2014 could turn out to be an historic year in science.
Recently radio astronomers who had been operating at the South Pole announced they have discovered proof of the Big Bang theory of how the universe began, they say 14 billion years ago.
What they actually detected is what we could call ‘skew’ polarised microwaves from space which might indirectly point to the existence of gravitational waves emanating from the period of ‘inflation’ – the rapid expansion, at a speed far greater than the speed of light, of the very early universe. This inflationary moment is said to have lasted from 10 to the power of -36 to sometime around 10 to the power of -32 seconds following the Big Bang. Afterwards the universe continued to expand but at a much slower rate. Inflation theory is needed to iron out problems in the ‘standard model’ of the universe – like why the galaxies are evenly distributed throughout space and why the background temperature of the universe is the same throughout when, without inflation, it would not have had time to mix and come to equilibrium.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …