I’m reading a fascinating book - The Whole Shebang, A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report by Timothy Ferris.  Among many other things, it tells the story of one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever - the Big Bang.   It’s a beautiful story of how theory and empirical evidence met almost accidentally.

In the 1940s an astrophysicist named George Gamow predicted that if there had been a Big Bang (basically, if the entire universe expanded from a singularity in a  blinding pulse too swift for words), then there would be some cosmic radiation left over that would be in the form of microwaves by the time it reached the earth.

In 1965, two young radio astronomers in New Jersey (Penzias and Wilson were their names) were working with a large communications antenna but were bothered by background noise.  They tried everything to get rid of it but were unable to.  Unknown to them, 30 miles away in Princeton, some researchers were trying to figure out how to find the thing Penzias and Wilson were working hard to get rid of.  Interestingly, Gamow had suggested in a paper that using the very antenna Penzias and Wilson were working with would be a good way to look for cosmic microwaves (but neither Penzias and Wilson nor the Princeton team had read his paper).  Wilson and Penzias called the Princeton group for help with their problem, and the lead researcher at Princeton realized at once what they’d found.  He hung up the phone and told his colleagues, “Well, boys, we’ve just been scooped” (Bryson, 12).

Long story short, “the existence, spectrum, and structure of the microwave background constitute formidable proofs of the big bang theory” (Ferris, 111).  And the Big Bang theory has some really interesting implications.  From the theory of relativity (energy = mass times the speed of light squared), we know that matter is frozen energy.  As the universe expanded from a singularity, it cooled.  The Big Bang cooled energy into matter.

Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) is the study of how particles were formed in the early universe, or how particles “froze out” in the moments after the big bang.  Here is where things get weird (if the fact that everything we see around us used to be in spot so infinitesimally small it had no dimensions at all isn’t weird enough).  The particles created by the Big Bang come in three kinds: baryons, leptons, and bosons.  Baryons are the particles of ordinary matter, like the protons and neutrons that make up atoms.  Astrophysicists calculate that only 1 - 10% of the matter in the universe are baryons.  Which means that up to 99% of the matter in the universe is what they call dark matter, and totally undetectable to us.  So the universe we see may be only 1% of all matter!  How wild is that?

The same night I read the dark matter chapter in The Whole Shebang, I read an essay in Dialogue I can’t stop thinking about called “‘That Which Surpasses all Understanding’ The Limitations on Human Thought” by Mark Nielsen.  Nielsen is a mathematician and in his essay he explains that there are different kinds of numbers.  Apparently mathematicians classify numbers in terms of the types of equations for which they might be solutions.  For example 2/3 is the solution to 3x = 2, and 2/3 is a rational number.  The square root of 2 is the solution to x squared = 2, and is an irrational number. 

Likewise there are algebraic versus transcendental numbers and computable versus non-computable numbers.  Somehow mathematicians have been able to prove that almost all real numbers are non-computable and thus beyond our comprehension. 

So most of the matter and most of the numbers in the universe are either unknown or unknowable.

Nielsen also says there are three kinds of facts in the “mathematical universe:” facts we have proved, facts we may yet prove, and facts that are true but that we can never prove.  He says “we are prone to thinking, consciously or not, that the unprovable facts are strange exceptions and that the ones we can prove are the rule.  After all, we only know of a few genuinely unprovable statements, so surely (we think) there must be only a few of them.”  But basically, we don’t know much about anything.

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My friend Paul who is an engineering professor at Georgia Tech said that one of his graduate students is going through a major “philosophical malaise” because of the incompleteness of human knowledge about physics, the inadequacy of the current theories, and the apparently low likelihood of physics experiments explaining much that’s new.  Apparently he feels that modern physics is at an impasse and it’s really eating him up.

From a lay person’s view, I think it’s amazing we know anything about the universe at all, given that it began billions of years ago and the universe is so big that the light that is currently reaching us was emitted from stars millions and millions of years ago.  But as Timothy Ferris says, “All things are products of cosmic history...scientists can explain the world in historical terms, demonstrating that things are as they are because they were as they were” (Ferris, 106).  So the universe is tractable, and it probably hasn’t given up all it’s knowable secrets yet.  But I can also empathize with this student’s mental anguish at the great difficulty of discovering new things. 

If it’s true that we’re only familiar with a sliver of the truth that exists in the universe, and that’s all we’re ever going to be familiar with, that would be consistent with this scripture from Isaiah:

    My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.

    For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

But as Nielsen points out in his essay, there is a way of knowing about the universe that is independent of human deduction.  We can somehow grasp truth with our spirits that is inaccessible to us any other way.  As Paul puts it, what we see in life is only “through a glass darkly” but will one day be “face to face,”  (1 Corinthians 13:12).  We can’t explain this way of knowing, and we can’t directly transmit it to others, but it is real and it is wonderful.  As my friend put it, “There is something about faith that fills one with confidence that explanations will come in due course and fills one with awe and humility, banishing all malaise.”  Well said, Paul.