THE BIG BANG: A PROGRESS REPORT
Jerry Harkins
576,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles[1]
and the volume of the sphere is 4 X 1026 or
400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic miles.
It –– the Universe –– appears to be approximately 13.8 billion years old and contains at least 2 trillion galaxies, including our own Milky Way which is a pancake-shaped cluster of at least 100 billion stars and has a diameter of approximately 100,000 light years. One of those stars is our Sun.
It seems almost certain that we are not alone, that there is other life out there and some of it is probably older and more advanced than we are.[2] If so, it is bound by the same laws of physics and chemistry as we are. For example, in the observable universe, gravity is gravity everywhere and 299,792,458 meters per second is the absolute speed limit.[3] Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to our Sun. If it nurtured life on a planet like ours, it would take light 4.243 years to travel between them. Living beings could not travel at the speed of light. It is estimated that it would take humans some 2700 generations or 54,000 years to made the trip. More advanced travelers might do better but, if they were at all like us, they would burn up or disintegrate at much higher speeds long before they reached New York.
Extraterrestrial life would also be bound by similar but not necessarily identical laws of biology. Instead of being carbon-based, it could be structured around silicon or, perhaps, germanium which is rarer on earth than either carbon or silicon. But all known living organisms are carbon-based, rely on water as a solvent and replicate through the mechanism of DNA and RNA. Given evolution’s penchant for diversity and experimentation, why this is so is an interesting but seemingly unanswerable question.
The unimaginably large numbers cited thus far are analogous to the unimaginably small numbers of particle physics. Together, they support an insight of J.B.S. Haldane, the British polymath, who wrote, “…my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”[4] Nearly a century after he wrote that essay, it seems even queerer. For example, it is now widely accepted that in the beginning, all matter and all energy were compressed into a tiny space, like an infinitesimal black hole containing an infinity of everything. This “singularity” exploded and the matter and energy released have been expanding ever since at an accelerating rate.
Many American believe all this is heresy because it seems to contradict what the Bible says about the creation. It is certainly a different story. The familiar King James Version of Genesis and many other English translations start with the statement that, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” That, however, is subtly different from the oldest Hebrew versions we have. A better translation would be, “In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth, the earth had existed waste and void.” This implies that the earth already existed but it was a wasteland and had no life on it. God “prepared” it for life by first creating light in the form of the Sun and separating the light from the dark by giving the earth spin on its axis and rotation around the Sun. Thus, the biblical “beginning” was not the beginning of matter and energy but rather of God’s project on earth. The Bible is silent on the question of what God was preparing “the heavens” for.
It is probably true that most scientists do not believe in God and that most Americans do but that is not an issue here. We now know that our universe came about by an explosive event called the Big Bang and that the earth was one of the results. Empirical evidence in the form of cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories and confirmed by Robert Dicke of Princeton University. Many physicists think the cause of the explosion was the heat generated by virtually infinite pressure but that too is not an issue here. What is important is that we now know how the creation of the universe unfolded starting about one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. We are close to knowing exactly when and how Planet Earth coalesced and we can explain the origin of the naturally-occurring and synthetic elements. We are closing in on how the first living creatures evolved from the earth’s chemistry and, most controversially, how we ourselves evolved from those first creatures.
The early history of the universe has been a major question from the earliest days of our own appearance on the scene and has yielded itself only grudgingly to our inquiries. Mistakes were made. Most famously, James Ussher, Anglican Archbishop and Primate of Ireland, calculated what he thought was the precise date of creation based mainly on biblical genealogy. He was, of course, dealing with the creation of the earth and he claimed the first day was October 22, 4004 B.C. The time was evening. Ussher was not a fool. His work was one of high scholarship. Its methodology was endorsed by none less than Isaac Newton and was widely accepted for two hundred years. It’s just that in 1650, neither he nor anyone else knew what fossils were. Or radioactive decay or the expansion of the universe never mind its rate of expansion. They had no hint that the earth and the universe were so old that six thousand years was no time at all. It had been only forty-one years since Johannes Kepler had published his finding that the planetary orbits are not circular but elliptical and eighteen years since the Inquisition had tried Galileo for the heresy of reporting that those orbits existed in the first place.
Ussher’s spectacular error serves as a warning to contemporary science: bear in mind that the scientists of the twenty-second century will look back on the errors we are making today. Still, it is all but certain that visitations from intelligent space aliens will still be in the realm of science fiction. We may then know there is life out there, perhaps even intelligent life, but any encounter with it will be via some as yet unimaginable form of Zoom.
Nevertheless, in 2020, the National UFO Reporting Center, a non-profit data compiler founded in 1974, received reports of 7,267 “sightings” in the United States, a substantial increase over 2018 and 2019 attributed to the pandemic shutdowns. Some of these were serious observations reported by reliable witnesses including several from airline and air force pilots. Most of these were readily resolved but a few remain speculative. The data do not reveal whether any of these reports were from the six million people who claim to have been abducted, leaving us to wonder why there are so many more abductions than sightings. In any event, an unknown number of these reports are pure fabrication and others are matters of true belief.
Belief, no matter how strong, in the absence of evidence is not fact. It can be many things, good or bad, true or false, sincere or hypocritical, logical or absurd but, by itself, it cannot be called a fact. And a fact is not an eternal verity. Today’s facts are vulnerable to new evidence or reinterpreted old evidence. It was once perfectly reasonable to assume as fact the observation that the Sun revolves around the earth. After all, it seems to rise in the east every day and set in the west. As King Solomon tells us, “The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.” But the evidence of our senses –– and our common sense –– mislead us. Galileo proved it decisively and his finding has subsequently been supported by an overwhelming abundance of confirming evidence and a complete lack of evidence to the contrary. The probability that it will someday be repudiated is negligible. On the other hand it has been and will continue to be modified to account for new observations.
There are not many facts as fully supported as heliocentricity but one of them is evolution. There can be no reasonable doubt that Darwin’s basic thesis is correct even if it has been amplified and modified a great deal since 1859. Ohm’s Law which describes the relationships between electrical current, voltage and the resistance they act on is a scientific fact even though it has several important exceptions. It is certain that dinosaurs roamed the earth for roughly 179 million years beginning in the early Triassic Period even though the fossil evidence is fragmentary. It is also certain that the Pythagorean Theorem is correct. The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Always. There are hundreds of ways of proving it and there are no exceptions. But the certainty of the theorem is not the same as the certainty of the dinosaurs. The former is based on rigorous mathematical proofs while the latter is an inference drawn from all the evidence that has ever been found.
[1] Many contemporary cosmologists believe the universe is "flat" or, more precisely, pancake-shaped. The singularity, however, must have been spherical and, if the Big Bang was an explosive event, the early universe would have been shaped the same way. The questions are when did the sphere flatten and what force overcame the expansive force of the explosion?
We also do not know what, if anything, may lie beyond the “observable universe” because information has not had enough time to get from beyond more than 13.8 billion years. A good bet might be “more of the same” which would imply that the universe is older than we think. Of course, “nothing” might be an even better bet even if "nothing" is hard to define. One idea gaining increasing interest is that our universe is only one of many such entities which may or may not be accessible to each other. This, of course, is at the frontier of scientific thought but if is true, all bets are off when it comes to the laws of science, including those of probability, applying throughout a multiverse.
[2] It took the first life form about ten billion years to appear on earth and that was about three and a half billion years ago. The genus Homo of which we are members arose in Africa between two and three million years ago. Our species, Homo sapiens, also arose in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago and is today the only surviving member of the genus Homo. Given two trillion galaxies and 13.8 billion years, it would be surprising if life has appeared only on the third planet of a single star in a relatively small galaxy.
[3] Another problem with a phrase like the “observable universe” is that vast parts of our universe are not yet observable and are therefore called “dark.” Dark matter is thought to constitute 85% of the total mass of the universe and dark energy to constitute 69% of the total energy. In other words, we know little about the majority of everything except that we’re almost sure it’s there. And then there’s the problem that the laws of the observable universe do not apply to the atom and its constituents, the subatomic particles. That’s the world of quantum physics and is best left to the quantum physicists. They often refer to its laws as “quantum weirdness.” Among them is the belief that, under certain circumstances, subatomic particles can move instantaneously without regard to distance.
[4] Possible Worlds and Other Essays, Chatto and Windus, London, 1927, p. 286. Haldane was a Reader in Biochemistry at Cambridge University and one of the first to propose a synthesis of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics.
Subsequently
As this essay was being posted, a report compiled by the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense was being prepared for imminent publication. It is said to contain all the information the government has collected on unexplained arial phenomena (i.e., UFO's) but is not expected to alter current scientific opinion regarding extraterrestrial life. The New York Times reported on June 3, 2021 that, while the origin of some sightings remain unknown, there is no evidence any of them involve alien beings. Because certain parts of the report will still be classified, it will not satisfy many of the true believers.
