Allan Sandage Quotes

In the years that followed there erupted a dispute that would run and run, between Allan Sandage, heir to Hubble at Mount Wilson, and Gérard de Vaucouleurs, a French-born astronomer based at the University of Texas.

It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It was only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence.

Those measurements of the Hubble constant on the “wrong” side of 60 that displeased Allan Sandage because they suggested a universe younger than its oldest stars? Problem solved. Those large-scale structures of supercluster filaments that seemed too mature for such a young universe? Problem solved. The universe was “too” young only if you assumed that the expansion rate had been decelerating throughout the history of the universe, or at least holding steady. A car that had been accelerating from 50 to 60 miles per hour and was only now reaching 65 would have needed more time to cover the same stretch of road than a car that had already been cruising at 65 miles per hour or slowing down from 70. If the expansion were decelerating, hitting the brakes, it would have been going faster in the “recent” past, and therefore taking less time to reach the present, than if it had just been constant. But an expansion that was accelerating today, hitting the gas, going faster and faster, would have been going less fast in the recent past, taking more time to reach the present. Thanks to acceleration, the age of the universe seemed to be, roughly, in the range of fifteen billion years, safely in the older-than-its-firstborn, old-enough-to-have-mature-filaments range. But

El Salmo 19:1 dice: “Los cielos cuentan la gloria de Dios, el firmamento proclama la obra de sus manos”39. A decir verdad, está escrito a través de los cielos tan vívidamente que cada vez más científicos que buscan las estrellas, se están volviendo cristianos. »El gran cosmólogo Allan Sandage, quien ganó la versión de astronomía del Premio Nobel, concluyó que Dios es “la explicación para los milagros de la existencia”40. Sir Fred Hoyle, inventor de la teoría cosmológica del estado estacionario del universo para evitar la existencia de Dios, finalmente se volvió un creyente en un Diseñador Inteligente del universo. »El astrofísico Hugh Ross, quien obtuvo su doctorado en astronomía en la Universidad de Toronto e hizo estudios en quásars y galaxias, dijo que la evidencia científica e histórica “enraizó profundamente mi confianza en la veracidad de la Biblia”41. Robert Jastrow, un reconocido agnóstico, director del observatorio del monte Wilson y fundador del Instituto del Espacio Goddard, concluyó que el Big Bang apunta hacia Dios. Y me gusta lo que el físico y matemático Robert Griffiths dijo: “Si necesitamos un ateo para un debate, voy al departamento de filosofía. El departamento de física no es de mucha utilidad” 42. Lee, la evidencia, es muy clara.