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A Return to the Beginning

By Daniel J. McNamara, SJ

We shall never cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T. S. Eliot

It is in the spirit of these lines by Elliot that we want to return to the Beginning, the Origin of all that is,
the Start of time and space and all they contain. This study is called Cosmogony from the Greek, from
cosmos meaning "order" and gonos meaning "offspring," which in turn, comes from the root meaning
"to be born." It is the study of the universe as an ordered system, which the Greeks assumed it to be.
The Greeks were struck by the general regularity of the motion of the stars. Even if they observed
certain "stars" that were not so regular in their paths (they eventually called them the "sky wanderers"
or planets), they still tried to fit these into the universal order that prevailed. This insight into the working
of nature-that it obeys natural 'laws'-gave rise, in due course, to science, as we know it, and its
presupposition that there exist laws in the workings of the natural world.

Returning to the beginning, however, is by no means the full story. In fact, even to return we must start
right at the present, at the Now of today. Yes, we do build on the work of those who have gone before
us as in any area of scholarship, but we ourselves must also look at the universe. We must discern for
ourselves the order or lack of it. Such a study also has a Greek name: Cosmology. From the present
cosmos to the origin of the cosmos, that is the story of this paper.

If the story begins with the Greeks; that is not to say they did not have forerunners. Their knowledge
of the sky came from those careful watchers who preceded them, the Babylonians. But, the Greeks
were the first ones who considered what they saw in the light of more basic assumptions - that human
beings can know the heavens, chart the stars follow regular motions, that they follow laws that can be
comprehended by the human brain. To us, this may seem trivial. But, when we reflect that since time
immemorial the stars have looked down on the human scene of life and death, tragedy and rejoicing,
birth and dying, with the same impersonal eternal shining, we can begin to realize the significance of
what the Greeks did. No longer were we to think of the heavens as controlling our fate. They were
impersonal and rightly so. As parts of nature, they obeyed the same laws of nature as human beings.
The cosmos was orderly and human reason could reason out this order. It was no longer at the whim
of the gods and, thus, a capricious and ultimately scary, uncertain arena into which the human being
was thrust at birth. We may not understand, at any one moment, its workings but, in principle, the
Universe can be understood .11

Studying the very big

When this Greek idea was rediscovered in Christian Europe centuries later, it found a very fertile field
in which to be planted and bear fruit. That the human brain could understand the Universe was not a
surprise to a culture that celebrated the human Son of God every year2. In fact, much has been written
about the religiosity of the founders of modern science, the first scientists. Men such as Isaac Newton
and Johannes Kepler were no strangers to religion and, in fact, would find it strange were we to ask
how they could be both scientists and religious in their worldview. Their early work was essentially
astronomical in nature and it is upon these foundations that modern Cosmology stands. When Newton
reasoned that the same force of gravity that he discovered to be operative on Earth - and expressed
in mathematical form - was the operative throughout the universe, he gave the clue to the development
of the science of the cosmos. Investigate the heavens, assuming it obeys the same physics and
chemistry as planet Earth, and much can be discovered about the cosmos. Such a voyage of discovery
has proven remarkably successful.

1 One interesting approach to this basic item in the history of science is that of the popular science writer Timothy
Ferris (1989).
2 How necessary Christian theology was to the rise of science is a contentious point, but you will find an interesting

approach in Stanley L. Jaki's The Savior of Science (1988).

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In the beginning, Newton used pencil and paper as his scientific "instruments." Eventually, he built his
own telescope, according to his own design. Since then, many and various instruments have been
built to study the heavens, simply drawing on data from the stars and other heavenly bodies. As we
have never been to a star, all we know comes from our investigation of the data they supply to our
senses. The first, of course, is light. But, there are many more. The electromagnetic spectrum can give
other information if it can be captured and analyzed. This means going beyond the visible light to the
non-visible, such as the infrared and/or ultraviolet ranges of the spectrum. These are not so easily
accessible to our senses, and yet, they can supply data about the stars from which they come. Thus,
astronomers have always been interested in new ways of capturing these spectrum ranges and have
designed various devices to do just that. We refer to these devices as "telescopes," though we, in fact,
may not be able to "see" anything since we are "viewing" the spectrum ranges that are not visible to
our eyes.

It took the development of science and its attendant products until the twentieth century to produce
"telescopes" that gathered information beyond the range of visible light. First, there was the radio
telescope, to be followed in the latter part of the century by the ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray
telescopes. All of these tell us something more, and often something new, about the heavenly bodies
that emit these rays. From such data, the stars are better understood (Chaisson and McMillan 1996)

But, what about the Cosmos? New ways of getting data and new wavelengths to use as probes of
stellar structure are helpful for specific objects of investigation, but what do these tell us about the big
picture, the whole cosmos? Radio astronomy has helped the scientists to find out a great deal more
about the heavenly bodies, and it would not be an exaggeration to state that it was this same
instrument that unlocked the current understanding of the Big Picture. When Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson tested their early radio receiver, they were surprised to find out that the signal of radio
transmission was coming from all directions in the sky. This would mean that the source of the waves
was anywhere they looked. How could this be? They soon reported their findings, and it was realized
by another group of scientists some one hundred kilometers away, that this could only be true if the
sources were evenly distributed in all directions. Further, they realized that the strength of these radio
waves was very low, meaning the source was weak. So the theory, called the Standard Cosmological
Model (Peebles 1993), was born. To understand this, we must step back a few years to the first two
decades of the century.

Edwin Hubble was an astronomer who wanted to resolve a conundrum about puffs of cloudy material
seen in the telescopes of his day and the decades before. These objects, which appeared puffy and
cloudy, were seen through the bigger telescopes that were better able to see fainter and farther
objects. Through these telescopes, the stars shone like brilliant diamonds, but these cloudy objects
were not point-like, but were diffuse and faint. Only the largest telescopes could make them out. What
were they? Due to their appearance, they had, earlier on, gotten the name nebula, Latin for "cloud."
But, were they clouds, and if so, what were they made of? Why did they shine, although not very
brightly? Hubble set out to discover.

After years of watching these objects and recording his investigations on film, using not only the
traditional telescope but also specialized instruments, he announced to the world that these objects
were not clouds but galaxies, i.e., clusters of stars. They did not exist in our own galaxy, but were
sister galaxies to our own, millions of light-years away. Hubble went on to explain that his observations
indicated that, not only were there thousands of such galaxies wherever he looked through the
telescope but that almost all of them were moving away from the Earth. He stated a mathematical law
that summed up his data. The galaxies are moving away from us, in such a way that the farther away
it is, the faster it is moving. This became known as Hubble's Law and is a cornerstone of modern
Cosmology (Davis 1991).

The beginning of space and time

By the time Penzias and Wilson discovered that cosmic radiation came into the Earth from all directions
and that it was very weak in nature, the implications of Hubble's Law had led astronomers to speculate
that the law suggested a time, long ago, when all the galaxies were together in space. To explain such

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great velocities for the galaxies farthest away, and therefore, those that were formed the earliest, they
used a term coined by Sir Fred Hoyle, a British astronomer. They spoke of an initial moment when all
the galaxies, or at least the matter and/or energy they are made from, were together at one point in
space and at the one initial point in time. They referred to this as the "Big Bang." This would explain
what Penzias and Wilson were receiving in their radio telescope. They were seeing the remains of this
initial Big Bang. They were picking up the energy left over, as it were, from that initial event and the
energy had been filling space-time as it has been expanding in the billions of years since the Big Bang.

Here, we need to consider this special term "space-time" to further understand this model of the Big
Bang and its effects on our world today. The term "space-time" refers to the mathematical formulation
of the Theory of General Relativity of Albert Einstein 3. In that theory, Einstein models space as a kind
of mathematical fabric, which is twisted and bent in accord with the amount of matter or energy that it
contains. Actually, this fabric is not made up of space coordinates only, but also that of time. It is,
therefore, a four-dimensional "space," which we call a manifold. This four-dimensional manifold tells
the matter within it how to move, and the matter tells the manifold how to twist. The problem, of course,
is that our imagination cannot picture these four dimensions, and so we have to fall back on the
mathematical formulation to really grasp the theory.

For our purposes, however, we can use the idea of a space-time manifold as the fabric, so to speak,
of the cosmos. It is this, which starts to expand with the Big Bang. As it expands it carries the galaxies
and, indeed, all material reality with it. It is this expansion of the manifold that Hubble saw in his
telescope. It is as if the galaxies are painted on the surface of a balloon and we see the galaxies move
apart from us because we are seeing the effects of the expansion of the underlying manifold.
Remember that the manifold has time as one of its dimensions. Therefore, as time increases so does
space, its partner dimension. Hubble's Law is describing this ongoing expansion. As the manifold
expands, as the Universe expands, so does the space of the galaxies expand, dragging the galaxies
away from each other4.

Once we accept this concept of space-time as a kind of fabric that has been expanding since time t
equals zero, then we are in a position to explore further. From what has been said, we can ask about
the shape of this space- time manifold, since we have learned that this shape depends on the amount
of matter/energy contained within it. From the shape, we can determine the amount of matter, or we
could turn the physics around. We can determine the shape if we knew the amount of matter. Interest
in this question has led the cosmologists to try to determine the amount of matter in the Universe.

Their equations, following the General Theory of Relativity, establish that only three possible shapes
for the space-time manifold are possible. Either the amount of energy-matter is sufficient to bend the
manifold back on itself, as it were, and we have a spherical Universe; or it is too little, and we have a
saddle-shaped Universe. The third option lies in between. There is just enough energy-matter to, as it
were, match the expansion rate of the manifold given by the initial Big Bang, and so the Universe is
flat, geometrically speaking. Which of these is true awaited further study by cosmologists into the
1990s.

In the meantime, a theory was emerging which was directly related. Cosmologists wanted to know
why the cosmos, at its furthest, at the very limits of seeing by our telescopes, appears to be
homogeneous. Wherever we look at the order of hundreds of millions of light-years, we see galaxies
upon galaxies, evenly spread out in space. In whatever direction we look in the sky the sameness
meets our eyes. Why should the Universe be so even at this level of inspection, given that it all started
in the boiling cauldron of the energy of the Big Bang? The theory that will resolve this problem and
also postulate that the cosmos should be flat is called the Inflation Theory. Its main proponent is Allan
Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Lemley 2002). He

3 A simple approach is difficult since the theory is so mathematical in nature that Einstein himself looked for help.
Try either Ferris (1989) or Davis (1991).
4 The classic example or image for this expanding Universe was given by Sir Arthur

Eddington, a British astronomer. He used the idea of the skin of an expanding balloon. One has to be careful
here, however, to remember that it is the skin of the balloon that represents space-time, not the air inside the
balloon or the balloon itself.

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believes that the Universe expanded extremely quickly near its beginning and then settled down
thereafter. This would create a homogenous universe and one whose geometry is flat. Such
predictions could be tested and so the cosmologists set out to do just that.

To do this testing, they again turned to new technology, new ways of viewing the Universe.

Seeing the universe in a new light

The new technologies they turned to were not new in themselves but new in their application to
astronomy. X-rays had been known for almost a century when they were harnessed to tell us about
the Universe. Unlike the X-rays of the medical profession, these X-ray telescopes did not send out X-
rays but rather collected the X-rays coming from the stars. To do so, X-ray telescopes had to be placed
above the Earth's atmosphere, which would otherwise have absorbed the X-rays. Thus, this new X-
ray astronomy was only possible when satellite technology had developed far enough to allow such
large telescopes to be placed in space. Since X-rays are more powerful than visible light, the X-rays
detected by these telescopes were coming sources from more energetic than ordinary stars, or they
were coming from ordinary stars, which were very far away. Or both. In the course of resolving this
question, the bigger cosmological question as to the flatness of space-time would be answered5.

The answers came in the late 1990s. Answers, yes, but with each answer came more questions-the
typical "way of proceeding” of science. The Hubble Space Telescope and the X-ray Space telescope
were used. They were joined by a less stately device-also a telescope-but looking far more like a huge
gas balloon. This was the Boomerang Infrared device, made to take a much closer look at the Big
Bang radiation, officially called Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR). This radiation is very weak, yet
it contains what the universe was like when the radiation was first able to break free of its source in
the Big Bang. This happened some 300,000-400,000 years after the Big Bang itself. Thus, the CBR
can tell us the structure of the cosmos at that time, if we can decipher its very cryptic message. The
Boomerang device, along with others, was able to do this, and what they saw matches the prediction
of the Inflation Theory. The Universe is flat and homogeneous. That very early inflation is the reason
why it is so.

But, the Hubble telescope and its sister, the X-ray telescope, were not to be left behind. They, too,
looked out into the cosmos and back in time. As they probed, they not only confirmed what was now
becoming the Standard Theory of Cosmology but they also significantly added to it. They discovered
that the very early galaxies were telling us something about our own galaxy that had never been
guessed at before. Not only was our cosmos flat, but also it was accelerating. The energy of the Big
Bang was dissipating as time went on, as we would expect, yet, the rate at which these early galaxies
were moving indicated that our present rate of expansion is actually faster than it should be. Something
was speeding up the cosmos. There exists some kind of" dark energy" accelerating the galaxies so
that even as the initial energy of the Big Bang is dissipated in time, the galaxies were not slowing down
but actually speeding up.

We say "dark energy," simply because we do not know what it is. The term "dark" is an old one in
Cosmology, but for another reason. All we know about the stars comes from their light, their radiation.
They emit radiation of all kinds and by investigating these different kinds of radiation we have been
able to piece together the Standard Theory. Only if something emits radiation, which we can detect,
can we know anything about it. We have never been to a star. We learn from what they send to us.

So it is that the concept of" dark matter" has entered into astronomy. We know from seeing the motion
of different stars around each other, or different galaxies around each other that there is something
we cannot see, but is present in the Universe. We know of it, not because we can see it, not because
it sends out radiation we detect, but rather because we can see the effects of its mass upon its
neighboring masses. Its effects can detect gravity and it is this gravitational pull that keeps one galaxy,
for example, in orbit about another. But, the matter we see glowing in the central galaxy is not enough

5 Many authors discuss how the Inflation Theory answers many questions, but one that is quite engaging is by
Barrow and Tipler (1988).

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to account for this pull of gravity on the other galaxy. Hence, there is some kind of" dark matter"
supplying the extra gravitational pull. Thus, the concept of" dark" was not unknown to astronomers. In
fact, the necessity for such "dark matter" had been known for decades. But, the late 1990s gave us a
new darkness-"dark energy."

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) of NASA, launched in June 2001, determined
that the "dark matter" and "dark energy" make up 23.3% and 72.1% of the universe, respectively. It
further determined the age of the universe to 13.73 billion years (NASA 2010).
The attempts to see the Universe in a new light have opened doors to more of the unknown. It seems
that it will take humankind a lot more "to arrive where we started and know the [cosmos] for the first
time."

References:
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Barrow, J. & Frank Tipler. 1998. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Oxford University
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Carroll, Sean, William H. Press, and Edwin L. Turner. 1992. "The Cosmological Constant." Annual
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Books.
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Press.
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Reference:
McNamara, SJ, D. J. (2011). A Return to the Beginning. In M. A. Cuyegkeng, Stellar origins human
ways: readings in science, technology, and society. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University
Press.

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