What We Can See There From Here

We were not present at the moment of creation.  However, that fact is not relevant to the question whether we can know anything about it.  Yesterday’s blog argues why.  Since distance in the context of the cosmos is measured in the amount of time light travels from distant objects to our eyeballs, looking across the heavens amounts to looking back in time.  Because of the lengthy light journey required, the more distant the object, the farther back in time we are looking.  Think of a movie watched backwards.  If we tolerate watching it in that direction all the way to the end of the track, we will be taken to the movie’s beginning.  And we will have occasion to observe every other event in between.  Of course we can count the same number of events whichever direction we choose.  Looking forward, we see the unfolding of the universe from the Big Bang event.  But if we look backward we notice something even more profound.  As I briefly stated yesterday, we observe that our universe (all of space, time, matter, and energy) had an absolute beginning out of nothing in what Stephen Hawking calls the “zero-volume singularity.”  About that event, Christians declare with Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  Cosmologists and the scientific community in general also concede that the Big Bang is an utterly secure paradigm for a universe whose history had an absolute beginning.

It is a secure paradigm for the two reasons that we both observe the over-arching pattern unfolding from the Big Bang and we can also measure its specifics.  This means we can test the measurements again and again.  In light of today’s title, what specifically can we both see and measure?  We observe that all galaxy clusters are flying away from one another after their beginning (all galaxies are the same age).  We also observe that they are farther apart now than they were in the past, and that this expansion has been slowing down (for reasons I will describe later, this same expansion is now accelerating).  We also measure that the universe as a whole is cooling down.  Scientists also discovered in 1964 the remnant glow of the initial blast of the Big Bang.  And then in 1992 they discovered seed-like “imperfections” in that otherwise uniform glow which eventuated in the actual formation of galaxies and stars.  Was this Big Bang a chaotic accident?  Absolutely not!  But that matter is for a later time.  Stay tuned for more on the present material!