Science, Blogs, Web I: Big Bang, Big Problem

There’s a blog post about gender differences in scientific literacy over at The Intersection. And no doubt, it is a scary statement about our culture and educational system (in the US in this case, although I suspect the results would be similar elsewhere) that men uniformly score better than women. But (as other commenters have noted) one question stood out:

The universe began with a huge explosion. (True)
Male 40
Female 27*

* that right folks, almost 3/4 of female respondents answered incorrectly

Despite calling it the Big Bang (originally a derisive term coined by Fred Hoyle), the Universe didn’t start in anything that could be described as a “huge explosion”. Yes, it’s been expanding for fourteen billion years from an incomparably dense initial state, but that expansion is happening everywhere, not exploding out from some single point. So maybe women actually knew too much to be tricked by the wording?