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Man's Relation to the Universe
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11867 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
2,687 Words |
| Author
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Sir Bernard Lovell
Sir Bernard Lovell founded the Jodrell Bank Observatory,
England, after World War II and continued as director until he
retired in 1981, when he became Emeritus Professor of Radio
Astronomy at the University of Manchester. |
My own working life as a scientist has extended over half a century, and I have learned to view with caution new claims to scientific certainty. This is especially the case in cosmology, where the years of my astronomical interests have seen the abandonment of several claims that, at last, we understand the nature and origin of the universe.
Of course, this is not a new feature in the history of the civilized world. The philosophers of ancient Greece argued whether God made the world from nothing or formed it from the primeval material already existing. Two thousand years later, we had the scientific version of this dispute formulated in terms of the steady-state continuous creation cosmology opposed to the concept of the evolutionary universe. The discovery of microwave background radiation in 1965 led instantly to the claim that this was the relic radiation from the primeval fireball of the universe more than ten billion years ago, and the concept of continuous creation was quickly abandoned.
No one has yet suggested an alternative explanation for the existence of this isotopically distributed radiation, and the concept of the Big Bang universe is now prevalent. The essence of this scientific observation is that with a sensitive radio receiving system working on a wavelength of a few centimeters a uniformly distributed radiation can be observed from any direction in the sky. The intensity of the radiation is equivalent to that which would be received from a black body at a temperature of only 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. This is believed to be the relic radiation from the early universe when it had existed for only a million years. With the expansion of the universe from the initial moments of time, the temperature had fallen in inverse proportion to the size of the universe and was then a few thousand degrees. The continued expansion of the primeval material over a period of more than ten billion years, during which galaxies, stars and ourselves evolved, leads to the observation today of this relic radiation at the temperature of 2.7 degrees above absolute zero.
I doubt if there is a single professional astronomer today who does not subscribe to this general view of the evolution of the universe. No other acceptable explanation has yet been proffered for the existence of this background radiation and, overall, there seems to be an elegant sweep of cosmic history in the scientific reasoning which involves the contemporary researches of the high-energy nuclear physicist and the deepest penetrations into space of the astronomers. The elegance of the Big Bang theory does not obscure the difficulties of its
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