Galileo had moved us from the center; by giving us our first visions of just how expansive space was, he displaced humanity. The genie was now out of the bottle, Pandora was out of the box. And no matter how hard Jesuit/Aristotelian philosophers or priests wanted it back in, there was no return. The big infinity of the universe seemed to risk crushing us—at least Sasha wondered if it flattened the possibility of faith in a personal order, making the universe impersonal and arbitrary.
It appears to be a further irony of history (and one that additionally opposes the myth that faith and the scientific are enemies) that a Catholic priest educated in Jesuit schools would be one of the first to deduce the Big Bang. In 1927, Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest and budding professor of physics, published a paper that asserted (following Einstein’s general theory of relativity) that the universe was expanding. He showed mathematically that there must have been a time when the universe was not. Through a huge explosion of expansion, it came to be, he asserted, and is continuing to stretch and expand even to this minute.
Four years before publishing his article, Lemaitre spent a year at Cambridge, studying under Arthur Eddington. It was Eddington, the uptight Englishman, more than anyone else, who made Einstein into a real Einstein, turning the eccentric German world-famous.
As we’ve already mentioned, 1905 was the year the young Einstein, who had experienced little more than failure in his adult life, published four papers while working as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. These four papers started a revolution. Not only did they uniquely articulate the shape and expanse of the universe, pointing to the big infinity, but these same papers pointed to the small infinity as well. They proved that atoms (and even smaller realities) existed. In these 1905 papers, Einstein, like Galileo, recast our vision, now in the direction of both the big and small infinites. In 1915, Einstein further worked out his general theory of relativity, which changed the world. Yet, no one (other than pointy headed physicists) would know it until Eddington found a way to prove it.
In 1919, Europe was still coming to grips with just how bloody and utterly hellish the First World War had been. It was the first war to turn the technological pursuits of the scientific full bore toward mass killing. So the thought of an English scientist trying to prove the theory of an enemy German was too much for the world press to ignore.
Eddington had secretly been reading Einstein’s papers for years (all German writing had been banned in England during the fighting). Eddington had a sense that Einstein was right. But all Einstein’s breakthroughs had happened through thought experiments. Eddington began wondering if there was any actual experimental way to test Einstein’s theories. Einstein’s visions were so imaginative, Eddington wondered if it would take an “act of God” to prove his calculations. Lucky for Eddington, such an act came with an eclipse, which gave Eddington the chance he needed to see if Einstein’s theory worked. If light was bent due to the eclipse it would prove Einstein’s theory.
After a dramatic voyage to an African island called Principe, and a morning downpour, the skies cleared and Eddington proved Einstein correct. The next morning Einstein was featured on the cover of newspapers across the globe, as story after story presented him as a charming, playful, and brilliant scientist. From that day on, the name Einstein would be synonymous with brilliance, and Einstein himself would become one of the most famous persons in world history.
But there was a hiccup in Einstein’s theory of relativity. It wasn’t so much in the theory itself, but in the presumption that went back to our story of Galileo. Einstein’s theory seemed to show that the universe was indeed expanding, meaning at some point, it was small enough not to exist. Lemaitre had the math to show that it was indeed a big bang that ignited the universe from the smallest of infinites (from particles) to such a large one that even a great mind like Blaise Pascal would say, “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces frightens me.”[1]
But this idea that the universe was expanding and therefore had a beginning stood against the Aristotelian presumption that the universe is eternal. Galileo had beaten up on Aristotle enough in moving the earth from the center and replacing it with the sun. Nevertheless, while Aristotle’s science was wounded, it was still breathing. And though most agreed that the ancient philosopher was wrong about motion, mechanics, and the shape of the galaxy, he was still right, they assumed, about its eternal nature. Besides, in an environment where the social practice of “science” had found a secure enough place (in the nineteenth century), to assume that the universe had a beginning sounded too religious or theological (it’s an irony that today creationists see the Big Bang as an enemy).[2]
It would take the observations of another English-speaking scientist to prove to Einstein that indeed the universe was expanding, and that his cosmological constant was unnecessary. The engine of relativity was shown in the skies of California to be so sound that it was wrong to govern its limits.
Just a short drive from the sea of lights filling the Los Angeles basin, you can see the night sky, an ocean of starlight washing over you from billions of miles (and therefore years) away. The echoes of God’s words to Job (“and who are you?”) echo in the starlight that hits our eyes from such a distance that some of those very stars quietly twinkling in front of us no longer exist. Like Galileo 300 years ago, the vehicle that can take you from basin to the stars is a telescope.
On a mountaintop a few miles from Pasadena, the Carnegie Institute built an observatory that they hoped would be the greatest in the world. If Galileo could have seen it he would have been shocked and filled with wonder. In 1917 they installed a 100-inch telescope called Hooker. And in another spooky irony of history, the same year (1919) that Eddington was making Einstein world-famous, the observatory hired a young Midwestern cosmologist named Edwin Hubble. With this huge telescope, Hubble was witnessing how massively infinite the universe was, observing that it stretched beyond the Milky Way, and that galaxies themselves where farther away from each other than had been thought. “Some [of these galaxies] were millions of light-years away. (One light-year is the distance that light, which travels at 186,000 miles per second, traverses in a year. A light-year is about 6,000,000,000,000 miles.)”[3] The size was so massive that Galileo would have choked if he’d heard it.
As Hubble was mapping the big infinity, finding ways of calculating the space between stars, using the Doppler effect to discover that they were even farther away than had been assumed, he had an odd breakthrough. The distance between these stars seemed to be growing; the galaxies themselves were moving further and further apart. In 1929, two years after Lemaitre, Hubble published his findings. And like Eddington to Einstein, Hubble proved the Belgian priest correct—again, observation proved mathematics.
Building off of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Hubble showed that spacetime was like a rubber sheet with galaxies drawn on top of it. As it was stretched in expansion, it moved galaxies further and further apart. The universe was indeed expanding. It was not only infinitely massive, but growing.
In the early 1930s Einstein was spending a few months in Pasadena at Caltech. One evening he jumped into a Pierce-Arrow touring car to drive up Mount Wilson, to see for himself what Hubble had spotted. When he did, Einstein asserted that his cosmological constant was indeed the biggest blunder of his scientific life. Why he ever added it, he didn’t know. If he hadn’t, if Einstein had stuck with his original assumption of 1915 that indeed the universe had to be either expanding or contracting, then it is possible that the Big Bang would be called the Einstein Bang—or maybe something more clever.
As it is, Hubble’s Law stands. While Einstein had the equations that the universe was in motion, it was Hubble who showed that its movement was expansion. Galileo’s few-inch telescope had knocked us off center, revealing that space was big and relativizing the earth next to other planets. Hubble’s 100-inch telescope not only confirmed that our planet was not at the center of our galaxy, but also revealed that our Milky Way was not at the center of the universe. Spacetime is more infinite than we imagined, and it is growing!
Jared was surprised, and then surprised that he was surprised, that the week after the mathlete championship and pizza celebration, Lily—Sasha’s teammate—came to youth group. That exuberant night after the victory, she’d made it clear that faith wasn’t something she was interested in. But here she was. Jared couldn’t help it—it felt weird, but in a good way.
But maybe the weirdness was Lily. She seemed different. Context has a way of bending perception, and Jared’s first impression was shifting. In the pizzeria Lily had seemed so confident, but now, sitting next to Sasha on an old couch in the youth room she disappeared into its cushions. Jared now interpreted her large-rimmed glasses not so much as a bold statement, but as a disguise to hide behind.
As the night went on, Lily became more animated. She interacted with a few of the adult leaders, and the tension in her face at the beginning had faded away by the end. Jared even had the feeling that his talk on Romans 8 connected with her. At least she seemed to be paying attention, and she laughed at a few of his jokes, which was more than he could say about many of the regulars.
But odder than Lily’s presence there, was that after youth group she hung around. Sasha usually was one of the first to leave, always rushing home to get back to her homework. But there they were, playing cornhole with a few other kids. Jared started to get the sense that they wanted to talk, and sure enough, as the rest of the young people departed, they asked to chat.
Lily began, “So, I came here tonight because Sasha said I should talk to you.”
“Oh, cool,” said Jared. “What’s up?”
Lily looked at Sasha as if to ask, Are you sure it’s a good idea for me to talk to him? Sasha gave a nod and Lily paused, and then nervously said, “So it’s about my boyfriend . . .”
Lily paused again, blushing a deep pink hue. “Well,” she continued, “so, he’s in college . . .”
Where is this going? Jared wondered. He began mentally running through his protocol for teen pregnancy or abusive relationships. He wondered how messy this was going to get.
Lily steadied herself before speaking. “It’s his mom.”
Jared was now totally confused. “What?”
“Well, she’s like this really conservative Christian, like, once she grounded my boyfriend for a week because he was reading Steven Hawking for fun.”
Okay, Jared now understood Lily’s righteous indignation around Galileo’s mythical jailing. The church’s hatred of “science” seemed true enough next to her boyfriend’s experience.
“So our favorite show is The Big Bang Theory,” she said, “so I got him a T-shirt for our two-and-a-half-month anniversary......”
Jared tried hard not to roll his eyes when she said anniversary.
Lily continued. “But when his mom saw it she got really pissed and said he wasn’t allowed to wear it around her, saying that she thinks it’s, like, an evil theory made up to distract people from following God.”
Incredulous, Jared interrupted. “But it’s a TV show!”
“I know, right?! Regardless, she went off about how God created the world and stuff, and about how that theory is evil.”
“Now, that’s crazy,” Jared blurted, still not sure why she was telling him all this.
“So, Sasha told me her dad, who, like, believesinGod, loves that show and is even a scientist. But I just needed to know how that was possible, so she told me to come to youth group and ask you.”
“Ask me what?”
“I guess,” Lily said, “how you can believe in God and the Big Bang?”
“Yeah,” Sasha added, “how can you?”
Jared had no quick answer. Honestly, he hadn’t thought much about it. So he asked his own question: “Why didn’t you ask Sasha’s dad?”
“Because we’re asking you,” said Sasha.
“Well, tell you what,” Jared said, exhaling deeply. “What if I do a whole youth group night on the question? Why don’t you two come back the next few weeks and we can plan a few things for a night on the Big Bang next month. Cool?”
“Yeah, totally!” Lily shot back.
“Okay. But just so you know, Sasha, I’m going to probably ask your dad to help me.”
“Oh, you can talk to him,” said Sasha. “Just don’t invite him to come.”
“Fine.” Jared was now starting to think this whole mathlete MVP thing had gone to Sasha’s head—but in a good way.
As the girls left, Jared wondered how he was going to pull this off.