This… will not a short topic. It will be long, grueling, and wildly unprofessional as I am hardly qualified as an expert. Barely a layperson in the area… However, what I am is willing to learn and willing to question.

Oh, so what’s the topic about… existence. Simple stuff really. The reason for this is I grew up believing things that I have discovered over the last few decades have long been replaced by better ideas, ones that contain something mythologies do not: evidence. When older cultures looked at the world around them, and indeed what they could see of the universe with the naked eye, truly fascinating ideas came with it. Human achievements in the name of something greater than themselves are still inspiring to this very day, but their basis for these achievements and the many conclusions they would reach would help to prevent societies with access to far superior technology and robust techniques of understanding the world and existence.

Belief without evidence may look shiny and hopeful, but it can be problematic and even damaging. The collected information that has been gathered by our species about existence is not a complete or perfect picture, but I’d argue it’s exponentially superior to anything any of the “revealed truths” of religions have to offer. This is for one reason – when it is wrong it corrects itself. Faith is jumping to a conclusion, knowledge is discovery with data. The scientific method actually requires both, but the answers come from following the process and not from resting solely on an unfounded idea.

In The Beginning

This idea of a beginning is quite fascinating, because it’s one that has some really broad implications for those who believe in a Creator, an Unmoved Mover, etc., as well as implications for those who do not believe in the idea of Intelligent Design (ID). It’s also a bone of contention philosophically amongst various groups, but I’m going to skip that part of it. What I want to talk about is what is known, at least to the best of my abilities.

The Big Bang

There are lots of resources available to discuss this concept, but NASA has a page which is pretty kid-friendly to help clarify some points.

The origin of the idea of the Big Bang did not come into scientific publication until the first part of the 20th Century, when a Belgian proposed the idea back in 1931. He did, however, suggest an expanding universe before other cosmologists, including Einstein, in 1927. He was partially beaten to the punch on this in 1922 by a Russian, but our Belgian took the idea further. This Belgian, Georges Lemaître, was both a cosmologist – meaning he studied the structure and potential history of the universe, and a Catholic priest, meaning I would normally categorize him as someone good at jumping to conclusions. However, that’s a conclusion I jump to without giving him any further thought, so let’s spend a little time discussing his seminal work. I should also point out his idea was not a popular one at the time, but we’ll jump to when it became sexy later.

Georges’ paper, A homogeneous universe of constant mass and increasing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extra-galactic nebulae (link), was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 90 years ago. 90. This is really important to consider, because our greatest understanding of our universe has really come to fruition very recently, and short of going into the history of science in general, it’s not hard to see why… Pockets of people here and there would have these amazing breakthroughs, but they’d also just as likely be met with giant obstacles which would include the Church, who profited quite insanely on human ignorance and fear. Anyone remember Giordano Bruno – “Perhaps you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.” Or so it goes…

Anyway, this paper is available for viewing… more or less. I’m sure a better format is available, but the only one I could locate at this moment was behind a paywall, and I have bills to pay, so I’m going to skip it. It’s also sort of graspable, but it obviously delves into areas of physics whereby I understand what it means to be looking at giants – Georges was a powerful thinker on this topic and even dead he knows more than I’ll ever truly understand. His paper starts by comparing two different sets of ideas regarding the universe, that of de Sitter and Einstein, ultimately deciding on Einstein’s theory of general relativity which was published back in 1915, but history wouldn’t vindicate the wild-haired genius until 1919 when another scientist confirmed things during a total solar eclipse. It seems obvious that Georges would pick Einstein, but it’s interesting to me that he would run comparisons to offer a “this is why I picked what I did” commentary.

I’ll admit that I think I have a handle on the paper for about the first four-ish paragraphs, then I’m terrifyingly lost in a realm of terms like dancing in a tornado of alphabet soup – it’s too much. It then goes on to math… I think… This is part of why so many people choose to disbelieve in the sciences, because it’s just too much to grasp, to handle. The actual explanation of things is so specific, and so reliant upon advanced terminology, that distilling it all down in such a foolproof way to the masses proves extra difficult. It’s a big reason why I’m fans of people like Sagan and Tyson and Kaku and Carroll and Cox – they do such a great job at it.

The overall point here is that Georges was purporting the idea that the universe is expanding, so it would seem pretty obvious it came from a single point of origin. Maybe. Upon further review, this whole idea makes me think about the procreative process. Consider a human being begins as a fertilized egg – that’s a pretty small thing. Encased in that small thing is all the materials needed to grow all the bones and meat and organs and brain and appendages to form a person. Also, guess what? That person will get bigger! They will grow from roughly 100 microns (which still makes the egg one of the largest cells in a body) to a full baby, to a full human! 100 microns is the diameter of a single strand of hair, just to give you some clarity.

It was in 1929 that a certain Edwin Hubble would publish his own findings, the ones we now refer to as Hubble’s Law. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hubble proved not only that the universe was expanding, but that galaxies which were already further away from us were moving faster than those galaxies which were not as further away. In “A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae,” he would graph these things out and the math associated is where we get our rough estimate of the universe being 14 billions years old.

This topic does not stop here, it barely even really starts here – there are still plenty of other names and other papers to read, but this covers the initial springboard as to how we got to where are today with modern cosmology.

Oh, the actual phrase “Big Bang” was coined by Fred Hoyle in 1949, whereby he disagreed with such an idea. Ironically, and I did not know this, but the idea of a singular actual explosion is not the perceived original moment of all things… but this may just be the oversimplification of such a complex process in order to create an easy label.

Is There Room For Skepticism?

Here is where I must take a step back because these are truly fascinating ideas based on the accumulation of actual evidence that stands to this very day, but the only dilemma a layperson like me has to offer in retaliation against such concepts is: how do we prove it?

I mean, based on the mountain of observations throughout recorded history, based on the ever-evolving but still consistent math, it’s pretty difficult to argue the points. What I’m asking here in regards to “proof” is what metric is sufficient? Many people would say that a Creator would have kicked off this moment, to which my argument to them is to prove such a Creator exists, and then a rabbit hole of other questions become apparent to me…

I’ve also had the argument posed that since no one was there no one can know for certain. Well, by that logic, nothing you have not personally seen or experienced can be known for certain to have happened. Humanity is great at confusing itself for the sake of its own ego.

Oh, I’m also really hoping to answer the question as to why our brains make us think about all this, because what’s the evolutionary lure to brainstorming about why the stars are moving?

Conclusion

I think we all realize by now that I’m siding with the evidence-based concept of the expanding universe, and I tend towards the idea that the Big Bang is the moment where things started for this physical existence. Who or what kicked it off is beyond me, and I generally give people a lot of leeway to persist in the notion of a Creator, because such an entity would have to exist outside our physical laws, which also starts to beg other questions, but now’s not the time…

Thanks for reading, sorry to anyone I’ve angered, I’m sure I’ll do it some more throughout this series.