It must be tough to probe the mysteries of the universe for a living. The pay’s not great, the discoveries are few and far between, and you don’t get the respect you deserve. Usually. But then, every once in a while, astrophysics hits the front page headlines and some astrophysicist hits the jackpot. That’s what happened last month. If you thought that things that happened 13.7 billion years ago aren’t news, think again.
Big Bang
Roman Catholic priest Fr. Georges Lemaître, working off Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, first proposed the “Big Bang” explanation of the universe’s origin in 1927. It took decades for the theory to win general acceptance. Einstein himself opposed it bitterly for years, in what he would later call “the biggest mistake of my life.”
The theory was finally proved experimentally only in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson. For their pains, they were awarded the Nobel Prize. Fr. Lemaître, on the other hand, never received the public recognition that was his due.
Nevertheless, in the 1970s several apparent problems with the Big Bang theory surfaced. The solution promised by Alan Guth’s 1981 hypothesis that the universe went through a period of extremely rapid expansion within the first second after the Big Bang, called “cosmic inflation,” had never been experimentally proven. It was one of the “great unsolved problems in physics.”
Until March 16th. Physicists working at Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University announced the results of 3 years of work using NASA’s WMAP satellite: inflation is for real, and Fr. Lemaître’s theory has survived another crucial test. At the press conference, according to AP wire reports, the scientists described the universe’s growth “from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.”
That begets a big question. Have we finally proven that God created the world with an dramatically instantaneous explosion of “Let there be light?”
Fr. Lemaître didn’t think so, and an anecdote has him taking Pius XII aside to dissuade any such premature judgment. Surprised? Ironically, unlike so many scientists of his time, Fr. Lemaître worked ceaselessly to keep religion and science separate.
Both explore the One Truth in different, complementary realms. Revelation tells us that God created the universe, and science is telling us what the beginning of the universe looked like. Neither has anything to say about the other’s contribution, even though points of contact like the Fiat lux of Genesis and the explosion of the Big Bang are certainly revealing. That was underlined by Pope John Paul II during his General Audience on January 29, 1986, when he said that the text of Genesis doesn’t purport to teach us anything significant from the point of view of the natural sciences; it tells us in fact something that goes beyond the sciences: that God is the cause of all creation.
Big Bucks
That March 16 announcement was big. This is bigger.
March 15 saw the official announcement of this year’s Templeton Prize winner, the widely-respected cosmologist John D. Barrow. The award, established by philanthropist Sir John Templeton, goes annually to a living person for advancement of knowledge in spiritual matters. Past winners have included Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Michael Novak, and Benedictine priest Fr. Stanley Jaki.
This is the PowerBall of scientific awards: currently at 795,000 pounds sterling ($1.4 million), the prize value is adjusted so that it always exceeds the value of the Nobel Prizes. For Templeton, it is a way to underscore that “research and advances in spiritual discoveries can be quantifiably more significant than disciplines recognized by the Nobels.”
Barrow has worked hard: to date, he is credited with more than 400 articles in scientific journals and 17 books translated into 27 languages. His most famous book was also his most controversial: 1986’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, co-authored with Frank Tipler. “Anthropic” and “cosmological” are big words, but the idea is simple: if we’re here, the universe must be tailor-made somehow to make life possible.
Now what does “tailor-made” mean here? Does it really have a Tailor, or did it just happen that way by chance? Since Barrow and Tipler’s groundbreaking work, scientists and philosophers juggle several versions of the principle that give all sorts of answers. One extreme version even ends by saying “Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the universe, and once it comes into existence, it will never die out.” In other words, from the very moment of the Big Bang, humanity was destined to evolve.
That’s all very interesting, but how interesting?
Big Questions
Science has a knack for inspiring awe (most high-school chemistry classes excepted). We look up at a starry sky amazed by the immensity of it all, and then we’re told that we can only see a mere fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the stars in our galaxy, and that our galaxy is one of billions of billions. Wow.
Here’s a real wow: recent work keeps on showing that the values of fundamental “constants” in the universe — basic numbers that define the universe’s structure, that could conceivably be different than they are — seem to reflect some kind of “fine tuning.”
For example, the nuclear strong force and nuclear weak force govern the behavior of particles at a subatomic level. In other words, they’re unthinkably tiny.
Make the strong force 2% weaker, and atomic nuclei don’t hold together — you have a universe made only of hydrogen. Make the strong force 1% stronger, and you have a universe with hardly any hydrogen and therefore virtually no stars. Or try playing with the weak force: slightly smaller, and stars can’t develop for lack of helium; slightly larger, and too much helium means that stars over-produce heavy elements. In all of these cases, life can’t develop.
Or take the proton: it has a mass 1836 times greater than that of an electron. Big deal? Try varying that just slightly, and atoms and molecules, the basic building blocks of matter, most likely can’t exist.
Or again, try varying the ratio between photons and baryons: it stands at a billion to one. Just slightly larger or smaller, and no galaxies and no stars can form. No stars, no planets, no life. And that’s just for starters. It’s like Goldilocks and the Three Bears writ large: there are dozens more variables that seem “just right.”
So was there a Designer behind all of that? Or was it just random chance? Believe it or not, scientists and philosophers are still going round and round about all this. One counterproposal has the universe blowing itself up in Big Bangs so many times that once in a very long while a universe like ours was bound to turn up. Another idea has it that there is some kind of general law setting all these basic numbers that hasn’t been discovered yet, or that all these “coincidences” can somehow be explained if infinite parallel universes exist.
For a believer, however, John Barrow’s work simply reinforces our faith, making us stop and wonder all over again at the infinite providence of our Creator. We really have “hit the jackpot”: the universe seems just right for us because God has loved us so.
O come, let us sing to the Lord…
O come, let us worship and bow down,
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
For He is our God,
and we are the people of His pasture
and the sheep of His hand. (Ps 95: 1,6-7)
As Barrow put it in his acceptance lecture, Sir John Templeton believes firmly that “religion and science can provide mutual illumination and appreciation of the wonders of our universe and inspire us to seek out and comprehend the truth in new ways — a truth that is unfailingly unexpected and so often not at all like it first appears.” Amen to that.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Br. Shane Johnson, of the Legionaries of Christ, studies for the priesthood at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University. He is simultaneously pursuing graduate-level degrees in religion and science and in philosophy of mind. He can be reached at authors@arcol.org.
