Loss of Faith – The Astronomical Boost

In 1964, a pair of radio-astronomers, Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, were experimenting on the huge twenty-feet antenna of the Bell Telephone Laboratory at Crawford Hill, New Jersey. They were trying to measure the radio waves emitted by our galaxy, the Milky Way. A constant noise bugged them and confounded their experiment. Frantic search for the source of noise revealed a pair of pigeons roosting on the antenna. They had left there 'a white dielectric material’ – young scientists reported in a delicate jargon. Pigeons were shooed away and antenna scraped off the contamination. But the noise persisted. Penzias and Wilson found that the noise was recorded with equal intensity irrespective of the direction in which antenna faced the sky. Radio waves were evidently not being emitted by a galaxy, but emanated from the whole space in the universe. They also found that these were microwaves with a wavelength of about 7.35 centimetres. This wavelength corresponded to a temperature of 3.50 centigrade above the absolute zero. (Relationship between the temperature of a heated body and the wavelength of radiations it emits, was discovered by the German physicist Max Planck in the closing weeks of nineteenth century. This discovery was the beginning of the new-age physics, Quantum Mechanics.) When the experimenters mentioned this difficulty to an MIT colleague, he referred them to PJE Peebles of Princeton. Peebles had earlier argued that there ought to be a background of left-over radio noise from the early universe corresponding to a temperature of about 100K. This was a little overestimate as was proved latter. Further deliberations by physicists confirmed that Penzias and Wilson had discovered the evidence of earliest universe in the form of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR).

This was a heart-stopping discovery. CMBR was literally a relic of an incipient universe when it was a mere few hundred thousand years old, i.e., these radiations have been in universe for about fourteen billion years. (A billion is a very large number. One followed by nine zeros does not capture its extravagant expanse. If a copier sheet represents a year, stack of sheets representing age of universe would reach a height of more than 1600 km. A similar stack of sheets representing the age of our species, the modern homo sapiens, will be less than 1/5th of a km.) There were no stars, no planets in universe when CMBR began their journey. The primordial soup of electrons, protons,  and neutrons had just begun to form hydrogen nuclei.  Radiations were much smaller in wavelength and the universe emitting them was much hotter, about 3000 Kelvin. The relentlessly expanding universe lengthened and cooled them to their enormous lengths and glacial subzero temperatures today. Temperature of CMBR accurately matched the predictions of astrophysicists like Peebles, Fred Hoyle and George Gamow, made many years back.

My hair stood on ends as I read these accounts of the origin of universe and the story of this discovery by science. I was humbled and giddy with awe. It felt I had glimpsed the kernel truth. These queries – that were only vague in my mind, I was so densely ignorant then – had made me restive decades back. This vast universe with its innumerable stars and planets, moving with a clockwork precision under dictates of certain hidden laws, laws so intricate that after centuries of labour man had understood only a fraction of these; Did it have a beginning or an end? What was its purpose? All this seemed deftly contrived to me. It was endlessly tempting to accept religion’s explanations that this magical world was created by an inscrutable God, whose person, mind, and intentions were to remain veiled for ever. 'Their's not to question why, their's but to do and die,' religion seemed to be saying. But as I read more of astrophysics, I was astonished to learn that the laws that described this grandiosely complex universe were simple – even a rookie like me could grasp them sans the mathematical jargon. I learned the true meaning of the word awesome – a sense of wonder that is beyond words, which can only be felt with a palpitating heart.

Physics, till early twentieth century dealt with the visible world, the world in which mind had evolved. Consequently, humans did not find the laws of this physics unworldly. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics shook the world of physics in the early twentieth century. Both dealt with dimensions which human mind had not grappled with in its millions of years of evolution. Relativity deals with dizzyingly vast distances of space and Quantum physics studies the world of subatomic particles. Their assertions are counterintuitive to human reasoning. Both provide an accurate picture of the universe and are essential to understand its origin and future. 

Universe today is marvellously homogeneous in distribution of matter and energy. Early universe underwent a massive inflation soon after its birth. Inflation lasted from 10-36 s after Big Bang, to 10-32 s. In this infinitesimal fraction of a second universe had expanded more than a zillion zillion times, i.e., by a factor of 1026. But before inflation universe was tiny, about 7.7 X 10-30 metres. This subatomic universe was subjected to quantum fluctuations. Theory of Inflationary universe, as described by Alan Guth, an MIT theoretical physicist, predicted that quantum jitters in the early universe would be spread wide by the inflation. These variations in temperature should be visible in the universe today in the varying energies of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). NASA launched two satellites in 1989 and 2001 to explore CMBR, Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Their data revealed a stunning picture of universe. Distribution of temperature of CMBR at different locations in universe was as had been predicted by the theory. COBE and WMA mapped these temperatures that differed by a few ten-thousandth of a degree; 2.7249 K here, 2.7250 K there and 2.7251 K at still another point in space. These were the indisputable footprints of the early universe, frozen as cosmic waves that had begun their journey fourteen billion years ago. It was a mind-blowing confirmation of theory by observations. Astronomy is replete with such feats. 

Every religion tells us that God created the universe. How? Not much is told. According to one, on the first day God created light, on second the sky, and similarly on the subsequent days, land, seas, plants, trees, Sun, Moon, and stars. According to another a lotus grew from the navel of a god and from it arose the Earth, the Heavens, and the sky. I am speechless and at loss of words to describe this ingenuity. 

Religion loves gaps in scientific knowledge. It jumps in with extreme alacrity into these and claims them its exclusive field of investigation. God is its one universal explanation for every lacuna in the scientific knowledge. Does religion realise that it has thus created a ‘God of gaps’; A God who is evoked only to fill in gaps in scientific knowledge.  

Once, after delivering a lecture on astronomy Bertrand Russell was confronted by an old woman in the audience who asserted that the earth was resting on the back of a large turtle. ‘And the turtle?’ asked a bemused Russell. ‘Do not think you’re very smart, young man. It’s turtles all the way down,’ replied the old lady. Story is probably apocryphal, but it highlights one important argument of believers - the infinite regress.

Science is steadily filling the gaps in its knowledge, but a ‘why this?’ question can be asked of every explanation. How were planets and stars formed? By coalescing matter in early universe. How was matter formed? From the high energy rays and particles soon after the birth of universe. Where did energy come from? From the Big-bang. How did Big-bang happen? Quantum fluctuations of Vacuum as proved by the Quantum laws. From where came the laws of physics? This is known as infinite regress. Theists love it. 

Big bang origin of universe predicts a beginning of the universe. If the universe had a beginning, there should have been an agency that set this process rolling. It is God. Stephen Hawking and James Hartle proposed a mathematical ‘no boundary’ model of the origin of universe. In this model universe has no beginning or end in space or time. In his stupendously successful and incredibly well written book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking said this while discussing the ‘no boundary’ model. ‘So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end; it would simple be. What place then, for a creator?’

Religion has used infinite regress to propose a theological argument for God – The First Cause argument. Everything we see in the world has a cause. If you go further and further into causation you would come to a first cause. This first cause is the God. Abracadabra and God comes out of theologist’s hat. Thus, God is the ultimate turtle, in the column of turtles supporting earth. An uncaused cause. But if everything has to have a cause, shouldn’t God too have one? And if the God can be causeless, why can’t it be the Big-bang itself? Why waste so many turtles?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German philosopher mathematician and co-inventor of calculus, posed the biggest conundrum in philosophy in the early eighteenth century, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ His answer was God created universe from nothing as ‘nothing begets nothing’. But how did God come into being from Nothing? Silence. Science now defines properties of vacuum, i.e., nothing. And this makes it something. The fallacy is to believe that nothing is a more natural state than something. This is not true. Nothing is an unstable state. It undergoes spontaneous phase transitions to something more complicated. In Stephen Hawking’s no boundary scenario for the origin of universe, the probability of there being something rather than nothing is sixty percent. It implies that something is the natural state, not nothing. It requires intervention of an external agency to maintain nothing. Thus, God’s hand will be required to explain nothing, not something.

Trust in the knowledge gained by astronomy and reverence for the facile religious explanations for the observable universe cannot cohabit the same brain. God inched out of mine but a faint apparition lingered at the threshold for a while. Theory of evolution gave it the final nudge and the concept tumbled out.

PS: It was not my intention to write about the wonders that physics, especially astronomy, has discovered about universe; Even if I could pretend to possess the skill and knowledge for such an enterprise. These are too numerous to be captured within the limited space of an article or two in a blog. I wanted to highlight a few discoveries that through their sheer brilliance and the stark truth staring in our faces, boldly disavow any role of supernatural in our universe. I must admit that I was bogged down by the breadth of the subject and pell-mell chose a few topics which may not be the most appropriate for the objective I had in mind.