BY JOSE PALU-AY DACUDAO
IN THE beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Gen 1:1-3).
Thus begins the wonderfully metaphorical Biblical narrative of the creation of the Universe. Order from chaos. Light from darkness. By the “seventh day”, all the complex and endless forms of Creation, diverse and beautiful, had graced existence.
According to the standard scientific theories nowadays, the universe came into being at a definite moment about 14 billion years ago. All observations indicate that the contents of the universe are moving apart.
Thus, they used to be closer together. Should we go back far enough into the past, everything would emerge from a single mathematical point (a singularity), in a tremendous fireball known as the big bang.
The strongest supporting evidences for the above Big Bang theory can be summarized as follows:
1. In the 1920s, American astronomer Edwin Hubble found out, based on telescopic and spectroscopic data, that the universe is expanding, with clusters of galaxies moving apart from one another.
2. The general Theory of Relativity of Albert Einstein predicts the expansion of the Universe.
3. In the 1960s, the American physicists Arno Penzias (a German immigrant to the USA) and Robert Wilson discovered the existence of the cosmic background radiation, which was interpreted as the echo of the big bang. They were awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery.
4. The ratio of hydrogen to helium, the three types of neutrinos, the dimensional flatness of the Universe and many other observations, when taken in context of physical theories, all are compatible with the Big Bang Theory above.
In Relativity Theory, space and time are fused into a single entity called space-time. According to astrophysicist John Gribbin:
“The big bang should not be thought of as an explosion of a lump of matter sitting in empty space. Space and time, as well as matter and energy, were concentrated in the big bang, so that there was nowhere ‘“outside’ the primeval fireball, and there was no time ‘before’ the big bang. It is space itself that expands as the universe ages, carrying material objects farther apart.” (To be continued)/PN
