THE COSMOS AND US - 2

Of course the down side of the fundamentalist view is that if there is no evolution, then we aren’t going to improve any more, either, and we’re stuck with ourselves as we are. That’s not so bad, I guess, but given all that we think is wrong with us, I’d like to think there was some hope that we’d keep getting better. You’d think God wouldn’t give up quite so easily, either! We need a little bit of evolution just to sort us out.

Well, it turns out the two questions are related quite a bit, because where we came from starts with a good look way, way up.

Our story today starts with Hubble. Not the telescope in space, but the guy it was named after. Early in this century, Edwin Hubble, who I believe was at the Yale observatory, noticed that the further a star was away from our galaxy, the faster it was moving away from us.

There was a German named Doppler who first figured out that vibrations from something coming toward us get shifted upward in frequency, and they get shifted downward when the thing moves away from us. Kids notice this - that’s why their model planes and cars all go like this: Neeeerrrrrowwwwww! The only difference was that Doppler did the math, which the kids hate to do.

So Hubble used the Doppler Effect to figure out that the closer you got to the edge of whatever, the faster things were moving away. It seemed that the whole Universe itself was getting bigger. Hubble calculated and charted the distance and speed of a lot of stars. That’s how you get your name on a nearsighted telescope, I guess - but of course NASA has fixed the Hubble so it sees right out to that edge that the real Hubble couldn’t. That’s evolution of a type, in action.

Well, the Hubble expansion meant that the Universe was smaller once, and when you do the math, it turns out that about a dozen billion years ago, the whole thing would have been smaller than a basketball. Sort of a pocket Universe, except there were no pockets. And something caused it to blow out of the pocket and start expanding. Now there’s a mystery. Maybe our Universe came out of another dimension, or maybe we’re the rear end of a black hole in some other universe, who knows?

The expansion process is called the Big Bang. The ‘whatever it was’ that started the Big Bang is that mysterious impulse that bewilders the scientific community. Since it is a mystery, we call it God!

More about that later.