Our Expanding Universe

I just have to remark on how interesting it is that the universe is expanding. I know-- you think Bill's off on another one of his pointless tirades here--- but think about it. Until about 1918, almost everybody in the world thought that the universe was essentially static and unchanging.  Sure, the earth rotated around the sun and the planets circled in their orbits, but this was part of a complex, mechanistic entity that had been devised by God or nature eons ago and could not be altered.  It remained only for science to uncover the rules by which this mechanism operated. 

Einstein ran into problems with this view.  His theory of relativity should have led him to the conclusion that the universe must be expanding, but he found this concept so odious that he postulated the existence of "anti-gravity"-- something that kept the stars and planets from collapsing in upon themselves with the force of gravity.

Unfortunately for everyone, Edward Hubble came along and proved that not only were there more galaxies than just ours, but that almost all the other galaxies were high-tailing it out of here as fast as possible.  Hubble used something called the Doppler effect to analyze the position of distant stars.  Essentially, the Doppler effect means that sound or light waves decrease in frequency the farther away an object is, and increase when an object moves towards you.  Think of a police car siren.

Hubble studied the light waves emitted by the stars and was astounded to discover that almost all of the stars are moving away from us.

Don't you find this alarming? Imagine you are in a big stadium with 100,000 people. You look around with your binoculars for about two-thousand years and make all kinds of charming observations about people's different heights and weights and hair colours.  You notice that they are moving around, but you think that they're just circulating around the stadium. Suddenly you begin to realize that all of the people, in all directions, are moving away from you.  Furthermore, you suddenly realize that they are all leaving rather quickly.  Why are they leaving? Where are they going? Why do they hate us so much? What do they know that we don't know?

Is there a bomb in the stadium?  And nobody told you?

"Four o'clock in the afternoon, and I didn't feel like very much".  Leonard Cohen, Dress Rehearsal Rag (Songs of Love and Hate)

Would such a line have been possible in a static universe? I don't think so. I think Cohen knows why they're leaving. Furthermore, I believe that Cohen is aware of the the effects of time-travel:
"The rain falls down on last year's man". Could it be that he has uncovered the secret, and went back one year to look at himself? Is that why it "seems so long ago/none of us were very strong"-- how would he know that, if he hadn't found a worm hole, probably somewhere on Clinton street?  Why does he claim, "I've seen the future, brother, it is murder"?

So, what does it all mean? "You're living for nothing now/I hope you're keeping some kind of record."

Some Christians believe that the expanding universe is proof that God created the world.   The idea that all the stars and galaxies are flinging themselves off into infinity faster than the speed of light does indeed suggest that God put out his finger and actualized the entire universe in a blinding flash.

After insisting that the world was flat for 2000 years, and then insisting that it was only 5000 years old (if it was 5000 years old, we wouldn't see the light from stars that are more than 5000 light years away, even though there are a zillion of them), and that Noah took dinosaurs into the ark, (even though he couldn't possibly even have had room for every species of insects), and that the sun revolved around the earth, one has to take the church's  pronouncements on science with a small degree of skepticism.  On the other hand, the Big Bang is about as apt a description of the idea of "creation", out of nothing, as any.  

Well, I find Hawking very edifying, and I think a lot of what he has to say applies to Leonard Cohen's songs.

Copyright © 1999 Bill Van Dyk  All rights reserved.

Stephen Hawking