THE INTELLECT THAT WORSHIPS
[TTP: Today’s articles were chosen specifically to show the results of thinking rationally and the refusal to do so.]
The deepest mind of the modern age sat in a lecture hall and admitted that a priest had out-thought him regarding the beginning of the world.
This is the story of how thinking all the way to the end stops looking like an argument and starts looking like awe.
In January of 1933, in a packed hall at Caltech, Albert Einstein listened to a Belgian priest explain how the universe began, and then he stood up in front of a room full of physicists and said it was the most beautiful explanation of creation he had ever heard.
This was not a man easily impressed, and it was not a conclusion he had wanted to reach.
A few years earlier Einstein had told the same priest, to his face, that his mathematics were fine but his physics were abominable. The idea offended him.
The priest, Georges Lemaître, was arguing that the universe was not the eternal, static, always-having-existed thing that every serious scientist assumed it to be.
He was arguing that it had a beginning. That if you ran the expansion of the galaxies backward far enough, everything collapsed to a single dense point, a moment before which there was no before.
Lemaître called it, with a poet’s ear, a day without yesterday.
Einstein hated it, and the reason he hated it is the most revealing part of the whole story.
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EL PASO, TX — Witnesses reported that a migrant woman gave birth right on the U.S.-Mexico border this morning, sadly making only the top half of the baby American.
