Reply To: Is belief toxic for your brain?

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Some lunch break thoughts on the matter…..

LeMaitre once said something along the lines that he had 2 methods of discovering the truth, religion and science. I think that Xians were already persuaded that Genesis was true. He, like Einstein was very adept at thought experiments. While it may not seem too profound at first glance, LeMaitre concluded that there must have been “a day without a yesterday”. (I only heard that term recently at a Brian Cox lecture).

Einstein disagreed with LeMaitre because of “the Cosmological Constant” which turned out to be an unnecessary addition to the theory of Relativity. Einstein (like Hoyle) was convinced that the Universe was eternal and unchanging. Personally I have often wondered why Einstein was so caught up with this idea, given his understanding of Newtonian Gravity, which he was “improving” upon and his understanding of Maxwell’s (and Faraday’s) ideas. Especially Maxwell’s idea that color is just the electromagnetic wave of light. Einstein would have understood the importance of this. Similar to the Doppler effect of sound, as a light wave travels towards us it oscillates at a higher frequency that light that travels away from us. That coming towards us appears blue and that light which travels away from us glows red.

In 1929, the year Edington proved that light bends around massive objects in space, to prove the Theory of Relativity to be correct, Edwin Hubble, who had already discovered that there was much more to the Universe than just our Milky Way galaxy, when on to observe that these galaxy clusters were actually travelling apart from each other. The universe was shown to be expanding. Not only expanding but the speed of this expansion was actually increasing. This became known as Hubble Law.

This caused Einstein to recant his “biggest mistake” and accept that the Universe is expanding. If we were to travel to any other of the billions of galaxies in the Universe, we would observe the same thing: the Universe is expanding.

Therefore, logically, if it is expanding and the rate of expansion is increasing, it must at some earlier point have had a beginning.  I know there are theories about redshift at certain frequencies in dark energy fields that can show expansion may have slowed at some point but overall these are fringe ideas.  Our current understanding of the Universe only leads to one conclusion. The Universe started at some point and expanded into what it is today.