I’ve begun and stopped a couple blog posts since Trump was re-elected: We’re in that twilight time, that time when the thought of a man like Trump being president sounds reasonable. Before he becomes the news again and everyone is reminded about exactly how fucked up and stupid he is. Seriously, Trump people, what the fuck was so great about his handling of Covid the first time he was president? Is Anthony Fauci still the bad guy? We’ll get all caught up in the insanity real soon, kiddies, and I apologize for the f-bombs but all bets are off now that he’s (gulp) president (again*). The last time Trump was elected, I compared him to Benito Mussolini, so this time around, let’s go with Napoleon, so we begin our voyage in the remotest place on Earth: Saint Helena Island. Not really, but when the English stuck the dictator there after his Waterloo, at least that was the most remote place in the British Empire. Do you know anything else about St. Helena Island? Perhaps you know about the nearly 10,000 remains of enslaved persons unfortunately discovered while constructing the new airport road? BTW, if I can fly to St. Helena now in 4 hours, can it even be called remote anymore? The new airport is a hellacious landing for pilots, the black basalt island jutting up from an old volcano on the floor of the south Atlantic Ocean is a nice place to visit, but very few Australian and Dutch emigres actually want to live there.

In 1680, a 20-year old by the name of, (don’t call him ‘Sir’) Edmond Halley, of comet fame, visited the little island to map the Southern stars as Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer had done for the Northern stars. In this distant, dank and dark place the young Halley began to conceptualize his theory of cometary movement, Halley (pronounced ‘HAW-Lee’ in his day, HAY-Lee when Bill Haley and the Comets rocked around the clock in the 1950s) was a polymath and a great scientist and student of history, he studied Ptolemy’s handy guide, the Almagest, a star catalogue written in Greek around the year 150, (the original was lost to history, but copied and saved by Arabic scholars) and by 1706 Halley had learned the Arabic language with enough facility that he completed a translation started by Edward Bernard of Apollonius’s Conics (from copies found at the Leiden Observatory and at the Bodleian Library at Oxford) and the same year he received a law degree from Oxford. We don’t know who the author of the original Arabic translation of Ptolemy was, but based on a statement by Halley it was probably written under the ‘auspices’ of Al-Ma’mun, an astronomer and Caliph of Baghdad in the year 825, but Halley dates the work to 820 in the preface of the translation.

Halley had taken a sabbatical from Cambridge University after King Charles II persuaded the noxious East India Company to allow him free passage to St. Helena, where the young scholar set up his expensive telescope on a high ridge near a place called ‘Hutts Gate’ for the next 18 months, and the weather was crap, basically cloudy and misty every day unfortunately, (he should have stayed in the valley in Jamestown) but he did get enough star identification and luminosity (or brightness) data to finish his degree and after that he became obsessed with the life’s work of his friend and colleague: call him ‘Sir’ Isaac Newton. You see, back in 1682 Halley (and Newton) believed that comets traveled in perfectly straight lines, but Eddie had a hunch that the historical reports of certain comets, paired with Ike Newton’s new mathematics and the newly discovered inverse square law, which Halley thought revealed one particular comet that was first catalogued in 240 BC as recorded in the Chin Shu chronicles in China; also a similar comet was spotted in a Babylonian tablet dated to 164 AD; some weaker reports but still evidence of a comet appearance in 684 and then in 1066 a real clue for Halley: the famed Bayeau Tapestry with the woven comet heralding the world-shaking Norman invasion. Then in 1301 the stunning Star of Bethlehem painted by Giotto finally convinced Halley that this comet was the very same, pulled elliptically around the Sun like a giant, icy yo-yo throughout history, passing by us every 76 years or so, and he predicted that the next appearance of the comet would be in 1758, long after his passing at the ripe old age of 85.

When at first proposed, Newton doubted Halley’s theory of comets, but he changed his mind after he took note of Halley’s wide-ranging research and it was Halley’s prediction, using Newton’s mechanics, that was one of the very first scientific experiments to prove Newton’s theory absolutely correct, and it just so happens that the next giant in Western science, Albert Einstein, was helped to be proven absolutely correct by another meticulous astronomer: so it’s good we remember Edwin Powell Hubble as the father of the Big Bang, because Hubble was a scientist of the first order as well as a pretty decent high school basketball coach in the great State of Indiana — and that’s sayin’ something. First off, some basic facts. If you want to argue with me about science, please first watch all of Cosmos (1980) with Dr. Carl Sagan. Enlighten yourself. It’s a testament to his lifelong passion for science and still remarkably accurate considering all that has transpired in science in the past 50 years. In this fantastic 9-part documentary series, Sagan shares his wonder of the Universe from his low-budget PBS spaceship as he travels through the Solar System and beyond. In one of the early episodes he connects the Hindu tradition of the Rig Veda to what science has found to be the actual age of the Universe, and the possibility a more ‘cyclical’ rather than ‘static’ nature of the Cosmos (the word for ‘Universe’ in ancient Greek), staking his claim to the debate that our Universe is about fourteen billion years old (13.7), and as frequently noted by Sagan, famous for saying “billions,” (in this case, human years) — is just one day in the life of Brahma. From the Veda:

[A] day of His constitutes our kalpa, His night too similarly another kalpa. There are fourteen Manus by the time a thousand sets of four yugas come to a close. O brahmins, the Kurta yuga consists of four thousand years. Four hundred, three hundred, two hundred and one hundred years respectively constitute the period of transition both at the beginning and end of a yuga.

In a breath Vishnu exhales, and thousands of Universes emerge and one Brahma is born in each. When Vishnu inhales, all Universes are Bogarted up and every Brahma disappears. This cycle is never-ending and eternal.

In astronomy and cosmology (now lumped together in what’s called ‘astrophysics’) some of the great scientists since 1900 include Edward Charles Pickering; Annie Jump Cannon; Vesto Slipher; Henrietta Swan Leavitt; Harlow Shapley; Fred Whipple; Arthur Eddington; Walter Baade; Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin; George Gamow; Ralph Alpher; Beatrice Tinsley; Robert Herman; Margaret Gellman; Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and most recently Stephen Hawking, Robert Penrose, James Peebles, Alan Lightman and Alan Guth are among the most luminous, but it was the brightest and most brilliant, Albert Einstein, who initially rejected the Big Bang theory out of hand, (shutting down research for years) however following Hubble’s data, which confirmed that the Universe is expanding (exponentially it turns out) by providing the undeniable evidence with his meticulous, direct observations (it’s beautiful how in Cosmos Sagan highlights the humble Milton Humason, the uneducated assistant to Hubble, who started out as a mule team driver — and Sagan delights in the thought), his able assistant Humason literally worked his way up Mount Wilson with all the supplies needed to get up and running, then up into the massive 100-inch Hooker Telescope — a janitor at first — but then on to become the ‘right hand man’ to the man behind the Hubble Law. 

Since time began, some folks have looked up at the night sky, the Milky Way and the Moon and stars and thought, wow! What’s all THIS? Other people have chosen to say, “meh” and looked at the fire or their feet or whatever and that’s fine, but some have thought geez, I wonder how far away those twinkling lights are? I wonder what they’re made of? Why do they stay up there and why do some move differently from the others (the ‘wanderers’), and why do some of these ’clumps’ (galaxies) look all smudgy? These and (Carl Sagan accent here) billions of other such questions have engaged cosmologists, astronomers, (and astrologers) since the beginning of time and if biology began when we looked down at the ground — physics — more accurately astrophysics, began when we looked up at the night sky. Or maybe when one cave person hit another cave person with a rock. And every single important question about classical mechanics has been effectively answered by these incredible cosmologists and astronomers. It’s only in the fine structure, the quantum details of the nanotechnology world and the huge scales at the edge of the space-time bubble, shown in the earliest examples of the Universe in the furthest galaxies that we can identify with telescopes — with dark matter and black holes still to be explained — we really don’t know what’s actually happening at the very small and very far away scales, however physicists and astrophysicists have some ideas. Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke extended our knowledge into fictional realms that may speak to future truths, but unlike Asimov, Clarke and even Carl Sagan, I’m not an atheist. I’m not even an agnostic. I’m a lapsed Catholic, and that makes me an undecided voter when it comes to the subject of the unmoved mover (or maybe just a lazy bum), so to keep my mind off Trump I learned more about the life of an extraordinary cosmologist by the name of George Lemaître, known later in life as Monsignor Georges Edward Lemaître: the true ‘Father of the Big Bang.’

Lemaître was born in Southern Belgium, in Charleroi, west of the Meuse valley, in the ‘Pays Noir’ (Black Country), where coal seams held big anthracite deposits. In Southeast Belgium, along the border with Luxembourg and Germany is the region known as the Ardennes. Lemaître went to St. Michael’s (Saint-Michel) College in Brussels and then on to the Catholic University of Luvain (Leuven) when the 20-year old graduate student and his brother Jack (Jacques) went out for a bike ride to the mountains in midsummer, 1914 to celebrate George’s birthday but instead of touring the Tyrol, they sprinted back to their hometown of Charleroi because the Germans had begun the invasion of Belgium. They both volunteered on site and fought the Germans in the opening days of World War I, then transferred to the artillery in order to dig in with the inhuman trench warfare conditions in which positions were taken and recaptured again and again with a ridiculous toll of lives. Today in Belgium, all along the Yser River, several monuments and sites recall the horrors of the Great War, including the Yser Tower commemorating the chilling ’Death March’ in Diksmuide, Belgium, along the riverfront created after the flooding of the lowlands, part of the intensely heroic defense of the country of Belgium in WWI, and even though the little Kaiser controlled 95% of the (neutral) country of Belgium, the Yser Front was an impenetrable, tiny and proudly independent part of Belgium that the invaders never got their bloody hands on.

The first Yser Tower was built in 1930 as a monument to Christian pacifism, however, it subsequently became an important political symbol for the Dutch Flemish movement and was subsequently destroyed in 1946 as a result of its association with Flemish nationalist collaboration in German-occupied Belgium in World War II. The current tower was rebuilt alongside the remains of the original and copied its design, finished in 1965, it remains a site of deep political significance to Flemish nationalists. In the destroyed college town of Luvain (Leuven), Lemaître saw his school’s medieval-aged library intentionally and systematically burned and destroyed by his German-speaking neighbors during the so-called ’Rape of Belgium’ and much has been written about how propaganda has played a big part in the bad memory of German Army conduct in Belgium at the onset of the war and the later Big One. Comparing genocides is improper and unproductive, however there’s no question that the German people under a dying empire committed the most inhumane and barbaric acts in Western history and we have the receipts submitted in evidence.

Ever since the Romans left mainland Europe, the dividing line between the Catholics of France and Spain and the Protestants of the Netherlands and Germany has always been in the heart of Europe in Belgium, and in Belgium the religious/language line is drawn further inward to Brussels; everything north of the capital city is Protestant Dutch and everything south is Catholic French. Well, pretty much everything. That was as true in 1914 as it is today, and in 1964, two years before Monsignor Lemaître died, he had rocks thrown through his windows because he represented the University administration in wanting to keep the old university French-speaking. This is a big deal in Belgium and if you ever go to there as I have, learn how to say “good morning” in both Dutch and French or you’ll be shunned one way or the other. Leuven and a great swath of Belgium that was once lorded over (literally) with typical French smugness took a couple of centuries to transform, but is now Dutch again — and this little cycle in history’s see-saw has gone up and down, over and over again. Oh yeah, and Waterloo, where Napoleon met his downfall in 1815, is just south of Brussels, north of Charleroi and east of Luvain, currently called Leuven (in Dutch).

Our ability to speak was developed later in our evolution as a species, in the frontal lobes of our brains and when we apprehend the finesse to reach down and pick up an ant with our thumb and forefinger, that is a miracle. When we speak to each other with our mouths (and hands) and understand meaning with our eyes and ears — that’s a miracle. Dialects of language are miraculous, part of the evolving life of the world’s myriad languages, constantly adapting and changing to meet the environment — which also serves to prove Darwin was right — that the tiny differences (or anomalies) are the real miracles in our evolution. That’s the nuanced, God-like part. For we humans to spit in the face of God and divide and provoke hatred between us, simply because we evolved enough as a species to know that we came from animals is a crime against nature itself. It’s the work of the devil in religion, demagoguery in politics and chaos in science. The fact that you speak Dutch and I speak French is what makes us human, it’s what connects us and not divides us. Linguistics professors will tell you, as genes and all DNA, languages (as all living things) share more than 98% of the same important stuff. Homo Sapiens (Sapiens) share 99.99% of the same DNA, so to say that any human being is ‘different’ from one another is a lie proven by the late, great biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Nobel Prize-winning physicist and dysgenic eugenicist William Shockley can kiss my Irish ass (4-7%) because he’s dead to me. I imagine he’s wearing a dunce cap while sitting in a corner of purgatory with Tim Burton-like football players hazing him for life by shoving his Nobel prize up his ass.

In 1921 Emperor Hirohito of Japan had the gall to visit the ruins of the destroyed Leuven Library, apparently symbolizing Japan’s emergence as a great, global superpower prior to the Great Depression, (but it was the United States’ financial contribution to reconstructing the library that got it done) while in China under Hirohito, over 4000 libraries would be destroyed during the Japanese occupation and right on cue — less than 20-years later — the newly rebuilt Leuven Library was destroyed for a second time by German forces during WWII. And 99.9% of the responsibility for those awful atrocities lies with all of us humans. We all did that! Great work humans! (yes, this is called ‘sarcasm’ and I’m still kinda bitter).

Back to science, after Humason and Hubble’s careful work using Henrietta Leavett’s ‘cepheid variable star’ catalog as a beacon, the famous 1920s debate would settle the matter for science (at the time) when Harlow Shapley conceded that the Andromeda Galaxy was, indeed, far beyond our Milky Way Galaxy and immediately after accepting Hubble’s victory, Einstein was the first to endorse both Georges Lemaître and his radical, now widely accepted theory, (the refinement of the Big Bang theory is currently called the Gold-Biondi-Lemaitre theory), so why isn’t George Lemaître better known in America? He certainly was a curiosity to the American public after making a big media splash when he returned to the US in the 1950s, winning the prestigious Franke Prize, (with Einstein’s endorsement) and with that healthy donation to the collection box, the Vatican took note and corrected past injustices by fully supporting Father Lemaître and the science of cosmology (no small thing for a Darwinist cleric, however the Pope later gave him the ‘high hat’ too) and the notoriety garnered due to the international debate in the late ‘50s between Father Lemaître and the British Cosmologist Fred Hoyle (who coined the term ‘Big Bang’ — some claim it was an insult, but that isn’t quite true), Father Lemaître, this standard-issue, French-speaking Catholic priest dutifully wore his cassock and collar his whole adult life, and between delivering Mass, the sacrament of marriage and receiving confessions, he would read up on the latest paper on general relativity and it was he, not Einstein, who’s math added up about the biggest question of them all, cleverly utilizing Einstein’s world-changing theory of general relativity to ‘re-formulate’ the theory that is now beginning to explain dark matter and things called ‘wormholes.’ Oh, and everything else in between, with Einstein and Lemaître’s logic to support it, from just one second after the Big Bang, but before that (fraction) of a second of the Bang, our physics didn’t exist because nothing can exist in that state, not matter or even time, (sort of what we think of as an ‘event horizon’ in relation to the edge of a black hole in today’s imagination) so don’t even ask about it.

Ukrainian mathematician Alexander Friedmann should also be remembered for his discovery of much of the same math underpinning what we call the Big Bang theory and the expansion of the Universe; and it was Al Einstein himself who informed Lemaître about Friedmann’s work during an impromptu stroll around the 1927 Solvay Conference, famous for the photograph made later on the front steps at the conclusion of the conference that centered primarily around Einstein’s ‘special’ relativity and Bohr and Schrödinger’s quantum mechanics rather than Einstein’s now (relatively boring) theory of ‘general’ relativity and how it applied to the budding field of cosmology, but Father Lemaître eyed his chance to corner the legendary Einstein to talk some of his ‘new-school’ math, he stalked the great Einstein as the German quietly smoked his pipe in the garden, but Einstein was intrigued as he listened to the Belgian Lemaître’s affable explanation, (now, I wonder if they spoke in German, French or perhaps English?) and the great Einstein claimed Lemaître’s work to be unoriginal and unworkable between pipe puffs, saying that it was proven by Friedmann’s math (not the case, and Friedmann hadn’t applied his math to the specific problem of expansion) but then Lemaître recognized his chance to remind Einstein that it was the Doppler effect shown in Hubble’s data, that galaxies are moving away from us (and each other), or ‘red shifting’ under the spectroscopy interferometer (that also further proved that Einstein‘s theory actually worked), using Newton’s math for gravity and Einstein’s ‘cosmological constant’ for (possibly?) dark matter itself, Einstein reversed himself about a steady-state Universe after the Big Bang Theory was introduced and proven, just as Isaac Newton had with Halley, and it was the (mostly) humble George Lemaître who stood with colleague Albert Einstein, so striking in their differences and yet so similar in their enthusiasm for, and dedication to science. In one of two paths to the ultimate truth of our Universe and the mysteries still waiting to be revealed by humankind, in both cases, the world’s most incomparable geniuses got it wrong — Newton and Einstein — but they changed their minds to reflect the ultimate truth of prevailing theories that stand today. Lemaître was the first to propose what we now call the Big Bang Theory, fully expressed in his paper, The Beginning of the World from the Point of Quantum Theory (1931) the theory that the Universe began from the explosion of a small, original ‘primeval atom’ as Lemaître called it, and he predicted the existence of the ‘cosmological background’ (or CMB) that was ultimately discovered by Arno  Penzias and Robert Wilson just prior to Father Lemaître’s passing in the summer of 1966, the ‘smoke and ashes,’ as he called it, that appeared just after the Big Bang singularity. Halley’s Comet has finally reached aphelion, or the furthest point in its current orbit away from us, approximately 3.27 billion miles away (further than the furthest planet in our solar system) and is now speeding directly back at us at 30,000 miles an hour. In November 1703, Halley published Astronomiae cometicae synopsis (A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets, also describing the comet sightings of 1456, 1531, 1607, and 1682) and he came upon the notion that comets orbit the Sun and don’t go in straight lines, just as Newton’s math predicted.

I grew up on Observatory Hill in Cambridge, named for the Harvard Observatory, where one of my good friend’s mothers worked for what is now called the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, a collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the old Harvard College Observatory. The Observatory Hill has a proud tradition in astronomy and cosmology, especially among women scientists under the leadership of the Pickering Brothers and later Harlow Shapley, and Harvard became one of the epicenters of astronomy in the last century, especially the work of Henrietta Leavett who discovered the first ‘variable’ star and Cecilia Payne, who in 1925 became the first woman in America to earn a PhD in Astronomy. I’ll write a diatribe about women’s rights and science asap, but one of the big reasons that astronomy gained such an interest in America (and everywhere else) was because of Halley’s Comet, especially in 1910 when the widespread use of photography helped make the event a media sensation. ‘Shooting stars’ and meteoroids (‘lil asteroids!) are remnants of a comet’s core and all comets eventually melt into meteor ‘swarms’ and Halley’s is now well into that melting phase of life (tell me about it) and this time around, the ‘ol comet might completely fall apart during the next perihelion.

The great astronomer Johannes Kepler predicted that there were as many comets in the galaxy as “fish in the sea,” the nearby Oort cloud contains 100 billion comets, so we’re in a big galaxy, folks. I push the truth a bit here because our Milky Way is basically an average-sized galaxy, but big, it is. It takes 250 million years for us to make one, single orbit around this big Way and our closest neighbor in the ‘local group’ of galaxies, the Andromeda Galaxy, is the furthest object in the night sky that we can see with our own two eyes. In 1986, I was 19 years old when I went to see Halley’s Comet during its last appearance and it sucked: on February 9, 1986, as it arrived at perihelion (closest to the Sun) no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see the damned comet 1P/Halley, because that time it swung by the other side of the Sun on the semi-sesquicentennial flyby and it was hard to see. Many countries sent out a bunch of incredible probes that got some wonderful research data, but the comet gazing was a bust, frankly, but eleven years later we were treated to the spectacular Hale-Bopp comet and all the craziness that came and went with that one, which won’t reappear for another few thousand years, but like clockwork on the evening of July 28, 2061, Halley’s Comet will reach perihelion and will again be visible to the naked eye here on Earth and that is all but certain. A little less certain is that we will all still be here on Earth to enjoy it with Trump back in charge, but if we outlive this second term and some less crazy ones after, with enough awareness left to witness it, if I am still alive here on this planet, for my 95th birthday present, I hope I can see Halley’s Comet this time. Might be one in a million, but you’re sayin’ I got a chance. 

Anyway, the Big Bang Theory, the television show, written and produced by Bill Prady and the brilliant Chuck Lorre that ran from 2007-2019 had the best theme song in TV history. Lorre enlisted the Canadian band the Barenaked Ladies to write the song for the hit show, where Lorre had caught them at a concert as he was developing the show, when the lead singer improvised a freestyle rap about the origins of the Universe and Lorre loved it and hired the band and Ed Robertson, who supposedly wrote the rap in the shower in 15-minutes, but it didn’t hurt that he had just read the book, Big Bang by Simon Singh and in my opinion, the little rap is the best summation of the Big Bang and what has happened since:

Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state, then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started (wait). The earth began to cool, the autotrophs began to drool, Neanderthals developed tools, we built a wall (we built the pyramids), math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries that all started with the Big Bang.

*Bang*

Carl Holt

January 18, 2025 —— ⬇️🇷🇺 google-site-verification=7zAA3HvJNbSGeTktQtkFF654-aL52usn-uPWBhrnRCM