The Big Bang Picture: a Remarkable Success of Modern Science Alain Blanchard LATT, OMP, UPS, 14, Av. E.Belin, 31 400 Toulouse, France E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract. During the XXth century a scientific picture of the universe and its history has emerged on the basis of the "Primeval Atom", the original proposition of Georges Lemaî tre. Indeed, I will show during this review that modern cosmology is a scientific theory, and as such does not pretend to provide the "Truth", but a framework in which predictions are possible and can be confronted to observations for possible falsification in Poper sense. The last forty years have offered a remarkable list of observational verifications of the predictions of the standard picture, on the basis of well established physics. During the last twenty five years a more revolutionizing picture has emerged: essential pieces of information for fundamental physics are obtainable from cosmology: this picture specifies the existence of non-baryonic matter, of dark energy and the physics relevant at energies well above what is accessible to terrestrial laboratories. Although definitive conclusions are obviously more uncertain, this approach is still a fully scientific path which successes have been remarkable and allow to consider cosmology as a new and rich branch of modern physics. Keywords: Cosmology PACS: 98.80.k 1. INTRODUCTION The status of cosmology as a science has been quite often debated. My personal point of view is that the question of Cosmology, i.e. obtaining the description of the geography and the history of the universe, is one of the oldest question of man kind, and therefore the scientific approach was much more difficult than say in thermodynamics.