younger scientists were so upset by these theological trends that they resolved simply to block their cosmological source,” commented the German astronomer Otto Heckmann, a prominent investigator of cosmic expansion. The dean of the profession, Sir Arthur Eddington, wrote that “the notion of a beginning is repugnant to me… . I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang … the expanding Universe is preposterous … incredible … it leaves me cold.”
Even some believing scientists were troubled. The cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle felt that an explosion was an undignified way for the world to begin, rather like “a party girl jumping out of a cake.” In a BBC interview in the 1950s, Hoyle sardonically referred to the hypothesized origin as “the Big Bang.” The term stuck.
Einstein, not long before his death in 1955, managed to overcome his metaphysical scruples about the Big Bang. He referred to his earlier attempt to dodge it by an ad hoc theoretical device as “the greatest blunder of my career.” As for Hoyle and the rest of the skeptics, they were finally won over in 1965 when two scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey accidently detected a pervasive microwave hiss that turned out to be the echo of the Big Bang. (At first the scientists thought the hiss was caused by pigeon droppings on their antenna.) If you turn on your television and tune it between stations, about 10 percent of that black-and-white speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the birth of the universe. What greater proof of the reality of the Big Bang—you can watch it on TV.
Whether or not the universe had a creator, the finding that it came into existence at a finite time in the past—13.7 billion years ago, according to the latest cosmological calculations—appeared to make a mockery of the idea that it was ontologically self-sufficient. Anything that exists by its own nature, it seems reasonable to assume, must be eternal and imperishable. The universe now looked to be neither of these things. Just as it winked into existence with an initial Big Bang, expanding and evolving into its present form, so too it might wink out of existence in some distant future epoch with an annihilating Big Crunch. (Whether the ultimate fate of the universe will be a Big Crunch, a Big Chill, or a Big Crack-up is a wide-open question in cosmology today.) The life of the universe, like each of our lives, may be a mere interlude between two nothings.
Thus did the discovery of the Big Bang make the question Why is there something rather than nothing? much harder to dodge. “If the universe hadn’t always existed, science would be confronted by the need for an explanation of its existence,” observed Arno Penzias, who shared a Nobel Prize for detecting the afterglow of the Big Bang. Not only was the original why question a live one, but it now needed to be supplemented by a how question: How could something have arisen from nothing? Besides giving renewed hope to religious apologists, the Big Bang hypothesis opened up a new and purely scientific inquiry into the ultimate origin of the universe. And the explanatory possibilities seemed to multiply. There were, after all, two revolutionary developments in twentieth-century physics. One of them, Einstein’s relativity theory, led to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning in time. The other, quantum mechanics, had even more radical implications. It threw into doubt the very idea of cause and effect. According to quantum theory, events at the micro-level happen in aleatory fashion; they violate the classical principle of causation. This opened up the conceptual possibility that the seed of the universe might itself have come into being without a cause, supernatural or otherwise. Perhaps the world arose spontaneously from sheer nothingness. All existence might be chalked up to a random fluctuation in the void, a “quantum tunneling” from nothingness into being. Exactly how this could have happened has become the province of a small but influential group of physicists who are sometimes referred to as “nothing theorists.” With a mixture of metaphysical chutzpah and naivete, these physicists—who include Stephen Hawking among their number—think they might be able to resolve a mystery heretofore considered untouchable by science.
INSPIRED, PERHAPS, BY this scientific ferment, philosophers have been showing more ontological boldness. Logical positivism, which had dismissed the question Why is there something rather than nothing? as nonsensical, was defunct by the 1960s,