Symmetry of the Universe

Symmetry of the Universe

Something puzzling is there in the Cosmos. Observations with a sensitive radio antenna carried near the top of the Earth’s atmosphere in a U-2 aircraft have shown that the background radiation is, to first approximation, just as intense in all directions, as if the fireball of the Big Bang expanded quite uniformly, an origin of the Universe with a very precise symmetry. But the background radiation, when examined to finer precision, proves to be imperfectly symmetrical. There is a small systematic effect that could be understood if the entire Milky Way Galaxy, and presumably other members of the Local Group of galaxies, were streaking toward the Virgo cluster of Galaxies at more that a million miles an hour (600 km per second).

At such a rate, we will reach it in ten billion years, and extragalactic astronomy will then be a great deal easier. In fact, the Virgo cluster of galaxies is already the richest collection of galaxies known, replete with spirals and ellipticals and irregulars, a jewel box in the sky.

If there were time when our Universe didn’t exist, where then God comes from? (Quotations from Meg Jorgensen). Image : Princess on Purple Magic Horse, Fantasy Art © Elena

But why should we be rushing toward it? George Smoot and his colleagues, who made these high-altitudes observations, suggest that the Milky Was is being gravitationally dragged toward the center of the Virgo cluster; that the cluster has many more galaxies than have been detected heretofore; and, most startling, that the cluster is of immense proportions, stretching across one or two billion light years of space.

In the lifetime of the universe there has apparently not been enough time for an initial gravitational nonuniformity to collect the amount of mass that seems to reside in the Virgo supercluster. Thus George Smoot is tempted to conclude that the Big Bang was much less uniform than his other observations suggest, that the original distribution of matter in the universe was very lumpy (some little lumpiness is to be expected, and indeed even needed to understand the condensation of galaxies; but a lumpiness on this scale is a surprise). Perhaps the paradox can be resolved by imagining two or more nearly simultaneous Big Bangs.

If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe, devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we which courageously to pursue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question. Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?