Beyond the Big Bang

The question of where everything came from is not new to us. Most likely we have asked this question back from the days when we were still toddlers perhaps—when we were inquisitive as ever. We asked ourselves about the beginning of almost everything—from the smallest atom to the grandest universe. I was surprised to be told, during my intermediate science back in my elementary level, that both can be present in a single story—the grandest thing we can ever know came from the smallest thing we can ever think. The theory of the big bang—only this time that I understood it this well and realized why people believed this as the strongest theory about the beginning of the universe.

The said theory, as said in the film, is not a product of an overnight thinking. It took years and years of thinking of the most prominent people known today in the field of science namely Aristotle, Claudius Ptolemy, Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble and Fred Hoyle. So now that we know their names, a bigger question would be what did they contribute to our knowledge of the universe?

Surely there are many and it would be a long story that is probably already a published book elsewhere, but for the sake of this limited paper, here is a run through. Given our naturally centrist perspective, Aristotle, being one of the early thinkers of the world, came up with the idea that the earth is the center of the universe. With our knowledge today, of course we can say that this is not any near the truth, but it is surely a good start especially for it started other studies by other observers such as Claudius Ptolemy. Basing on Aristotle’s earth centered universe, Ptolemy tried to observe the pattern of the movement of the planets and predict its future movement. He collected beautiful but quite chaotic information. Looking at these observations, Nicholas Copernicus tried to make sense of these patterns and he did successfully by, instead of the earth, he put the sun in the center of it all. However, he didn’t publish this theory immediately with the fear of probable issues with the church. Kepler agreed to this concept of heliocentrism. However, instead of a circle, he concluded that the planets orbit around the sun in ellipses—in this formation, as the planets go nearer to the sun, they move faster and move slower as they get farther. Meanwhile, observation and data collection would not have been so easy and accurate without Galileo Galilei’s invention: the telescope. This magnified the celestial bodies so much that they discovered a lot of things—craters on the moon, satellites of Jupiter, and rings of Saturn to name a few. Galileo also made some experiments and in one of them, he concluded that things fall in the same rate of acceleration regardless of their mass. This gave a start to the connection and a world changing discovery of Isaac Newton. Now, one of the biggest questions would be: What keeps the planets in this order? This question was given answer by the genius of Isaac Newton. Given Galileo’s free fall conclusion, Newton thought of the moon falling to the earth and earth falling to the sun and so are the rest of the celestial bodies in the solar system—he called it gravity. This is the force that puts order to everything in the universe—from an apple in a tree to the stars in the universe.

Finding answers to questions about the universe did not end there. It continued and is still continuing up to the modern period and one of the greatest modern scientists—probably the greatest scientist that had ever lived—would be Einstein. He thought of the universe as laid out in the fabric of interconnected space and time.; to him, space and time were not different variables. Although Einstein wanted to believe a static universe, his concept of space-time tends to suggest an expanding universe not to mention his failure to find a constant that can counter the force of gravity against his space-time. Because of his failure to embrace the theory of the expanding universe, other scientists stated the obvious for him such as Father George Lemaitre, one of the first people to propose the big bang, who suggested that the universe came from a very hot cosmic egg, also known as the primeval atom, which exploded and is continuously expanding today and Edwin Hubble who found out, through the most modern telescope of his time, that the sun is only one of the billions of stars in the milky way galaxy and that milky way is just one of many other galaxies in the universe. He also suggested that stars are going farther and farther away. Another is Fred Hoyle who argued that stars are made up of hydrogen and helium and every other element were just products of the combination of these elements.

I have never understood the big bang theory with details this keen. All the previous lessons gave me a very vague story which made it hard for me to believe. As a student, this film made me more open to this theory and further theories to be developed about the beginning of the universe. This is not to say that I denounce the creation theory or my belief of the supernatural creator, it is just that at some point, I believe that science and religion can co-exist—such as when answering the question of where did that cosmic egg came from. Also, knowing in detail how they came up with the knowledge we now know, as a student, I felt that it is not too late for this generation and the generations to come to contribute ideas about the origin of the universe. Surely we already know a lot of things—thanks to the brilliant people mentioned above—but, certainly, we have more yet to learn as well.