The Birth of the Universe: A Quantum Egg

Belgian priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître conjectured in 1931 that the beginning of the Universe could be modeled as the decay of a single quantum of matter, which gave birth to everything else. Lemaître suggests that the initial state of the Universe was without space or time, and the initial quantum was like a "unique atom" that spontaneously started to decay into smaller atoms or quantum fragments. The Big Bang model of cosmology emerged from the pioneering work of George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which suggests that the young Universe was denser and hotter, and matter was broken down to its smallest constituents early on.