We’ve known for years that there was a missing item in the library of books about intelligent design. Well, not only one, but one that has been primarily on our minds. ID is a challenging scientific subject to explain. Not everyone is ready to settle down with a hefty and heady tome of 500 pages or more — especially not if the reader is a teen or young adult. And yet, the purposeful design of life and the cosmos is no less important for such. A person to appreciate than for the older reader. It may be more critical. An easily relatable story with charming artwork seemed the best approach for someone like that. That’s why we’re so delighted to introduce The Farm at the Center of the Universe by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jonathan Witt, with illustrations by Otniel Araujo. It’s the very first novel from Discovery Institute Press. The subject is the “book of nature,” as one character puts it, whose “pages are all around us.” The novel tells the story of Isaac, whose father died young. Why did he die? How could that be fair? Isaac’s older cousin Charlie — a science teacher — says he knows why. There’s no God. No afterlife. Just atoms in the void and the struggle for survival. Charlie says a week at their grandparents’ farm, seeing animals get killed and eaten, will prove it.
The Big Bang theory changed how we understand our universe. But who do we have to thank for it? On a new episode of ID the Future, I conclude my conversation with esteemed cosmologist Jean-Pierre Luminet, who sets the record straight on the real heroes of the Big Bang theory with his new book The Big Bang Revolutionaries, available now from Discovery Institute Press.
In Part 2, Dr. Luminet begins by shedding more light on Georges Lemaître, the Big Bang theory’s chief architect. Lemaître demonstrated a rare humility, more concerned with pursuing an accurate understanding of the universe than with who got credit for the theory. Luminet explains why it took so long for scientists to accept Lemaître’s theory over other competing theories of the universe’s origins. Luminet also shares insights into two other architects of the Big Bang theory: Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann and Russian-American physicist and cosmologist George Gamow. Luminet concludes by explaining the state of relativistic cosmology today. “We can now say really that we have entered an era of high precision experimental cosmology,” says Luminet, allowing us to fix the fundamental parameters of the universe to within a few percent. However, several questions remain about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Meanwhile, the Big Bang theory has been in the news lately.