GE1713

A Return to the Beginning

By Daniel J. McNamara, SJ

We shall never cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T. S. Eliot

It is in the spirit of these lines by Elliot that we want to return to the Beginning, the Origin of all that is,
the Start of time and space and all they contain. This study is called Cosmogony from the Greek,
from cosmos meaning "order" and gonos meaning "offspring," which in turn, comes from the root
meaning "to be born." It is the study of the universe as an ordered system, which the Greeks
assumed it to be. The Greeks were struck by the general regularity of the motion of the stars. Even if
they observed certain "stars" that were not so regular in their paths (they eventually called them the
"sky wanderers" or planets), they still tried to fit these into the universal order that prevailed. This
insight into the working of nature-that it obeys natural 'laws'-gave rise, in due course, to science, as
we know it, and its presupposition that there exist laws in the workings of the natural world.

Returning to the beginning, however, is by no means the full story. In fact, even to return we must
start right at the present, at the Now of today. Yes, we do build on the work of those who have gone
before us as in any area of scholarship, but we ourselves must also look at the universe. We must
discern for ourselves the order or lack of it. Such a study also has a Greek name: Cosmology. From
the present cosmos to the origin of the cosmos, that is the story of this paper.

If the story begins with the Greeks; that is not to say they did not have forerunners. Their knowledge
of the sky came from those careful watchers who preceded them, the Babylonians. But, the Greeks
were the first ones who considered what they saw in the light of more basic assumptions - that
human beings can know the heavens, chart the stars follow regular motions, that they follow laws
that can be comprehended by the human brain. To us, this may seem trivial. But, when we reflect
that since time immemorial the stars have looked down on the human scene of life and death,
tragedy and rejoicing, birth and dying, with the same impersonal eternal shining, we can begin to
realize the significance of what the Greeks did. No longer were we to think of the heavens as
controlling our fate. They were impersonal and rightly so. As parts of nature, they obeyed the same
laws of nature as human beings. The cosmos was orderly and human reason could reason out this
order. It was no longer at the whim of the gods and, thus, a capricious and ultimately scary, uncertain
arena into which the human being was thrust at birth. We may not understand, at any one moment,
its workings but, in principle, the Universe can be understood .11

Studying the very big

When this Greek idea was rediscovered in Christian Europe centuries later, it found a very fertile
field in which to be planted and bear fruit. That the human brain could understand the Universe was
not a surprise to a culture that celebrated the human Son of God every year2. In fact, much has
been written about the religiosity of the founders of modern science, the first scientists. Men such as
Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler were no strangers to religion and, in fact, would find it strange
were we to ask how they could be both scientists and religious in their worldview. Their early work
was essentially astronomical in nature and it is upon these foundations that modern Cosmology
stands. When Newton reasoned that the same force of gravity that he discovered to be operative on
Earth • and expressed in mathematical form - was the operative throughout the universe, he gave
the clue to the development of the science of the cosmos. Investigate the heavens, assuming it
obeys the same physics and chemistry as planet Earth, and much can be discovered about the
cosmos. Such a voyage of discovery has proven remarkably successful.
1
One interesting approach to this basic item in the history of science is that of the popular science writer Timothy
Ferris (1989).
2
How necessary Christian theology was to the rise of science is a contentious point, but you will find an
interesting approach in Stanley L. Jaki's The Savior of Science (1988).

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In the beginning, Newton used pencil and paper as his scientific "instruments." Eventually, he built
his own telescope, according to his own design. Since then, many and various instruments have
been built to study the heavens, simply drawing on data from the stars and other heavenly bodies.
As we have never been to a star, all we know comes from our investigation of the data they supply to
our senses. The first, of course, is light. But, there are many more. The electromagnetic spectrum
can give other information if it can be captured and analyzed. This means going beyond the visible
light to the non-visible, such as the infrared and/or ultraviolet ranges of the spectrum. These are not
so easily accessible to our senses, and yet, they can supply data about the stars from which they
come. Thus, astronomers have always been interested in new ways of capturing these spectrum
ranges and have designed various devices to do just that. We refer to these devices as "telescopes,"
though we, in fact, may not be able to "see" anything since we are "viewing" the spectrum ranges
that are not visible to our eyes.

It took the development of science and its attendant products until the twentieth century to produce
"telescopes" that gathered information beyond the range of visible light. First, there was the radio
telescope, to be followed in the latter part of the century by the ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray
telescopes. All of these tell us something more, and often something new, about the heavenly bodies
that emit these rays. From such data, the stars are better understood (Chaisson and McMillan 1996)

But, what about the Cosmos? New ways of getting data and new wavelengths to use as probes of
stellar structure are helpful for specific objects of investigation, but what do these tell us about the big
picture, the whole cosmos? Radio astronomy has helped the scientists to find out a great deal more
about the heavenly bodies, and it would not be an exaggeration to state that it was this same
instrument that unlocked the current understanding of the Big Picture. When Arno Penzias and
Robert Wilson tested their early radio receiver, they were surprised to find out that the signal of radio
transmission was coming from all directions in the sky. This would mean that the source of the
waves was anywhere they looked. How could this be? They soon reported their findings, and it was
realized by another group of scientists some one hundred kilometers away, that this could only be
true if the sources were evenly distributed in all directions. Further, they realized that the strength of
these radio waves was very low, meaning the source was weak. So the theory, called the Standard
Cosmological Model (Peebles 1993), was born. To understand this, we must step back a few years
to the first two decades of the century.

Edwin Hubble was an astronomer who wanted to resolve a conundrum about puffs of cloudy
material seen in the telescopes of his day and the decades before. These objects, which appeared
puffy and cloudy, were seen through the bigger telescopes that were better able to see fainter and
farther objects. Through these telescopes, the stars shone like brilliant diamonds, but these cloudy
objects were not point-like, but were diffuse and faint. Only the largest telescopes could make them
out. What were they? Due to their appearance, they had, earlier on, gotten the name nebula, Latin
for "cloud." But, were they clouds, and if so, what were they made of? Why did they shine, although
not very brightly? Hubble set out to discover.

After years of watching these objects and recording his investigations on film, using not only the
traditional telescope but also specialized instruments, he announced to the world that these objects
were not clouds but galaxies, i.e., clusters of stars. They did not exist in our own galaxy, but were
sister galaxies to our own, millions of light-years away. Hubble went on to explain that his
observations indicated that, not only were there thousands of such galaxies wherever he looked
through the telescope but that almost all of them were moving away from the Earth. He stated a
mathematical law that summed up his data. The galaxies are moving away from us, in such a way
that the farther away it is, the faster it is moving. This became known as Hubble's Law and is a
cornerstone of modern Cosmology (Davis 1991).

The beginning of space and time

By the time Penzias and Wilson discovered that cosmic radiation came into the Earth from all
directions and that it was very weak in nature, the implications of Hubble's Law had led astronomers
to speculate that the law suggested a time, long ago, when all the galaxies were together in space.
To explain such
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