Hubble vs. Einstein debate of the 1950’s

02Mar08

If a comparable parallel of similarity existed between Science and Religion then it would defiantly exist within the framework of their individual motivations which by the way initiated their respective realizations into ‘our world’, at the very outset. Interestingly however, these ‘motivations’ or objectives are the precise components or factors that dictated their existence in the first place, and they themselves have been instigated or activated by purpose! We can think of both Science as well as Religion as (largely) “man-made” vessels by which the human element can travel aboard and unravel the unknowns of this dreamy universe that we are a part of! They are two wings of the very same bird so to speak, a bird that symbolizes or rather represents mankind’s expedition for the absolute truth(s) behind this shadow of a mystery we call life! As we stick with this striking metaphor for a moment, let us first begin by considering Science to be the left wing of that bird, infinitely flapping its feathers towards the outer truth(s) of life. However, being so fact based and as physically oriented as Science and the scientific methods of each Science are (or seem to be at least), it is conceivably impossible for that left wing to flock inwards! Therefore the balance is maintained by religion, as it is the right wing which strives to satisfy humanity’s quest for the inner truth(s) and provide us with answers to the internal unknowns of which we so assertively demand seeking! Likewise however, it is also limited by constricted perspectives due to its spiritually based outlook and strictly metaphysical understanding of our universe! Fantastically nevertheless, both vehicles/vessels of truth are fueled by the very same factors that they are set to shed light upon, i.e. mystery and the unknown! Without mystery and the unknown, there would be no relevant reason for the existence of science and religion; they would be completely extraneous, immaterial, ineffective and inapplicable, and awfully lacking a defining purpose in actual reality!  

All throughout ancient and modern human history, starting from the earliest civilizations known to man and skipping down through the times all the way to this present era, we (human minds at work) have been trying to reveal the dark portions of our universe that the universe   has been ‘destined’ to keep a secret from us! Whether we are destined (in a preordained manner or instant by instant) to find all the answers or not, is simply inconceivable by us to say the least! Nonetheless, granted enough time under the assumption that mankind will keep up the same pace of scientific advancement as in the past century, there’s no telling what we could unlock, unveil, declassify, and reveal!

Perhaps what is most captivatingly inspiring nowadays about this seemingly contradictory -yet at other times seemingly symbiotic- relationship, is the striking balance between and the mutual confirmation of the present findings of both Science and Religion, by each other! In this day and age, both quests for knowledge seem virtually on the same track, to go a step further they may have turned into the same train, the same vessel of truth seeking (they may have become one essentially)! Consequently, what was before almost reluctantly reflected upon as purely philosophical or metaphysical chatter by scientists, has now been adopted by the scientific communities worldwide, as having been purely based on factual and accurate grounds, all along! For example the notion of the oneness of our universe as one with all life contained by it, as one with itself and all existence, was an idea discoursed and pushed forth by early philosophers also sermonized in many cultures and religions, but it certainly wasn’t endorsed or supported by Science or the scientific method! In fact, in many instances it was (and perhaps more shockingly continues to be) looked down upon or even ridiculed! However ironic it may sound, the debate is still alive and will continue to be alive probably as long as a single mystery or unknown exists within our universe! Nonetheless, more and more scientific studies are pointing towards a fabric of connectivity that unites our universe (whether we perceive it as irregular, constant, expanding, contracting or ripping).

1400 years or so ago, the Holy Quran was revealed to a handful of Arabian tribesmen in the middle of the spaciously vast Sahara dessert, living under a relatively primitive community, coping as best they can with the harsh dessert conditions that the deserted ghost towns had to offer! A verse in that book was revealed to those Bedouin peoples as follows (do forgive my poor translation),

“The Heavens and the Earth were jointed together (ratqaan) until We clove them asunder”

Another verse reads as follows,

“The Heavens We created, and verily we are expanding them”  

Indeed words are so mysterious within themselves and they will always be open for interpretation and reinterpretation all the way through the times, yet it is defiantly worth mentioning the probability that it is as though this religious book was suggesting what would have been inconceivable and unperceivable to its uninformed and uneducated audience! The probability of implying that the universe was somehow ‘jointed together’ and then upon creation was supernaturally ordered to explode into a Big Bang, would violate all Scientific norms as we know them, for the simple reason that this was discovered (or at least properly debated and documented) during the early 1930’s and continues to be tested and modified even in present times! The possibility of introducing an ‘expanding universe’ to a fanatically closed society that lived in an era known as “The Age of Ignorance”, either demands a suspension of disbelief or calls for an extra leap of faith, its one or the other if truth be told!

Approaching the 1920’s all the way through to the 1960’s, a predominant dispute (arguably the intellectual debate of the century), featured prominent scientists on both sides of the aisle, and became characterized by the dead certainty and the faithfully upheld convictions that were so vehemently invoked onto the scientific arena, by both camps! It served as a battlefield between two focal arguments; the infinite steady state of the universe (or Einstein’s assumption of the cosmological constant) on one side of the spectrum, vs. an expanding universe with a precise moment of creation ( or Hubble’s observation of the metric expansion of space), on the other!

“Whether it is a coincidence or a more ominous effect that made both passageways to truth (i.e., Science and Religion), assemble halfway, or it is just perceived as such by those in need of connecting spirituality to the discipline of science, the reality on the ground reveals a virtual assemblance of the two, nonetheless!”, Seif Allah Khaled Seif El Nasr….  

Einstein, an accomplished theorist more than a methodical observer, developed what is now revered by scientific communities worldwide, as having been the most important theoretical development for modern physical cosmology in the 20 ^th century! Einstein’s ‘theory of relativity’ allowed modern physicists to observe/analyze time and space as a single geometric entity, formed by the disproportionate distribution of energy all throughout our universe! In due consequence, he was then able to push forth his predictions of black holes that besieged our universe (or ‘worm holes’ as he liked to call them, with reference to their mysterious manifestations in so many of his equations). Einstein hypothesized that certain dead stars (specifically those with masses above 3M sun) were expected to become black holes after they had burned full out of fuel! As a star reaches its dying phase, (a stage known to scientists as ‘red giant’) the remaining hydrogen fuel that is burning out of control causes the already massive star to expand enormously. Hence like a monster, it swallows up whatever was ‘doomed’ to orbit around it until it simply cannot grow any larger! And in a spectacular departure, it blows up in what is called a supernova explosion, leaving behind a vacuum so powerful that it can suck up as much time and space as is conceivable to the human mind! Also in direct accordance with his ‘theory of relativity’, Einstein was then able to realize how gravity works; it was due to energy bending space-time, or ‘curved space time’! The rubber sheet analogy of the universe fits perfectly in this context for it succeeds in painting an exact mental picture of how the force of gravity works in relation to energy and matter! If we visualize a rectangular rubber sheet with a circular object on it, we can see how that object’s mass would create a circular dent around it, representing its gravitational wells! Correspondingly, (as we picture our universe to be that rubber sheet) any circular mass in space (be it planets, stars, or moons) would have that same circular dent surrounding it. Logically, the more massive the mass of that object is, the stronger its gravitational wells (or the more visible the dent would be, in a rubber sheet universe)! To put it lightly, Albert Einstein was a genius but even geniuses make mistakes, and his assumption of a ‘cosmological constant’ was according to his own words, “The greatest blunder” he ever made!

Everything was going well for the king of cosmology however due to the prevailing notion of an ‘infinite and static universe’ , Einstein introduced an assumption into his equations (a new term involving a quantity that he called the ‘cosmological constant’), so as to allow a time-independent solution for a universe with a ‘ uniform’ distribution of matter! Einstein later came to regret that he had unnecessarily mutilated his original theory and that he had failed to notice the expansion of our universe! (Yet to be frank , this musn’t count against the man if truth be told. As a matter of fact, theorists receive the world as it is presented to them by observers and poorly observed velocities of stars and galaxies made it irresistible back then to suppose that our universe was fixed/stagnant/static/infinite ).

In the 1920’s Edwin Hubble made an observation at Mount Wilson observatory that the galaxies (overall) were moving away from each other, and therefore we were dwelling in an expanding universe! Just a few years beforehand, the general conception was that only the Milky Way was our universe and that we were at the unique center point, marvelously situated in the magical heart of it all! The first observation Hubble made, shattered this naïve human belief to pieces and thus probably made the Christian church (alongside with most religious entities of the time), rather uneasy about his findings! In retrospect of course, (according to hindsight’s nature of always being 20/20), such findings would seem pathetic to us, yet at the time it was a such a big deal to discover that certain distant stars in the night sky did not even belong to our galaxy but in fact were different galaxies all together. Hubble (contrary to Einstein) was a methodical observer not an accomplished theorist, thus he was more in tune with the scientific method and traveled  great lengths (metaphorically speaking) to avoid constructing needless assumptions and blind suppositions, as did his honorable colleague with the introduction of the ‘cosmological constant’! At the observatory, Hubble indicated that distant galaxies appeared to be receding faster than those closer to us by measuring the luminosity of the redshift factor of distant galaxies (or the ‘z’ factor, as labeled in Hubble’s CDM-model), and then converting those measurements into a specific model of space-time such as that of the Lambda model! (Bluish colors were an indication of closer galaxies to our Milky Way whereas a more reddish color implied a remotely expansive distance! During the observational study phase, he discovered that velocities were easy to establish yet distances were far more difficult to determine! Regardless of the latter, Hubble’s closely controlled assessment of the stars and galaxies visa vi the metric measurements of the coordinate system he put in place, allowed him to confidently interpret these results as being an indication of an expanding universe without a center midpoint of any sort! It is also noteworthy to point out that in a metric expansion of space, rather than objects moving apart into emptiness, it is the space which contains the objects which is in and of itself expanding. (In other words there isn’t anything that the universe is expanding into). The so called Hubble expansion was an elemental feature of this galactic universe that we have so miraculously been a part of, which by the way fundamentally differs from the static universe Albert Einstein primarily considered when he developed his gravitational theory!

When Edwin Hubble officially published his findings in 1929, two years later Einstein officially denounced his isotropic perception of the steady state universe and called it his ‘greatest blunder of all of time’!  Hubble, although he wasn’t even close to being as luminously spectacular (or as stunningly brilliant) as Albert Einstein was, he did follow a few simple steps that were able to unravel one of the greatest ambiguities that has been occupying our universe (and our minds- some would argue that they are both one and the same thing, but that is a different matter altogether-) for centuries now! The following steps belong to an almost sanctified scientific method whose fundamentals revolve around the basic principle of trial and error! Hubble began primarily by observing a phenomenon! Consequently, he hypothesized an explanation for that phenomenon! Accordingly, he predicted a logical consequence for the guess and then he tested the prediction! Hence after reviewing for any mistakes, he was then able to finally conclude his ground-breaking observation and convert a proposed hypothesis initially lacking sufficient data, into a physical cosmological law, that will most probably stand until the end of time!

Whether it be ‘an ant on a balloon model analogy’, ‘an expanding rubber sheet analogy’ (previously stated above), or ‘a raisin bread mode’ comparison, none could have been substantiated without Einstein’s theory of relativity and its fusion with Hubble’s law of expansion! Likewise, most prevalent theories nowadays; Big Bang (estimating the age of the universe -as it exploded into existence- to be 13.7 billion years ago, or the Big Crunch (predicting, a contracting rather than expanding universe, but suggesting similar effects nonetheless), or even the Big Rip where it is foreseen that a colder than livable universe will continue to grow thinner and more apart thereby allowing matter to become more and more dilute, hence tearing to shreds all the galaxies and stars; whatever the theory may even be in the future, it must be corroborated by both Einstein’s modified theoretical relativity as well as Hubble’s legislated observational expansion law!

Without diving deeper than necessary, a new science has emerged to the mainstream like never before in its history, and may be responsible for recalling back from the library shelves, all the science books from schools and universities worldwide! This new interpretation of what has already been established (including the theory of relativity and metric expansion of space), is called Quantum mechanics!   Quantum mechanics, calculates the various probabilities of the possible outcomes of experiments! Those who follow this relatively new branch of science believe that Einstein’s “greatest blunder” was that he called his assumption of the ‘ cosmological constant‘, his “greatest blunder”! Although Einstein himself rejected the notion that physics laws could deal with probabilities by famously decreeing, “God does not play dice with the cosmos”, his works have been used as the foundation of all that is Quantum. Indeed, this is the exquisiteness of not only Quantum physcics vs. traditional physics, or the debate between an expanding universe vs. a steady state universe, or even the seemingly contradicting arguments pushed forth by a moment of creation on the one hand vs. an infinite static universe on the other, but it is in fact the overall glory of bearing witness to such eternal quests for knowledge! Afterall, what would knowledge be if it is not known? How dark and cold would the universe be if it is not experienced?                                                   

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