It was the monkey picture that did it. Neil Turok, professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University, had just expounded to a conference of fellow physicists his revolutionary theory of how the universe began.

Sitting in the audience and listening to the responses, he knew he had been controversial and awaited the learned responses with interest. The responses were not as subtle as he had expected.

When Alan Guth, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of America’s leading research universities, took the podium, he pulled no punches.

The conference, organised by America’s National Academy of Sciences, froze in embarrassment as Guth attacked Turok and his theories — and called up a slide of a monkey to illustrate his comments.

“I was shocked,” said Turok. “I had been putting forward a new idea about what happened before the Big Bang and the events that led to the creation of our universe. Depicting me as a monkey was his way of saying I was wrong.”

That event was just one salvo in what has become one of science’s fiercest debates: how to explain the origins of the universe. What Turok had done in his lecture and accompanying papers was to challenge an idea that has held physicists in thrall for more than four decades: that time, space and everything else all appeared out of nothing and began with one Big Bang.

Instead, Turok says the Big Bang was not a unique event at all. In fact it was likely to have been one of many, perhaps millions of, Big Bangs.

A small but growing band of other researchers, including Paul Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein professor of science at Princeton University, support the idea.

If Turok and his supporters are right, the implications are daunting. The life’s work of many scientists, and thousands of research papers, would be redundant. No wonder they are fighting back. It would also mean that time, matter and energy have always existed — and always will.

It was Albert Einstein who put science on the trail of the Big Bang when his general theory of relativity made it clear that the universe could expand or contract.

Einstein never worked out which it was doing, but 14 years later the American astronomer Edwin Hubble made the historic discovery that, wherever one looked in space, galaxies were racing away from each other.

The clear implication was that if things are flying apart now they must once have been much closer together — and that perhaps they all began at one single, tiny point.

From this combination of theory and observation grew the idea of the Big Bang which, in its current form, suggests that the universe exploded into existence 13.7 billion years ago.

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