West Main

LOOKING BACKWARD IN TIME

Eight times around the world in one second!  The speed of light travel is that fast!  Yet this is slow compared to the size of the universe, which is still growing in its expanse.

Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the universe is expanding was supported by his measurement of distances in space using some unusual stars called Cepheid Variables.  These distances have turned out to be unthinkably enormous, and are measured in light years, or the distance light will travel in one year.  Current measurements from the space telescope named after Hubble have indicated that the universe is some thirteen billion light years in its expanse.

Therefore, because the speed of light is slow compared to distance in the universe, when we are looking at distant stars we are looking backward in great leaps of time.  What we see today through the eye of a telescope is not a current happening, but events that took place many, many years ago.  Historians also give us a look at ancient times, but space-time distances dwarf those of historians.  However, just as history helps us to understand the present, looking backward in the star world also helps us to understand the way things are now on earth.  This makes the work of astronomers and cosmologists more pertinent to life here on earth.

Because we are able to look so far back into time, we can see a myriad of happenings in the star world that have taken place long ago.  The birth and death of stars can be seen in considerable detail.  Stars vary greatly in size, and the forms they take in death are also varied from neutron stars to black holes that devour all light and matter that come near them.

Because we can learn about the life of a star of a given size, estimates of the life span of our own Sun are possible.  In this we learn that our solar system was not designed to last forever.  And it is fatally dangerous to live near a dying star.

In the 1960s, Penzias and Wilson, experimenters with Bell Telephone Laboratories, discovered a band of radio waves of about seven centimeters in length coming equally from all directions.  It was finally decided that this radiation had originated from a burst of light from distant time near the beginning of creation.  The expanding universe was thought to have Doppler shifted the wavelengths to their present thermal range from their former place in the band of light wavelengths.

The observation of distant happenings in the universe is humbling.  In I Corinthians 15, apostle Paul alludes to the diversity to be seen in the heavens as an evidence of God’s power to create a new body for us in the resurrection.  We can also conclude that our eventual home with God, in the world of the unseen, must be a place beyond our wildest imagination.  That is why speculative books telling what heaven will be like are distasteful to me.  If I cannot get my mind around the universe that I have been allowed to see, how could I comprehend the unseen world that I cannot see?

– James Gibbs