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| Georges Lemaître |
This
question has fascinated scientists since 1931, when the Belgian astronomer,
physicist and priest Georges Lemaître formulated the theory of the primordial atom,
which since 1950 was known as the Big Bang theory.
According to this cosmological theory, as the universe is expanding, if we move
back in time we must come to a point (13,800 million years ago, the cosmologists
tell us) when it would have gone through a singularity,
with a volume tending to zero, while pressure and density would tend to
infinity. Could this have been the beginning of the universe?
In 1951
Pope Pius XII, in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said the
following words:
A mind illuminated and enriched
by modern scientific knowledge, calmly evaluating this problem, is led to break
the circle of a matter entirely independent and autochthonous, either uncreated,
or because it has arisen by itself, and to rise to a creative Spirit... It
seems really that present science, by jumping back over millions of centuries,
has succeeded in being witness to that primordial “Fiat lux”, when out of
nowhere burst forth, together with matter, a sea of light and radiation, while
the particles of the chemical elements split and were reunited into millions of
galaxies
