Chapter 01: The Beginning Of The Universe

profile
Tushar Nath
May 11, 2019   •  15 views
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

~Albert Einstein

Through a series of articles, I would like to take you to the journey of the cosmos and where it all began.

The beginning of the universe had been discussed for a long time. Different religions have had different perspectives about it. One argument for a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have a first cause to explain everything about the existence of the universe.

Another argument was, if it did not have a beginning, human civilisation would have progressed more than it already has.

But many Greek philosophers including Aristotle himself did not the like the idea of the creation of the universe because it made too much of divine intervention.

People believed that there had been periodic floods or other disasters that repeatedly set the human race right back to where it started from.

But Edwin Hubble , in 1929, made a landmark observation that wherever we look, the stars are moving rapidly away from us. In simple words, the universe is expanding. This proves that, in earlier times, objects would have been closer to each other. In fact, there must have been a time when all the objects were in the same place packed tightly, of very high density.

This led to the theory of Big Bang. It was a time when the universe was infinitely small and infinitely dense. And an explosion happened, known as the Big Bang, and all the objects in the universe as we now know and see, started to drift apart form each other.

Prior to the Big Bang, we do not have any knowledge about what existed as of yet.

We can say that Time had a beginning at the Big Bang, in the sense that earlier times simply could not be defined. Also, defining Time prior to the Big Bang is not an easy task. Since we have considered the Big Bang as the starting of the universe, a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe.

One can assume that God created the universe at any time in the past and since then, the universe has been expanding. It is what we choose to believe. But it would be meaningless to to suppose that it was created before the Big Bang.

An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does pace limits on when He might have carried out his job.

3



  3