(Opinion) Just try to imagine a telescope the size of six large trucks (20.197m × 14.162 m) resting comfortably one million miles out in space and beaming back amazing selfies of universes only imagined but never before glimpsed.
It’s just breathtaking and makes our world’s petty craziness pale insignificance.
While it may sound a little like sci-fi, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched flawlessly on Christmas day in 2021, is very real and expected to continue exploring the universe for the next two decades.
NASA has a sensational winner in its 10-billion-dollar crap shoot now destined to move the science of astronomy light years ahead. It has already sent back pictures of exploding galaxies that have traveled through space for more than 13.5 billion light years letting us peer at celestial events in what might best be called ‘cosmic real time’.
When I was a young boy learning about the stars in heaven, I couldn’t get out of my head a nagging question which bothers me still – what is on the other side of the end of the universe: what came before the big bang?
Like the explorers who set sail from Europe to the west, to terra incognita and whose maps often carried the legend, Hic sunt leones or dragones. Lions or dragons were thought to populate the unknown and be awaiting them if their ship somehow managed not to go over the edge which some feared was the end of the world.
Like those mariners, I have endlessly speculated on what might lay on the other side of the edge of our knowledge. Now with JWST, I wonder how much closer we are going to be to finding out what nothing looks like and perhaps, glimmers of the meaning of life.
Our scientists assure us that our universe came into being with a very big bang, an explosion of extremely high density and temperature, causing space to expand and then cool and settle down into the universe as we think we know it.
Even with JWST examining the heavens 24/7 and our penchant for ‘seeing is believing’, why is it that I can’t stop wondering what is on the far side of what we see – is there an edge to infinity? Can we ever know the seemingly unknowable and if we could, would it solve the big question of where we come from, and, where we are going?
Perhaps it will take all that we are learning from JWST to jolt us into wanting to know more. Now that we have a window into the origins of our tiny planet hasn’t this ignited our inquisitive passions?
In any period of unrest like the one we are currently enduring, the conservative forces of reaction push back against discovery, fearful that their power may be somehow diminished, that their beliefs in Christian Nationalism may be endangered. Nagging questions stretch the imagination and thinking too much is dangerous. Burn the books and limit the school curriculum and perhaps yesterday will go on a little longer.
I wait and worry to see the blowback to JWST’s discoveries. Sadly, there is nothing new in this.
Over centuries the establishment church orthodoxy which taught that the Earth was the immovable center of the universe attacked all other theories as heresies. We now don’t question that the earth revolves around the sun. but the Catholic Church branded the famed scientist Galileo Galilei a heretic for his heliocentric solar system teaching.
It took the church more than 300 years to admit that Galileo had been right and the church wrong. Conservatism dies hard even in the presence of irrefutable evidence.
Looking at the brilliant photographs beamed back to us by JWST, showing unnumbered galaxies with exoplanets – those planets that orbit their own suns, I feel a profound sense of insignificance. In this immensity with millions of planets orbiting millions of suns, are we the only beings and if so, why?
When we consider how small we are, tiny specks of sand on an endless beach, it is impossible for me, like so many others not to wonder how it all came about and what lies beyond the known.
The eminent scientist, Sir Fred Hoyle (who incidentally spontaneously invented the term ‘big bang’ and always said he hated it) found the idea that the universe had a beginning to be pseudoscience.
As an atheist it sounded to him a bit too much like religion, resembling arguments that there was a divine creator. “The reason why scientists like the ‘big bang’” said Hoyle on BBC Radio “is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis. It is deep within the psyche of most scientists to believe in the first page of Genesis”.
If the idea that the universe had a beginning is pseudoscience, real science has no concrete answer except faith.
The fact of religion and science rubbing against one another and throwing off sparks dates back to well before Galileo. The JWST will surely pose more questions going forward.
Discovery drives us to ask what lies beyond what we know, what was there before the big bang, what the end looks like. These are questions which will not go away.