"Earlier theories […] were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past." (Sir Fred Hoyle, [From microfilmed Speaker's Copy of a radio script held at the BBC Written Archive Centre, for Hoyle's radio talk on the BBC Third Programme] 1949) [Coining the 'big bang']
"The universe starts with a big bang, expands to a maximum dimension, then recontracts and collapses: no more awe-inspiring prediction was ever made. It is preposterous." (John A Wheeler et al, "Gravitation", 1973
"[The Big Bang is] followed by what? By a dull-as-ditchwater expansion which degrades itself adiabatically until it is incapable of doing anything at all. The notion that galaxies form, to be followed by an active astronomical history, is an illusion. Nothing forms, the thing is as dead as a door-nail." (Sir Fred Hoyle, 'The Big Bang in Astronomy', New Scientist, 1981)
"The most abstract conservation laws of physics come into their being in describing equilibrium in the most extreme conditions. They are the most rigorous conservation laws, the last to break down. The more extreme the conditions, the fewer the conserved structures. [...] In a deep sense, we understand the interior of the sun better that the interior of the earth, and the early stages of the big bang best of all." (Frank Wilczek, "Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics", 1987)
"In fact, all our theories of science are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and nearly flat, so they break down at the big bang singularity, where the curvature of space-time is infinite." (Stephen W Hawking, "A Brief History of Time", 1988)
"As a general scientific principle, it is undesirable to depend crucially on what is unobservable to explain what is observable, as happens frequently in Big Bang cosmology." (Halton Christian Arp, 1990)
"A universe that came from nothing in the big bang will disappear into nothing in the big crunch, its glorious few zillion years of existence not even a memory." (P C W Davies, "The Last Three Minutes: Conjectures About The Ultimate Fate Of The Universe", 1994
"God created two acts of folly. First, He created the Universe in a Big Bang. Second, He was negligent enough to leave behind evidence for this act, in the form of the microwave radiation." (Paul Erdős [in Paul Hoffman's "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth", 1998])
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