Tag Archives: Big Bang

ⓜ Beyond the end of time

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This entry is part 8 of 38 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote: As I have mentioned, in 2009 the Redemptorist Press invited me to write a series of reflections on issues of religion and science for the Sunday bulletins that are distributed in churches throughout the United Kingdom. The Feast of the Assumption is August 15, but in the UK it is celebrated on the following Sunday, 16 August. This is the final reflection that I wrote for that series. One of the great successes of modern science is the Big Bang theory. This idea that the universe is expanding from a single point was originally invented to explain what stops the stars and galaxies from all collapsing together due to the warping of space-time proposed by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. But the thought that the universe began from a single point at a certain fixed time (currently estimated at 13.7 billion years ago) was strongly resisted by many astronomers at first. They felt more comfortable with a universe that was … Continue reading →

Religious Scientists: Msgr. Georges Lemaître (1894-1966), Father of the Big Bang

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This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series Religious Scientists of the Catholic Church

Many thanks to Dominique Lambert, who provided me with several articles and a full biography that were used to create this post. Georges Lemaître was a priest of the diocese of Louvain, in Belgium.  The proposer of what would become known as the Big Bang Theory was one of the more influential astrophysicists of his lifetime.  Albert Einstein even once skipped one of his own public appearances in order to converse with Lemaître over deep cosmological problems. Biographical Sketch: Georges Lemaître was born July 17, 1894 in the mining town of Charleroi, Belgium.  He studied at the Jesuit school Collège du Sacre Coeur, and then prepared to study mining engineering, as was typical of bright students in the area. With the advent of World War I, he enlisted and served with the artillery, where he received a formal reprimand for correcting an error in the artillery manual. After his discharge, he decided to study physics and mathematics. In 1920 he … Continue reading →

What do the Kentucky Ark and Soviet Scientists have in common? Opposition to the Big Bang Theory! (re-run)

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This is a re-run of a post that I originally wrote for October 5, 2016. I think it goes well with the posts on the expanding universe from two weeks ago and last week. Last week [in 2016], in a post about discussing theories like the Big Bang theory with those who hold traditional views of the age of the universe (such as the folks who built the Kentucky Ark), I mentioned how Arthur Eddington and Edwin Hubble expressed opposition to the idea of a finite age to the universe, and how the name “Big Bang” was a derisive joke-name given to it by Fred Hoyle. Guess who else disliked the Big Bang Theory?  Soviet scientists.  Yes, in 1949 Soviet astronomers pledged to fight against the theory of the “widening of the Universe” and declared that, in order to counterbalance this pro-religious “bourgeois” idea …Soviet science must intensify its work on regions beyond our galaxy, to give a materialistic explanation of … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Perturbing the Universe

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This entry is part 121 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

  This column first ran in The Tablet in April 2014 A member of our Vatican Observatory community, Fr. Bill Stoeger, died of cancer last month [2014]. I could say that Bill was both the smartest man and the holiest man I have known; but he would have rejected that characterization out of hand. So I will only say that his goodness and his genius never ceased to move me. He’s the only person I know who could work the mathematics of the Big Bang, and also direct retreats for religious women. Bill’s religious faith did not control the science he did, but how he did it. For example, more often than not he collaborated with scientists from the developing world – South Africa and Brazil in particular. And he showed a special patience with those members of our scientific community who could be brilliant but eccentric and sometimes hard to deal with. His scientific output was astonishing. At Cambridge … Continue reading →

A Few Minutes after the Big Bang

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Within the first few minutes following the Big Bang, all of the building blocks of matter in the universe had been made. Fortunately, enough matter was produced to give us the 100 billion galaxies with their requisite 100 billion stars each, the planets, comets and asteroids and so on, because no additional matter was made since this special epoch in cosmic history. We think the universe arose from what we call the Big Bang. This was a special kind of explosion. If you could magically be there at that time hoping to witness the fireworks and remark on the shape of it (like a mushroom cloud?) you would have been disappointed. This is because the explosion was so large that it incorporated all of space simultaneously. There would be no vantage point clear of the heart of the blast. In the first thousandth of a second following the Big Bang, the temperatures were so high, about 100 billion degrees, that … Continue reading →