Friday, February 15

 

Catholic Super Secret Science Fact of the Day


The period before the Big Bang (an idea itself proposed by a Jesuit priest-scholar) is sometimes called in physics by an extremely Catholic name:
In 1952, George Gamow, one of the founding fathers of Big Bang cosmology, proposed that the period before the Big Bang be called the Augustinian era, after the philosopher Saint Augustine, who believed time was solely a property of the God-created Universe. Even though one could philosophically argue over the meaning of the phrase "to create", through the theory of general relativity space and time can be related to each other. The phrase "Augustinian Era" stands as a testament to the fact that the known laws of physics break down in a gravitational singularity of a geometric point at the time zero of the Big Bang and that, before then, time as we know it is meaningless.
Thank you, Wikipedia. A footnote indicates Gamow actually spoke of it as "St. Augustine's Era," but Augustinian sounds much snappier.

As to what God was doing before all that, in light of modern string theory, I humbly suggest the solution lies in one simple word: macrame. A whoooole lot of macrame.

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