“The universe is a single jewel…”

WHILE INDIVIDUAL STARS showed a great variety of motion, such was not the evidence that began to accrue from the early 1910s on about spiral galaxies. By and large their spectra showed a red shift indicative of recessional velocity. In the early 1920s this could mean that those galaxies might not be permanently subordinate parts of the Milky Way. In other words, the mini-universe revealed itself as possibly being in the process of fragmentation, the very opposite to what a universe has to be. Also, the Milky Way itself had to be removed from its exalted status as the main part of that mini-universe to one among tens of thousands of spiral galaxies. This happened when around 1924 Hubble observed Cepheid variables in the Andromeda nebula which allowed him to establish its true distance and size. The distance turned out to be two million light years, or twenty times the diameter of the Milky Way. This showed the Andromeda nebula to be roughly equal in size to the Milky Way, and a true rival to the supposedly chief body in the visible universe.

But when the observable or mini-universe had to be divided into tens of thousands of equally big parts and cease thereby to appear as a coherent whole, another development came to the rescue of cosmic coherence. The result was nothing short of dramatic in that it gave an unsuspectedly precise grasp of the universe itself. The major breakthrough in cosmology occurred when in 1927 the Abbé Lemaître derived from Einstein’s cosmological equations the expansion of the universe and correlated that rate with data on galactic red-shifts already available. Lemaître’s conclusion should seem especially daring when contrasted with the diffidence with which Hubble and Humason published, about that time, their first analysis of those red-shifts. Even four years later, with many more data on hand, they voiced their constraint “to describe that ‘apparent velocity-displacements’ without venturing on the interpretation and its cosmological significance.” Yet the velocity-distance law contained not only the revolutionary implication that the whole universe is subject to an over-all dynamics of expansion, but also that far back in the cosmic past all thing, or the universe, had to be a very small thing.

This latter point found its first elaboration in Lemaître’s famous hypothesis of the early universe as a “primitive atom.” He did not, however, seize on the principal philosophical opportunity which this view of the universe offered. Not that the exploitation of that view demanded scientific expertise or professional training in philosophy. What was demanded could have conceivably been found in those Catholic and Thomistic circles in which Lemaître moved. Yet even in those circles where Chesterton had for some time been eagerly read, no attention was given to his most penetrating analysis of scientific laws, widely available in his Orthodoxy, first published in 1908. It also contained what in view of the late-20th-century developments in scientific cosmology should pass for a profound anticipation of their very gist:

“The universe is a single jewel and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel of the cosmos it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and price; for there cannot be another one.” (‘Orthodoxy’)

But if the universe was to reveal convincingly what precious things reveal in their smallness, namely, its exceedingly specific features, its expanding motion had to be followed up in the reverse direction.

~Stanley L. Jaki: God And The Cosmologists, Chap. Two—Nebulosity Dissipated.

God and the Cosmologists

Available at Real View Books