Afterglow of Creation

"When I first read this book I loved the easy nature of the way it was written. Again, it was another story of discovery. The microwave background to radiation is, as Marcus Chown calls it, the “afterglow” of creation. It is the remaining radiation from the Big Bang, the creation of the universe. The most astonishing thing to me is that this microwave glow was predicted by theory. It was searched for and found. So I think it is the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century. It comes from a number of scientists working and building on the work of each other. Ultimately it derives from a Belgium priest called Georges Lemaître who was a contemporary of Einstein and a fantastic mathematician. He discovered that the expansion of the universe was hard written into the Laws of Relativity. Nobody really believed him. He is not even that well remembered and yet he predicted this expanding universe before Edward Hubble, the American astronomer, discovered it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Lemaître realised that if the universe was expanding it must have been smaller in the past. And he found in the mathematics of Relativity a moment of beginning of space and time. That concept of a beginning to space and time was taken up later by a physicist called George Gamow, and he used it to predict the microwave background radiation. Then there were two radio engineers who actually found it serendipitously. They didn’t know anything about the prediction. They were just trying to clean off an old radio horn. They thought, let’s see if we can use it for some of this new-fangled radio astronomy, and they got the signal straight away. Marcus Chown’s book mentions Lemaître but is really the story of Gamow and those engineers, how these different characters came together to understand what they were looking at and how ultimately it became a Nobel prize-winning discovery. They met in 1925 and there is at least one picture that exists of them together. But Hubble doesn’t mention the priest in his work. George Lemaître is in fact one of the key characters in my third Labyrinth novel. Whilst I am not a religious person, one of the other things that I find very interesting about him is the work he put into separating science from religion. He even had an audience with the Pope in the 1950s to explain to him why there was no conflict between the two institutions. It relies on this idea of the hidden God. If you are looking for evidence of God he turns up in mysterious places. What Lemaître said is that he had discovered that there was a beginning to space and time. He thought that it was an outworking of God but it was not the biblical creation. That came before the beginning of space and time, and so forever separated God from scientific enquiry. He argued that science relies on measurements and whenever you measure something, you locate it in space and time. Any measurement you can think of will do that. So science can only work once there is space and time. If God is omnipotent he can work outside the realms of space and time. He is therefore capable of existing before space and time. So whatever the genesis of the universe is, space and time don’t need that instant of creation. They can come along a little bit afterwards. He is, but once he sets it going, he doesn’t need to interfere further. This was a totally different belief from Newton, who thought that space and time were virtually God’s sense. Newton called the universe “the sensorium of God”, which is where the title of my latest book comes from. Lemaître argued that God brought space and time into existence after the Genesis and so you can’t equate the Big Bang with the biblical creation. Since God exists outside space and time, science can never prove or disprove him. That was the underpinning of how he separated science from religion, which was always a problem from Galileo onwards. Are the two things at war? Could you prove God as Newton thought you could or should the two things be kept apart?"