310 VINCENT E. SMITH 



Von Welzsiicker who closely resembles Lemaitre and Gamow 

 in their cosmologies, speaks of a compressed primeval gas.^° 

 Lemaitre, tracing out the history of his exploding primeval 

 atom, has computed that if the 



fragmentation occurred in equal pieces, two hundred and sixty 

 generations would have been needed to reach the present pulveriza- 

 tion of matter into our poor little atoms, almost too small to be 

 broken again.^^ 



Summing up his theory on how the primeval atom expanded 

 into our present universe, Lemaitre with a flair for the poetic 

 says: 



The evolution of the world can be compared to a display of fire- 

 works that has just ended: some few red wisps, ashes, and smoke. 

 Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the slow fading of the 

 suns, and we try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of 

 worlds.-^ 



All of these theories, as the opening phrase in the preceding 

 quotation reminds us, are evolutionary. Gamow speaks of the 

 original Big Squeeze. Such a type of theory points to the 

 hypothesis for a beginning of some sort in the history of the 

 cosmos we now know. 



The beginning theory is regarded by Sir Edmund Whittaker 

 as an argument for Creation, even for Creation in time."^ 

 E. A. Milne spoke of a t = and held likewise to a temporal 

 beginning of our cosmos.-* With such a conclusion, however, 

 and as both of these experts would admit, we pass beyond the 

 frontiers of science in the narrow modern sense of the term 

 and enter a meta-scientific region. 



The more scientifically orthodox supporters of a beginning 

 theory usually do not range beyond the view that there was 

 some primeval matrix — an atom, a nuclear fluid, a compressed 

 gas — densely packed togther; from this original stuff our uni- 



*" Op. cit., p. 81. 



" Op. cit., p. 78. 



" Ibid. 



'^'^ Space and Spirit (London, 1946) pp. 118-121. 



"'^ Modem Cosmology and the Christian Idea oj God (Oxford, 1952) p. 58. 



