Where Did the Universe Come From
Where Did the Universe Come From — After learning of the Big Bang, I came to see aging a little differently. If the universe has lived 13.8 billion years and is cooling still, then a single human lifetime is but a brief warmth within that vast span. Yet that brevity does not mean it is trivial. When I think that a sliver of iron in my body was forged in the heart of some star billions of years ago, I am not small at all. To ask after the beginning was, in the end, to ask after my own roots. We are all descendants of an ancient light, set out from the same single point. And one question, never fully solved, still remains: before that beginning, what truly was there?
Anyone who has looked up at the night sky has held this question at least once: where did all of this come from? The stars, the earth, even myself. Was it always there, or did it begin at some moment? And if there was a beginning, what was there before the beginning?
For ages, people believed the universe was eternal and unchanging — always the same, with no beginning and no end. In the 1920s, Lemaitre, a Belgian priest and physicist, held a different thought. If the universe is expanding, then rewind time and would not everything gather into a single point? He called it the "primeval atom." His idea that the universe had a beginning was at first met with ridicule. One astronomer mocked it as the "Big Bang" — yet that very name endured forever.
In 1929, Hubble found through his telescope that distant galaxies were all moving away from us — and the farther they lay, the faster they fled. The universe was expanding like rising bread dough. Rewind time and everything begins at a single point 13.8 billion years ago. The decisive proof came in 1964. Two engineers, trying to remove noise, found a faint radio hum coming from every direction of the sky. It was the last warmth left as the primeval fireball cooled — the first light of the universe. The echo of 13.8 billion years ago still rings across the whole sky.
- The carbon and iron that make our bodies were all forged inside stars. We are, quite literally, beings shaped from the ash of cooled stars.
- Because its light has traveled billions of years, the James Webb telescope shows us, right now, the first galaxies from when the universe was newly born.
- The faint warmth left as the universe first cooled is still measured today. Even in part of the static between radio channels, the first light is mingled.
始는 모든 것이 처음 비롯되는 시초를 뜻하니, 시간과 공간이 함께 시작된 우주의 첫 순간과 통한다.
Meet this hanja in Cheonjamun →After learning of the Big Bang, I came to see aging a little differently. If the universe has lived 13.8 billion years and is cooling still, then a single human lifetime is but a brief warmth within that vast span. Yet that brevity does not mean it is trivial. When I think that a sliver of iron in my body was forged in the heart of some star billions of years ago, I am not small at all. To ask after the beginning was, in the end, to ask after my own roots. We are all descendants of an ancient light, set out from the same single point. And one question, never fully solved, still remains: before that beginning, what truly was there?
