1/ Everyone responding to this tweet is calling Limbaugh a moron. I don't see any answers, so I thought I'd explain it.
2/ There are two quick hot takes. The first is that we do "see" it. The "cosmic microwave background" is the light from when the universe was still on fire 13.8 billion years ago. It's even go the same spectral shape as fire, just red shifted.
3/ The second hot take is; "The Red F**king Shift". Like sound, light has a doppler effect, bluer for things traveling toward us, redder for things traveling away from us. All the galaxies in the universe are moving away from us.
4/ Moreover, the more distant a galaxy, the greater the red shift, so the faster the universe is moving away. If you run the clock backward, then everything crunches together 13.8 billion years ago. This has been known for 100 years.
5/ The Big Bang is just a theory. By that, scientists mean they don't care if it's
"true", like religious people. They just mean that if they are going to predict things, they will use the theory to predict a thing.
"true", like religious people. They just mean that if they are going to predict things, they will use the theory to predict a thing.
6/ It's been an incredibly successful at prediction. A ton of things fit the theory, nothing seriously challenges it. Any competing theory has a ton of observations about the modern universe that a competing theory would have to explain.
7/ There's a lot of high-school science here that you've probably forgotten. For example, how do we know the proper color of things, to know they've shifted. The easy answer is hydrogen has several emission spectra....
8/ We can therefore recognize the hydrogen spectrum anywhere, even when it's been shifted.
9/ Likewise, there is the "Cepheid variable" star that has a fixed color/brightness relationship. We can find them in distant galaxies, measure their color, calculate their brightness, and hence, their distance (further away = dimmer).
10/ All of these concepts were in your high school textbook. All of them (except for cosmic background) were in Limbaugh's high school science textbook. These are very basic things.
