IN THE BEGINNING

Page 1  |  2  |  3  |  4

       The first inkling that the ìuniverse without beginningî might be a false concept came in the 1910s, when Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity. The theory describes gravity not as a force acting at a distance in the sense Newton thought, but rather as a curvature in the fabric of spacetime. The equations of general relativity made a startling predictionóthat the universe is in fact expanding. But Einstein knew better. Hundreds of years of scientific thought had taught that the universe was static and unchanging. So Einstein modified his equations by introducing something he called a ìcosmological constant,î which neatly brought the universe back into balance and left it static as he believed it to be.

       One of the first people to take general relativity at face value was the Belgian priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître. He worked through the equations and proposed that the universe did have a beginning, in what we today would call the Big Bang. He conceived of the universe starting with what he called the ìprimeval atom,î in which all the universeís matter was crushed into a sphere only a few dozen times bigger than the Sun. This primeval atom then exploded into an incredible number of smaller pieces, which in turn kept splitting apart into ever smaller pieces until the atoms of the present universe formed.