n the 13th century, Siger of Brabant authored the thesis The Eternity of the World, which argued

that there was no first man, and no first specimen of any particular: the physical universe is thus
without any first beginning, and therefore eternal. Siger's views were condemned by the Pope in
1277.
Cosmological expansion was originally discovered through observations by Edwin Hubble.
Theoretical calculations also showed that the static universe as modeled by Einstein (1917) was
unstable. The modern Big Bang theory is one in which the universe has a finite age and has
evolved over time through cooling, expansion, and the formation of structures through
gravitational collapse.
The steady state model asserts that although the universe is expanding, it nevertheless does not
change its appearance over time (the perfect cosmological principle); the universe has no
beginning and no end. This requires that matter be continually created in order to keep the
universe's density from decreasing. Influential papers on steady state cosmologies were
published by Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle in 1948.[3][4]
It is now known that Albert Einstein considered a steady state model of the expanding universe,
as indicated in a 1931 manuscript, many years before Hoyle, Bondi and Gold. However, he
quickly abandoned the idea.[5]

Observational tests[edit]
Counts of radio sources[edit]
Problems with the steady state model began to emerge in the 1950s and 60s, when observations
began to support the idea that the universe was in fact changing: bright radio sources
(quasars and radio galaxies) were found only at large distances (therefore could have existed
only in the distant past), not in closer galaxies. Whereas the Big Bang theory predicted as much,
the steady state model predicted that such objects would be found throughout the universe,
including close to our own galaxy. By 1961, statistical tests based on radio-source surveys[6] had
ruled out the steady state model in the minds of most cosmologists, although some proponents
of the steady state insisted that the radio data were suspect.

Cosmic microwave background[edit]

For most cosmologists, the definitive refutation of the steady state model came with the
discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964, which was predicted by the Big
Bang theory. The steady state model explained microwave background radiation as the result of
light from ancient stars that has been scattered by galactic dust. However, the cosmic microwave
background level is very even in a