that rather than a theory, although commonly referred to as such – it essentially died with Hoyle.
Today’s Big Bang model
Today, the Lambda-CDM Big Bang model is the only theory that makes any testable predictions and that is supported by observations.
Most cosmologists today believe we know the history of the universe back to 10-21 seconds after the Big Bang – that’s 0.0000000000000000000001 seconds. The painstaking piecing together of this history over the last 50 years, although lacking in fine detail as it undoubtedly is, represents humans’ greatest intellectual achievement, our species’ crowning glory. It has been achieved through an unparalleled synthesis of astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics, chemistry and other sciences.
But science will not rest until we can push our theories back even further in time, to that exact moment when the universe came into being.
Artist’s concept of the Big Bang, the event now believed to have marked our universe’s birth. If we looked far enough back in time, could we witness the birth of the universe?
Bottom line: At the moment of the Big Bang, all of the energy in the universe – some of which would later become galaxies, stars, planets and human beings – was concentrated into a tiny point, smaller than the nucleus of an atom. And it’s not just matter that was born in the Big Bang. In the view of modern cosmologists, matter and space and time all began when that microscopic point suddenly expanded violently and exponentially.
