It’s Now a Fact!  There WAS a Big Bang!

By Shlomo  Maital      

            Big Bang

It is not often that a scientific discovery in astronomy hits the New York Times front pages.  “Seeing back to the start of it all” (Tuesday March 18) reports that, “reaching back across 13.8 billion years..with telescopes at the South Pole, a team..led by John M. Kovac (Harvard-Smithsonian) detected …gravitational waves, the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old.”

   The new finding that detected gravitational waves confirms a theory known as “inflation”,  the theory that the expansion of space in the early universe happened at a rate much faster than the speed of light.   Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate.  “Inflation” is a theory expounded first by Dr. Alan Guth at Stanford, late at night in 1979.  It was a “eureka” moment.  “Spectacular realization!” Guth wrote then.   Guth broke the physics rule, that the speed of light is an upper limit.  What if it isn’t?  he asked. And that led to a conceptual breakthrough, that on Monday, was confirmed. 

   The radio telescopes were sited at the South Pole, because the atmosphere is thinner there and there is far less background ‘noise’ to interfere. 

    How did human life happen?  In one sentence:  the Big Bang scattered hydrogen molecules, which clumped into stars, which exploded, scattering matter (formed in the belly of stars by fusing hydrogen atoms into heavier matter) which clumped into planets, and in soupy seas chemicals formed ribonucleic acid, then DNA, and a reptile that evolved from a single-cell creature went onto land and learned to breath air…and when a huge asteroid hit the earth and the resulting dust cloud obscured the sun, the cold-blooded dinosaurs all died, leaving the world to the mammals..and humans.  

    How arrogant are we humans?  The Creator took 13.8 billion years to shape the universe as it is today.  If those 13.8 b. years were represented as one year, 365 days,  human life has existed for only the last 14 seconds of December 31,  or, just about 50,000 years.  So people – you are just the early early stage of an experiment, and alas, it just doesn’t seem to be working too well.