Big Bang

While most of their classmates at the Wharton School were preparing for careers with investment firms, Brian Le Gette and Ron Wilson were peddling ear warmers on campus. Other students laughed at first, but when the pair sold 1,000 warmers in two years, their MBA classmates at the University of Pennsylvania's renowned business school began clamoring to get in on the venture. Eighteen students invested a combined $100,000 initially, and 17 other students, family members and friends joined a year later, bringing the investment to $2 million.

WASHINGTON -- An international team of astronomers has captured what are described as the first detailed pictures of our universe in its infancy -- just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, before the formation of the first stars and galaxies. The cosmic baby photos look something like slices of a blurry cheese pizza. But they are delighting scientists because they appear to support promising theories about the early physics of the universe and the mechanisms that led to the birth of stars and galaxies like our own. The images -- snapped by a telescope hung beneath a balloon over Antarctica -- also appear to resolve a fundamental question raised by Albert Einstein about whether space is "curved" or "flat."

Drop in front of the television, thumb the remote control through the blizzard of images and odds are pretty good you'll find lots of biting sharks, enigmatic mummies, churning tornadoes or star-slurping black holes.Never, it seems, have there been more science shows. And never have more people watched them.Sure, American students score miserably in science and math tests, compared to the rest of the world. (In one recent comparison, eighth-graders in the United States ranked behind all but four of 41 nations: Lithuania, Cyprus, Portugal and Iran.

NOTHING, APPARENTLY. Or rather, an endless cycle of expansions and contractions. That at least is the latest big scientific theory on the universe -- one that poses a challenge for those who seek a neat beginning, middle and end to things. For decades, cosmology's prevailing theory has been grounded in the so-called Big Bang an estimated 13 billion years ago, the genesis of an ever-inflating universe. The new theory says the Big Bang was not the first such huge explosion of matter -- that instead of an expanding universe, it's an oscillating or bouncing one. Coincidentally, publication of this theory was quickly followed this week by the display of the latest mind-blowing images from the newly upgraded Hubble Space Telescope -- images capturing light from the universe billions of years ago, as close as this world has been to the Big Bang.

Support the guy. He's the only president we have. The American unity that has formed can defeat terrorism, but a big bang in the wrong part of the desert might only recruit more terrorists. Taliban mullahs bargain over Osama like a prized carpet. Recession? Greenspan has the words for it, "a pronounced disengagement from future commitments." Cheer up. Oil is down.

People often ask me: `Do you believe in the big bang or in creation by God?' And my answer is, `Yes.'" THE REV. BILL STOEGER, one of the astronomers who works at an observatory owned by the Vatican in the mountains of Arizona.

On this date in 4004 B.C. (Julian calendar), God began the creation of the universe, according to the "Annals of the Old Testament," written by Archbishop James Ussher in 1650. Cosmologists have arrived at a somewhat earlier, and less precise, date, based on observations of receding galaxies. They date the beginning of time and space to the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, give or take a few million.

ATLANTA -- Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, including the surprising discovery of boron in an ancient star and the most precise measurement so far of heavy hydrogen in space, have given astronomers new insights about early cosmic history and perhaps a clue to the fate of the universe.Astronomers using the orbiting telescope have also found that clouds of primordial hydrogen, thought to be randomly distributed in the most distant reaches of space, may be nearby as well.These discoveries, reported here yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, were made by ultraviolet instruments that have managed to produce illuminating results despite the telescope's flawed primary mirror.

How would you like your company to get big bang -- I mean really big bang -- for giving away bucks that aren't really its bucks?Confusing as that sounds, it gets worse before it gets better. The company I am referring to is a major Delaware-chartered financial institution. Its corporate offices are in New Jersey. And, by all rights, it is really a Maryland company, at least historically. It is the company that gives away the money it doesn't really have.Last week, the Hodson Trust gave away $2.6 million to four Maryland institutions of higher education.

The Big Bang Theory, a revealed truth for cosmologists, has now been confirmed. So say the cosmologists, who think they've found their Holy Grail. Us laypeople, who are supposed to have great difficulty accepting the Big Bang, actually have no trouble wrapping our minds around it at all. What really gives us trouble, however, is the time before the big pop-off. What made the Big Particle that blew up to become the universe as we know it?The super-particle, which contained all the matter that now orbits the sun, fills the galaxy and populates the star charts, was so unstable, the scientists say, that it could only exist for an infinitesimal time.