is the big bang theory now not a theory but accepted reality?

No absolute fact yet but Big Bang is pretty hard to beat with know facts. There are actually about 7 competing theories of origin.

You have to be careful thinking a theory is a fact. For Instance, the Law of Gravity is now being challenged. And Einstein disrupted a lot of "facts"!!!

Wave Ripple

String

Oscillating (repeating Big Bangs)

etc.

No it is still a theory.

There is no irreputable proof in any of it, just guesswork..

But like any theory where we don't directly know the fact, the Big Bang is the best we have.

It fits the bill.

The more we find out, the less we know.

Is Space really infinite?

Did we come from a White Hole?

A scientific theory isn't "just a theory" or "still a theory". It is the best explanation (or best model) that fits the observable evidence. The Big Bang theory is such a theory. It remain a valid explanation for what we're observing, and that's as close to the "fact" that science ever gets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

A scientific theory that holds up to the observable evidence and stands the test of time is, indeed, accepted reality. But it is still called a theory.

In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.

- Stephen J. Gould, " Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981

The same point applies equally to any other scientific theory. There is no higher standing in science than theory.

The big bang has always been, and will forever be considered accepted reality.

Big Bang was coined by Fred Hoyle who had a different theory.The difficulty with the theory is that a mass ofthe size of a golf ball expended with limit.The expansion was calculated in the order of 10^17 second of time.

Other calculation indicates a time that goes back to infinity.Thus time as per the Big Bang theory is a little short on one hand and other hand no direction as far as the cause of motion is explicated.

The Biblical record of Creation indicates that there was a space structure of the Heavens(High waters which indicates a fluid)

No Humans was there at the instance of Creation to prove whether the singularityd explode forming an expansion or the creation took place simultaneously in the form of a spin.No one can really prove how our Creators formed the construction of the physical Universe

Still a theory, it doesn't explain everything.

Until someone comes up with something better that accounts for millions of observations. In one form or another the BB theory has been around over 80 years and it has seen the rivals come and it has seen the rivals go.

One rival made some kind of sense, but did not account for the cosmic microwave background, which had been predicted by BB theory and found accidentally in the mid 1960s. Goodbye steady state.

All major scientific theories now in place, from the theory of oxygen based combustion to that of clonal selection and BB have been attacked rationally or irrationally. There is a reason why these theories are still around, it's because they work and the rivals did not.

A theory is a proposed explanation for something that you cannot go and check directly.

In science, a theory MUST be based on facts, and on validated principles before it can even be proposed (published).

Even at that, thousands of theories are published every year. The primary job of a scientist (in regards to theories in her or his own field) is to show why a theory is invalid.

The theory we call Big Bang was first proposed as an idea (a hypothesis: "what if...?") in 1927.

The same scientist (who happened to be a priest) also prepared a mathematical model (in the early 1930s) showing that space has no choice but to react to the presence of mass: space must contract or expand (but his model does not give the sign... it simply shows that it cannot remain static).

Observations made by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble (with the same priest as his assistant) showed that distant galaxies are all moving away from each other at a rate that is linear relative to the distance between them.

The theory, based on the above (and much more) was first published in 1948. It got its awful nickname Big Bang from an adversary (Fred Hoyle, during a radio interview in 1949). The nickname is awful because it gives the false impression that the theory describes an explosion.

The Big Bang theory simply describes the hypothetical effect of the expansion of space, on the energy content of the universe:

Same total amount of energy + more space to spread it out = the energy DENSITY of the universe should go down with time.

Fred has published his own theory (1949) called Steady State. The two theories were "mutually exclusive" (if one is true, then the other must be false). Therefore, scientists have been trying to find ways to contradict one or the other (or both -- they could both be wrong) since then.

Steady State says that the energy density remains the same all the time; as space expands, new energy is added to the universe (and the calculated rate is so low that it made sense).

As better understanding of physics was gained, some even used each theory as tools to make predictions. One of the predictions was:

IF (a big if) the Big Bang version were true, then we should observe the remnants of the moment when the "temperature of the universe" (equivalent to energy density) dropped below 3000 K (approx 5400 F).

This was deemed impossible under Steady State, where the temperature of the universe remains constant throughout eternity (past and future).

Meanwhile, scientists much prefered Steady State, where the mathematics (and the assumptions) were a lot easier to handle. Big Bang's mathematical model was so complicated that even Einstein needed explanations (the priest met him in the early 1930s to explain the model - Einstein then accepted it).

It is only in 1964 that the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation was finally observed. This radiation had been predicted using Big Bang, and was impossible under Steady State.

Since then, more and more observations support the theory nicknamed Big Bang. Of course, it had to be improved, tweeked, expanded, since then. At the start, it was just an idea, now the whole theory is full of details about what happens as the energy density passes critical values.

The same way you can explain what happens to water as it cools past the critical temperature of 0 C -- it becomes solid and releases latent heat; you can do that without having to explain where the water came from.

The Big Bang theory is still the best tool we have to explain the observed behavior of the universe over the last 13.8 billion years.

However, it does NOT tell us where the universe came from (it does not even try to do that).

And it still has a few unsolved mysteries (it says nothing about dark matter and dark energy, for example).

the big bang theory is a tv show