IWKnights Corner for May 21, 2023

Did you know this about the IW Knights of Columbus? 

We conclude this article with the third part of "In the Beginning”.  This is the title of an article recently published on the KofC.org website.  The author is Christopher M. Graney.

“FATHER LEMAÎTRE’S THEORY

By Father George Lemaître’s time, what scientific discoveries were contradicting was the long-established idea of a beginningless, changeless universe.  Heat energy flow, fossils, Einstein’s theory of gravity, the motions of galaxies - they all suggested that the universe changed over time.

Building on Einstein’s ideas and supported by Edwin Hubble’s evidence that the universe is expanding, in 1931 Lemaître proposed what he called ‘the hypothesis of the primeval atom,’ in which the universe and time itself all begin at once.  He later described his hypothesis in the 1964 interview noted above: ‘There is a beginning very different from the present state of the world … described in the form of the disintegration of all existing matter into an atom.  What will be the first result of this disintegration, as far as we can follow the theory, is in fact to have a universe, an expanding space filled by a plasma, by very energetic rays going in all directions.’  This universe continued to expand and change, becoming in time the universe we see today.

In the 1940s, the astronomer Fred Hoyle dubbed Lemaître’s idea the ‘Big Bang.’  Hoyle was not paying a compliment, but with time, the name stuck.  Father Lemaître’s Big Bang idea aligned with Genesis better than Aristotle’s unchanging universe; in both Genesis and the Big Bang there is a beginning!  Indeed, in a 1951 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope Pius XII stated that science might be ‘entirely reconcilable’ with the idea of creation, since ‘It seems that the science of today, by going back in one leap millions of centuries, has succeeded in being a witness to that primordial Fiat Lux [Let there be light], when, out of nothing, there burst forth with matter a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chemical elements split and reunited in millions of galaxies … [although] the facts pertinent to natural sciences … still wait for further investigation and confirmation.’

The story goes that Father Lemaître quietly cautioned the Holy Father after this statement.  What if further investigation showed Lemaître’s theory to be wrong, just as science had shown the long-standing changeless universe theory to be wrong?  Indeed, the seemingly solid, persuasive astronomy of St. Augustine’s time, about the star and moon sizes, turned out to be wrong (yes, today we know that stars are large, but we know that based on entirely different evidence than the astronomers of Augustine’s time used).

Science is not like math.  Pick up a 150-year-old math textbook and you can still learn from it the Pythagorean Theorem or how to divide fractions.  Pick up an astronomy text of that age, and it will explain neither what galaxies are nor that nuclear reactions power stars.  Indeed, the Webb telescope exists so we can discover new things and thus modify our science based on new evidence.

Nevertheless, the JWST is built on the hope that changes in the study of astronomy are bringing us toward a truer view of the universe.  The telescope is specifically “tuned” to Father Lemaître’s ideas. It is designed to see the most distant objects, whose light waves have been ‘stretched’ by the expansion of the universe to now appear as longer-wavelength infrared light.  Because of the time it takes light to travel such distances, the JWST will be seeing those objects as they appeared in the early days of the universe — showing us, we hope, the first stars and galaxies to form after Father Georges Lemaître’s Big Bang, on that dazzling ‘day without a yesterday.’”  NOTE: above photo is of Father Lemaître and Albert Einstein.

Additional information – including a link to the entire article above - can be found on facebook.com/IWknights9981on IWKnights9981.com/bulletin, on facebook.com/IWknights9981, and on Twitter at twitter.com/IwKnights.