If you can see the constellations tonight, you might pick out Orion and his faithful dog on the trail of a vicious bear. But the lights blinking down on you are more than what — or when — they seem.
After spending the day with students, Father George Coyne spoke to a packed Love Auditorium on the night of April 14. In a lecture titled “The Dance of the Fertile Universe: Chance and Destiny Embrace,” the Jesuit astrophysicist, University of Arizona professor, and former Vatican Observatory director pointed out that nearly 1,300 light years separate us from the Orion nebula.
So the light we see in April 2010 was produced on a spring evening when Chinese chemists were inventing gunpowder (ca. 710 A.D.).
Look at it through various high-powered telescopes and you’ll see that Orion’s simple belt actually floats in a cloudy womb where countless new suns are incubating.
Coyne mentioned how atoms swirl around one another, combining, splitting, spawning new and heavier elements, interacting through both necessity and chance while hinting at the ways in which galaxies and humans came to be.
When two hydrogen molecules meet an oxygen, they must form water. But must they meet? The number of failed processes in space dwarf successful ones. Yet 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars litter the universe. That doesn’t even account for earth-like specs of galactic sand, he said.
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| Jesuit astrophysicist George Coyne (left) speaks to students and visiting faculty in the Galileo, Church & Scientific Endeavor course. With him is Professor Jeffrey Bary. (Photo by Andy Daddio) |
Destiny and chance have produced three generations of stars since the beginning of time. Coyne argued that the ferment generated enough carbon and other elements to build our own toenails, hair, arms, legs, and evermore complicated brains.
But there’s a giant leap from the building blocks of life to life itself, and that is where the scientific becomes philosophical.
Did God do it? “I don’t know,” Coyne admitted. But if he did, “God is a nurturing parent with respect to the universe.” He has created something dynamic, then allowed it to assert its own personality, for better or worse.
“I thought he made a lot of concrete arguments using science, and he made a distinction between what he believes versus what he can prove,” said astronomy major Michael Lam ’11.
The lack of a single concrete answer doesn’t disturb Coyne. When scholarship falls short, he has his faith. Furthermore, if the lifetime of the universe were reduced to a single year, the birth of Gallileo and modern science would have occurred at 11:59:59 p.m.
“We’ve only been studying these things for a second,” said Coyne. “Give us another minute.”