They always have been. And Cool never changed that.
Typing “Big Bang Theory” into a search bar links us immediately to the long-running (debut 2007), immensely popular CBS sitcom, a post-modern look at the lives of Caltech physicists. The conventional meaning of the term, our universe’s origin starting with a small singularity currently pegged at 13.8 billion years ago, is a mere second thought.
Even “relativity” cannot match that pop culture success: The first hit I tried offered to define the term, as if that really matters.
But the Big Bang is unpopular among cosmologists. It survives on evidence alone. And sadly, evidence matters much less than it used to.
Science historian Helge Kragh tells us that astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the term “big bang” in 1949: “Ironically… to characterize the kind of theory he much disliked and fought until the end of his life… As Hoyle said in an interview in 1995: ‘Words are like harpoons. Once they go in, they are very hard to pull out.’” In 1949, he had described the theory as “irrational.”
But in 1965, the evidence of aftershocks (the cosmic microwave background) More.
See also: Multiverse cosmology at your fingertips