Once Upon a Universe

Roman Catholic priest Fr. Georges Lemaître, working off Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, first proposed the “Big Bang” explanation of the universe’s origin in 1927. It took decades for the theory to win general acceptance. Einstein himself opposed it bitterly for years, in what he would later call “the biggest mistake of my life.”

The theory was finally proved experimentally only in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson. For their pains, they were awarded the Nobel Prize. Fr. Lemaître, on the other hand, never received the public recognition that was his due.

Nevertheless, in the 1970s several apparent problems with the Big Bang theory surfaced. The solution promised by Alan Guth’s 1981 hypothesis that the universe went through a period of extremely rapid expansion within the first second after the Big Bang, called “cosmic inflation,” had never been experimentally proven. It was one of the “great unsolved problems in physics.”

Until March 16th. Physicists working at Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University announced the results of 3 years of work using NASA’s WMAP satellite: inflation is for real, and Fr. Lemaître’s theory has survived another crucial test. At the press conference, according to AP wire reports, the scientists described the universe’s growth “from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.”

That begets a big question. Have we finally proven that God created the world with an dramatically instantaneous explosion of “Let there be light?"

Fr. Lemaître didn’t think so, and an anecdote has him taking Pius XII aside to dissuade any such premature judgment. Surprised? Ironically, unlike so many scientists of his time, Fr. Lemaître worked ceaselessly to keep religion and science separate.

Both explore the One Truth in different, complementary realms. Revelation tells us that God created the universe, and science is telling us what the beginning of the universe looked like. Neither has anything to say about the other’s contribution, even though points of contact like the Fiat lux of Genesis and the explosion of the Big Bang are certainly revealing. That was underlined by Pope John Paul II during his General Audience on January 29, 1986, when he said that the text of Genesis doesn’t purport to teach us anything significant from the point of view of the natural sciences; it tells us in fact something that goes beyond the sciences: that God is the cause of all creation.

"The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions."

-- J.L. Heilbron University of California at Berkley.

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It is all very well to point out that important scientists, like Louis Pasteur, have been Catholic. More revealing is how many priests have distinguished themselves in the sciences. It turns out, for instance, that the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Fr. Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher (also called "master of a hundred arts" for the breadth of his knowledge). Fr. Roger Boscovich, who has been described as "the greatest genius that Yugoslavia ever produced," has often been called the father of modern atomic theory.

In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

By the eighteenth century, the Jesuits

had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter’s surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn’s rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics — all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents [Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, 2004, p. 189].

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Fr. J.B. Macelwane, who wrote Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, the first seismology textbook in America, in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Fr. Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In seventeenth-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible. Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less developed nations not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate time keeping, weather forecasts (particularly important in the cases of hurricanes and typhoons), earthquake risk assessments, and cartography. In Central and South America the Jesuits worked primarily in meteorology and seismology, essentially laying the foundations of those disciplines there. The scientific development of these countries, ranging from Ecuador to Lebanon to the Philippines, is indebted to Jesuit efforts.

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