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Back to the Beginning A GREAT BRAIN’S BIGGEST BLUNDERWhen Albert Einstein developed his revolutionary theory of general relativity in 1916, his mathematical calculations pointed to an extraordinary conclusion—the universe was expanding. And since if you rewind the tape on any expansion, you get back to a point where it started, that meant the universe must have had a beginning too.1 Einstein, however, was like most scientists of his day in that he believed in an eternal universe. Unwilling to accept a beginning to the universe, Einstein fudged the numbers in order to nullify the conclusion that the universe was expanding. University of California astrophysicist George Smoot explains that Einstein’s main problem with an expanding universe was its implication of a beginning. A beginning pointed to a beginner beyond scientific investigation.2 However, once experimental data proved that the universe really was expanding, Einstein admitted his error, calling it “the biggest blunder of my life.”3 There’s a point worth considering here: if it could happen to Einstein, it could happen to anyone. Rarely is anyone completely objective when it comes to the issue of a creator. While it is true that religious belief and philosophy became an obstacle for scientific inquiry in the days of Galileo, trends have changed. In the modern era it has been a prejudice against the possibility of a cosmic designer that has kept many scientists from honest and open inquiry. Thankfully, the truth generally comes out in the end, and scientists began to see the light. For Einstein and others, it was something called red shift that started the parade of evidence for a universe with a beginning. RED SHIFTING THE BIG BANG THEORY INTO HIGH GEAR In the late 1920s, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble noticed something unusual as he gazed into the heavens. It wasn’t a new planet or little green men waving at him from Mars; it was something more tedious and at the same time more thrilling. Hubble had been spending countless nights at the Mount Wilson Observatory, studying the stars and galaxies and especially the spectrum of color in the light they sent our way. He discovered that the light from most other galaxies was shifted to the red end of the spectrum, which indicated they were moving away from us. Furthermore, the farther a galaxy was away from us, the more red shifted its light was and, thus, the faster it was moving away from us. The only explanation for all of this was that space itself was expanding, causing all galaxies to move away from each other. In an expanding universe, from any point in space (including our own), it would appear that most stars and galaxies were racing away. And the farther away they were, the faster they would be racing. There it was in the red shift: proof that Einstein had been right in the first place (before he fudged his formula) and that the universe really was expanding. Proof, in other words, that the universe was not eternal but had a beginning.4 And yet not everyone accepted the proof at first, including a scientist named Sir Fred Hoyle (former Plumian professor of astronomy at Cambridge University and founder of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge). Ironically, it was Hoyle who originally described the event as a “big bang,” meaning to mock the idea. The name stuck. (According to physics professor Brian Greene, the term “big bang” is actually misleading since there was nothing to explode and no space in which an explosion could take place.)5 But unlike Hoyle, many other scientists began coming over to the side of the newly named theory. Back / Next |