IWKnights Corner for May 7, 2023

Did you know this about the IW Knights of Columbus? 

"In the Beginning” is the title of an article recently published on the KofC.org website.  The author is Christopher M. Graney. We will print parts of this article over the next several weeks.  “Nearly a century after a Belgian priest proposed the “Big Bang” theory, astronomers peer back in time to the first galaxies.”

“Question: A Catholic priest and the James Webb Space Telescope both look at the universe. What do they see?

Answer: A day without a yesterday!

If that sounds like a bad attempt at a ‘dad joke,’ it’s not.  It is actually true — and something we should keep in mind when we look at the spectacular images from the JWST, the space telescope NASA launched in 2021.

A century ago, Father Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest who was also a physicist, looked at what was being learned about the universe.  He also looked at the then-new ideas of Albert Einstein.  Father Lemaître concluded that science suggested there was once a beginning to everything — even time itself.  There was once, in his words, a ‘now which has no yesterday.’

Scientists had long thought of the universe as beginningless, changeless and eternal. ‘We [scientists] expected the universe to be static,’ Father Lemaître stated in a 1964 interview.  ‘We expected that nothing would change.  It was an a priori idea that applied to the whole universe … for which there was no experiment.’

An a priori idea — an assumption.  Since at least the time of Aristotle, several centuries before Christ, scientists had operated on this assumption.  The changeless universe just went through endless (and beginningless) cycles.  This makes some sense.  The sun rises and sets daily.  The moon goes through its phases — crescent, quarter, full — every month.  The stars seen in the evening sky change in a yearly cycle; the deepening twilight of every Christmas Eve always reveals Orion rising in the east. We see the same sun, moon and stars that our great-grandparents saw. Even Job in the Bible knew the constellations we see today:

God alone stretches out the heavens
and treads upon the crests of the sea.
He made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades
and the constellations of the south. (Job 9:8-9)

The changeless night sky suggested a changeless universe.”

NOTE:  The description of the picture above:  A protostar forms at the center of a blazing hourglass of interstellar gas and dust, captured by Webb’s Near Infrared Camera.  NASA, ESA, CSA, Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach (STScI)

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.