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Illustrations by Jonathan Dyck

How Did the Universe Begin?

Professor Barth Netterfield’s lifelong journey into faith, physics and astronomy

September 23, 2017 | By Barth Netterfield

I come from two worlds. One is the world of science. The other is the world of faith.

As a child, I felt the presence of God all around me. In stars. In trees. In insects.

...the more impressive they become.

At the same time, I was fascinated by where things came from and how they worked.

Not long before he died, my 91-year-old grandfather encouraged me to study science. He didn't accept all of its findings, but he believed in the process.

I enrolled at a Christian liberal arts college in Minnesota, where I studied physics - and religion.

At grad school, a friend and I often didn't see eye to eye on religion.

(me)

(me)

(friend)

Now as an astronomer I use huge balloons to raise telescopes 35km above the Earth - to avoid the atmosphere and get a clear view of deep space.

In one experiment, we studied the cosmic microwave background - the faint afterglow of the Big Bang.

But nothing we or anyone else has discovered explains why the universe exists, or what purpose it serves.

And, as I tell my students, there's still so much we don't know. We've observed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. But we have no idea why. It's as if empty space has hidden energy. This is what we call dark energy.

We don't know what happened in the first moments of the universe. And we don't know if our universe is one of many.

What we do know is that, compared to the age of the universe, all of human history is but a moment.

...and the Milky Way is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. As we look deeper and deeper into the universe, peering back to the beginning of time... the more mysterious and breathtaking it becomes...

...revealing, to my eyes, on an ever-grander scale, the creative majesty of God.

Tags: Astronomy, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Department of Physics, Religion

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3 Responses to “ How Did the Universe Begin? ”
Wayne Hove says:

January 7, 2019

Our family discusses this a lot. While we are all cautiously science advocates, the one issue that keeps arising is around the statement, 'the universe is expanding.' I find this statement highly problematic. Any time we put a finite line on something, one can always ask what is on the other side of this line. If the universe is defined as only that which we know, we might be able to say that the masses we know are moving apart. However, if we define the universe to be all that there is, then it must be infinite.
David m mckee says:

September 25, 2021

The universe did not have a beginning, nor does it end. Our species runs into the epistemological limitations of the human brain which cannot understand in any profound way concepts like "eternity" or "infinity" and then we impose our limitations on the stupendous colossal dynamic process we call "the universe" when we say "it began" X years ago.

We recognize quantum phase changes and phase changes at the human Newtonian scale. What happened X years ago was a cosmic phase change in which the existing state of the dynamic process metamorphosed into the current physical state with the constants and properties we observe and with which construct our current models. Note: "current" and "model"; not "permanent" and "reality."

The universe is an endless process, like the surface of a Möbius strip.
Gordon Gilchrist says:

September 25, 2021

The recent loss of my dearly loved wife after 70 years of happy marriage has caused me to think deeply about life, death, creation and the existence of something after life.

I wonder what today's science has to say about the idea of a continuous, ether-type of "force" after death. From where does the "spark" of life emanate? Would that same spark endure after death?