The Hunt for the Beginning and Scope of the Universe

It became fashionable in the 20th century to say that World War I and the horrors that followed it, including Nazism, communism and World War II, destroyed the 19th century notion of progress, the idea that humankind was steadily improving in every way.

Human nature seems not to have changed for the better; human institutions, perhaps. But certainly science in all its forms clearly validates the concept of progress. We know more about the nature of the universe today than we did yesterday, and we shall know more tomorrow than we do today.

Martin Gorst’s “Measuring Eternity” is a lively account of one of the prime goals of scientific inquiry, the hunt for the beginning, size and scope of the universe. The ancient world, he writes, (he focuses on science in the West) tended to think of the world as a repetition of cycles without beginning or end. That view was changed only when Christians, armed with the Hebrew Bible and their own additions to it, took over the Roman Empire. As they did, St. Augustine in “The City of God” set forth the proposition that would govern Western thought for 1,500 years, that the Book of Genesis described the creation of the world as it actually happened: The world, and time, had a beginning, before which was nothing.

Over the years various scholars and churchmen tried to pinpoint the exact date on which the world was created. Gorst says that at least 128 dates were proposed, ranging from 6904 BC down to 3761 BC. It was left to an Irish Anglican bishop, James Ussher, to establish the date that was widely printed in Bibles for the English-speaking world until the early years of the 20th century.

Years of study and reading, Ussher announced in “The Annals of the World,” published in 1650, led him to fix the timeand day of the creation as 6 p.m. on the evening of Saturday, Oct. 22, 4004 BC. Even as Ussher published his book, however, doubters were beginning to question the literal truth of the Bible. At first these thinkers worked within the bounds of the Christian tradition. About the same time that Ussher published, the Frenchman Isaac La Peyrere said people had to exist before Adam and Eve, or else how did their son Cain find a wife? Students of nature were also finding fossils and studying mountains. How, they asked, did Noah’s flood fit in with what their eyes told them?

The spreading habit of scientific inquiry reached a crescendo in the 19th century, when the emerging sciences of geology and, under Charles Darwin’s great discovery of the laws of evolution and natural selection, the new zoology combined to overthrow Ussher’s now-ludicrous dating system. The world was much older than previously thought.

But how old? It would take scientists until the end of the 20th century to reach an agreed-upon conclusion about the age and size of the universe.

Gorst, a writer and director of science documentaries for, among others, the Discovery Channel and Britain’s Channel 4, tells the story in a lively and engaging fashion. He gives the reader a fine sense of how science actually works--in fits and starts, chasing up blind alleys and beginning again, always testing hypotheses against experience.

Gorst’s particular virtue is that he uses the men and women who work in science to tell the story of the science they do. He presents them vividly: Here is Sir Isaac Newton, working stubbornly and laboriously to prove the Bible chronology correct; here is Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch telescope on Mt. Wilson to discover that the universe is far vaster than anyone had imagined; here is Albert Einstein, presiding over 20th century science like its avuncular inventor, sometimes wrong but mostly right; here are Hubble, George Gamow and others working toward the theory that a rapidly expanding universe all began with a “big bang,” as it was derisively termed by English physicist Fred Hoyle.

Most scientists who study these things agree that the rapidly expanding universe is about 13.4 billion years old, give or take a billion. Gorst explains skillfully how we got to this point. Yet, he writes, “the only certainty, if history has anything to tell us, is that this latest age for the universe won’t be the last.”

Every night astronomers are peering deeper into space and further into the past. And, as they do, he says, “we dream that one day, just maybe, we will know for certain the true entirety of time.”