It’s time to wind down this series of posts. (Probably past time.) For some reason the Tower of Babel keeps coming to mind as I read how physicists and astronomers are struggling to understand what immediately followed the Big Bang. Martin Rees, author of Before the Beginning, arbitrarily but helpfully, divides cosmic history into three parts: 1) before the first millisecond, 2) from 1 millisecond to 1 million years, and 3) after 1 million years.

Cosmology confronts us with two contrasting styles of problem. The early evolution of our universe (parts one and two), when everything expands almost uniformly and no structures have yet condensed out, can be described by just a few numbers — just as, for instance, the physics of subatomic particles can. But the genesis of an individual galaxy like our Milky Way involves gas dynamics, star formation, and the feedback from stars and supernovae. Understanding these complicated and messy processes, the complexities we see around us and are part of, requires a different approach — as different, in the words of relativity theorist Werner Israel, as mudwrestling is from chess.

As for the second stage, down to the first millisecond after the big bang, Rees says that it is an era where there is good quantitative evidence with the relevant physics well-tested in the lab. This part of cosmic history, Rees says, is the easiest to understand.

Since humankind seems to be learning what makes nature tick, and since at least some scientists praise its complexity as God’s handiwork, I believe God is being glorified and is pleased. It’s before that first millisecond that makes me uneasy.

The first millisecond [is] a brief but eventful era spanning 40 powers of 10 in time, starting at the Planck era [10 to the -43 power] seconds. This is the intellectual habitat of mathematical physicists and quantum cosmologists. The relevant physics is still speculative — indeed, one motive for studying cosmology is that the early universe may offer the only real clues to the laws of nature at extreme energies.

With the Tower of Babel in mind, I have to wonder if this theorizing about the very instant of the Big Bang may be a cosmological bridge too far. God has seen fit to allow us to unravel some of the mysteries of creation, but it may be uncomfortably close to striving to make ourselves God.

And I think that brings me to the end of my cosmological adventure for now. For you readers who have hung in there with me to the bitter end, thanks.

Dave, all run down and tuckered out.

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