Preparing for the Miraculous

196 eleven talksimproving or worsening the lot of the creatures of the gods,and sometimes of the gods themselves. With one exception:the Hebrews. Their holy book told about an absolutebeginning, when Yahweh created heaven and earth, andeverything in it. According to Genesis, the book in whichthis is narrated, the world had a beginning.Physics and cosmology, successful in working out severaltheories of cosmological mechanics, preferred at firstnot to trouble itself with an explanation of how the cosmicclockwork had been wound up. They supposed, for simplicity’ssake, that the universe had existed from infinity andwould continue existing in infinity, eternal and unchanging.Yet this opportunistic viewpoint began to be questioned inthe 1920s. Because of the advances in nuclear physics, thecomposition and the life histories of the various types ofstars began to be known. Edwin Hubble’s astonishing discoveriesseemed to show that the universe was expanding.All this lead to a model of the universe which is still presentedin the text books and by the media as the standardmodel (but which is in fact severely questioned).“We can say that the Big Bang theory is currently regardedas a well-established theory, the standard-modelacceptable to most physicists, and that the questions thatremain do not cast serious suspicions on it.” Thus wroteKitty Ferguson in The Fire in the Equations, published in1994. 6 Lee Smolin, however, opines: “We, who are used tothe idea now, can only speculate about how hard it was toaccept the notion that the universe might have had a beginning.”7 Indeed, in 1933 the universe was still assumedto be eternal and unchanging, and when Albert Einstein,then already a celebrity, endorsed the first propositions of6 Kitty Ferguson: The Fire in the Equations, p. 126.7 Lee Smolin: The Trouble with Physics, p. 151.