…In the beginning…and again…and again…etc…
On Christmas Eve in1968 the astronauts of Apollo 8 saw the Earth rising over the lunar horizon and the iconic “Earthrise” photo they took changed the perception of our place in the Universe. They thought it appropriate to read from the Book of Genesis written around 400 BCE; “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…”. The biblical creation story was an early attempt to describe how we came into being as shown in the 1794 image by William Blake “The Ancient of Days” (below).
Whilst driving on my way to visit in-laws in Warsaw in 2006, I stopped in the town of Toruń and visited the house of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who was born in 1473. Then, everyone accepted that God’s Earth was the centre of the Universe. However, Copernicus’ naked eye observations of the night sky led him to conclude that every planet, including Earth, revolved in circles around the Sun as it better explained the motions of heavenly objects mathematically. He knew it wouldn’t go down well with the teachings of the Catholic Church so he published his idea just weeks before his death, aged 70. Fifty years later, Galileo became the first person to study the skies with a telescope and defended Copernicus’ idea based on his own observations of 1609 but in February 1616, a Catholic Commission declared heliocentrism (“Sun at the centre”) to be “foolish and absurd”. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, under which he remained for the rest of his life.
In 1929, American astronomer Edwin Hubble observed distant galaxies to be moving away from our galaxy, the Milky Way. So if the Universe is expanding then it must have started at a single point in a Big Bang. In the 1950s there were two theories about the the Universe: the Steady State and the Big Bang. British astronomer Fred Hoyle supported the Steady State theory where the Universe has no beginning or end in time. However, the 1964 discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (the radiation glow after a big-bang) indicates that the universe was born in a sudden expansion 13.8 billion years ago from inside a space tinier than an atom.
The Nobel Prize winning mathematician and cosmologist, Sir Roger Penrose, has proposed that our Universe arose from another pre-existing Universe. He suggests that our Universe will keep expanding for longer than 1 followed by 100 zeros years he calls an “aeon”, ending with just photons and where there is no idea of scale or time. This then becomes the seed for the next Big Bang and the next aeon cycle repeatedly continues forever. Penrose calls it Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. Not everybody agrees with this theory but at least Roger is not under lifelong house arrest for his idea!
By Glynn Bennallick