Preparing for the Miraculous

204 eleven talksuniverse. And Halton Arp, former assistant of the great EdwinHubble himself, remains a stubborn opponent of thestandard Big Bang theory. But one of the most impressivestances against the Big Bang was that by John Maddox, foryears the physics editor of the prestigious science journalNature. In 1989 he wrote in an editorial, with the argumentativetitle “Down with the Big Bang”: “Apart from beingphilosophically unacceptable, the Big Bang is an over-simpleview of how the Universe began, and it is unlikely tosurvive the decade ahead.” It has survived even two decadesahead, but it is now, as mentioned above, one amongseveral rival theories which are not yet sufficiently simplifiedto become the standard fare of the media.This means that if one reads statements of the followingsort: “We can be very confident about tracing the history[of the universe] back to within about one-billionth ofa second after the universe began,” one should questionthe confidence. Statements like this, by the arch-scientificmaterialistand fertile popular author Peter Atkins, belongto the gospel of the Church of Scientism. Steven Weinberg,Nobel Prize winner in physics and the author of The FirstThree Minutes, is less forward, and writes in that very book:“I cannot deny a feeling of unreality in writing about thefirst three minutes [let alone the first one-billionth of a second],as if we really know what we are talking about.” 19The main problem is that present-day cosmology usesthe mathematical instruments of present-day physics to calculatefantastically complex events in a past many billionsof years ago and totally different from the present circumstances.New technological instruments, like the Hubble andKepler telescopes, do allow to see billions of light years intothe past of the cosmos, but the interpretation of the obtained19 Steven Weinberg: The First Three Minutes, p. 7.