EDITORIAL
Primordial Light
First published in July 2010, this remarkable microwave all-sky image of the Universe was produced by ESA's Planck satellite. The main disc of our Milky Way galaxy runs across the centre of the image. Striking streamers of cold dust reach above and below it: this galactic web is where new stars are being formed, and the Planck mission found many locations where individual stars are edging toward birth or just beginning their cycle of development. The mottled backdrop at the top and bottom is the cosmic microwave background radiation, the oldest light in the Universe - the remains of the fireball out of which our Universe sprang into existence 13.7 billion years ago.
The Birth of the Universe and the Dawn of Time
Originating power brought forth a Universe. All the energy that would ever exist in the entire course of time erupted as a single quantum — a singular gift — existence. If in the future, stars would blaze and lizards would blink in their light, these actions would be powered by the same numinous energy that flared forth at the dawn of time.
There was no place in the Universe that was separate from the originating power of the Universe. Each thing of the Universe had its very roots in this realm. Even space-time itself was a tossing, churning, foaming out of the originating reality, instant by instant. Each of the sextillion particles that foamed into existence had its root in this quantum vacuum, this originating reality.
The birth of the Universe was not an event in time. Time begins simultaneously with the birth of existence. The realm or power that brings forth the Universe is not itself an event in time, nor a position in space, but is rather the very matrix out of which the conditions arise that enable temporal events to occur in space. Though the originating power gave birth to the Universe fourteen billion years ago, this realm of power is not simply located there at that point of time, but is rather a condition of every moment of the Universe, past, present, and to come. [Swimme & Berry: The Universe Story]
The space between stars and galaxies is black to our naked eye and optical telescopes. A radio telescope, however, detects a faint background glow in all directions. This is the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). It is strongest in the microwave region of the radio spectrum, and is the relic 'first light' released when the Universe came into being. Prior to the formation of stars and planets, a smaller Universe was filled with white-hot glowing hydrogen plasma. As the Universe expanded, the plasma and associated radiation grew cooler, until a point was reached where stable atoms could form. The glow of the CMBR exhibits the specific pattern of a red-hot gas, blown up to the size of the Universe. Several of its features relate to the value of the Hubble Constant, a number that describes the rate of expansion of the Universe since its origin. By finding out how fast the Universe is expanding, scientists have deduced that it is 13.7 billion years old. World religions appear to have been overwhelmed by the industrial growth society, and offer little resistance to the psychopathic tendencies of the business corporation. Contemporary science is largely held hostage to the technological imperative—an engineering project. Even quantum physics is respected primarily for its technological applications, rather than the scientific contributions it could make to biology, medicine, psychology and spirituality. The scientific revelation of the creativity and beauty of the evolutionary process now provides us with a coherent reason and context to celebrate our own existence as a species. The human emerged from the community of species that make up the amazing biodiversity of our geological era. Our brilliant new sciences like molecular genetics, evolutionary biology and ecology confirm our biological origin beyond doubt. Here we are, at a pinnacle of scientific knowledge about our own species, about its place in planetary evolution and about the nature of the Universe as a whole. It is a potentially overwhelming fact that we also find ourselves face-to-face with a full-scale evolutionary crisis of our own making. Fossil fuels and “business-as-usual” are rapidly bringing our entire geological era to an end. We are living through the sixth great “extinction event” in Earth’s geological history, and we ourselves are its cause. The new global human society desperately needs meaning, wisdom, a new story of why we are here. To know the fourteen billion-year-old story of the self-emergent Universe and the four and a half billion-year-old story of our mother planet, Earth, is to know how and why we are here. It saves us from the extremes of nihilism or eternalism. It saves us from thinking all is lost. We can draw every day from resources far greater than the merely human realm. Quite possibly we could thereby save our species and a habitable, living world.
In the all-sky image at the top of the page, the Milky Way shows what the 'local Universe' looks like now, while the CMBR background pattern shows what the Universe looked like close to its time of creation (before there were stars or galaxies). In the background pattern are different colours that represent minute differences in the temperature and density of matter across the whole sky. Such small irregularities somehow evolved into denser regions that became the galaxies of today.
Why Are We Here? Why Ask Now?
Descartes’ logic and Newton’s science led us, step by empirical step, towards our extraordinary modern knowledge of the Universe. However they are themselves inherently reductionist, and this has had serious psycho-spiritual consequences. A particularly pernicious one has been to deny the mysterious, numinous quality of the Universe and the Earth.
- August 2010