You’ll get a bang out of this!

Spoiler alert: The Universe is more than 6,000 years old! According to Genesis 1, 5 and 11 that is its assessed age. The Universe, according to astrophysicists, is over 13 billion years old. There are still some Fundamentalists who insist on 6,000. Perhaps Fox news agrees with them.

Paul Halpern has written an interesting book, “Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Big Bang Debate” (Basic Books, 2021). Halpern is a Professor of Physics at the University of the Sciences, Philadelphia.

Until the middle of the 20th century there were two theories of how atoms of the various elements formed. These were based on the data collected across the Earth with telescopes and other devices. As equipment improved, new data caused a debate among the scientists involved. One concept was Steady State, in which stars were born at generally the same rate as others collapsed. The high gravity of the latter compressed electrons (sparks of energy buzzing around the nucleus), protons (stable subatomic particles occurring in nucleus with a positive electric energy equal in size to that of the electrons), and neutrons (Having mass equal to that of protons but no electric charge). The Big Bang was more in tune with the newer data. More of that below.

George Gamow (1904-1968) was born in Odessa, Russian Empire (now Ukraine). He came to America in the summer of 1934 as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. That fall he taught at George Washington University and stayed until 1956.

He then went to the University of Colorado in Boulder until his death in 1968. He was a well-respected nuclear physicist and cosmologist.

Gamow advocated a theory of the Universe in which almost all elements were created during the Big Bang. As additional data became available the theory was updated by Hans Bethe (a German-american nuclear physicist), and Charles L. Critchfield (a mathematical physicist) Steady State could not explain the predominance of hydrogen in the Universe.

Other galaxies are moving away from us very quickly and in all directions, driven by an explosive force over 13 billion years ago. George Lemaitre, a Belgian priest theorized that the Universe began from a single primordial atom. This was later updated to a single blob of energy that became electrons, protons and neutrons. Edwin Hubble’s observations that Galaxies are speeding away from us in all directions added support to the theory.

Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis (the cosmic development of atoms more complex than hydrogen). He was one of the authors of the influential paper, “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars” in 1957. It became known as B2FH from the initials of the authors: Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and Fred Hoyle. It took from 1955 to 1956 to write the piece at the University of Cambridge and altech. It became significant to astronomy and physics.

He rejected the Big Bang: theory (a term he coined on BBC Radio in March 1949) in favor of the Steady State model. He also authored science fictions novels (such as “Ice,” “The Inferno” and Into “Deepest Space”), short stories and radio plays. He co-authored two books with his son (“Of Men and Galaxies” and “Ten Faces of the Universe”). For most of his working life, Hoyle worked at the University of Astronomy at Cambridge.

Currently the Big Bang Theory is accepted as the most plausible explanation of the Universe.

Other galaxies are moving away from us very quickly and in all directions, driven by an explosive force over 13 billion years ago. George Lemaitre, a Belgian priest theorized that the Universe began from a single primordial atom.