The question of how the universe came to be is a common one now, and the Big Bang theory does a good job of giving us clues on what actually happened. However, has anyone stopped to think what there was before the huge explosion of matter? Scientists have, and they say there could very well have been a twin universe to ours before this one came to be. Details in the full article.

The Big Bang is a big conundrum and a lot of people have been debating this topic for a long time. There are people who believe that it happened more than four hundred million years ago, others say it never happened. The cosmic background radiation is an old token from the earliest age of the universe. The small differences in  temperature offers an integral hint on how galaxies formed and it shows how matter began to collect itself. Once measured, scientists would be closer to the time when the universe exploded into creation. Ergo, someone had to find the blackbody spectrum.

It was up to John Mather of NASA and George Smoot from the University of California to find it. They were able to find proof and got a great big medal in the end--the prestigious 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics. The two made a large contribution to the Big Bang theory and they were heavily involved in the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), a satellite that measures the diffuse infrared and microwave radiation from the early ages of the universe. J. Mather was the one who revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation, while G. Smoot measured the small variations in the temperature.

Congratulations to the two scientists. We hope that with this knowledge, people will be more appreciative of how the universe , and eventually the Earth, came into being.

Religion and science are often depicted as mortal enemies. But Stephen Barra, a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware, begs to disagree and wants to set the record straight. True, science has Galileo as its poster boy for those who think religion would rather have a world cloaked in ignorance rather than have  its dogma challenged.

But Barr reminds us that some of the greatest scientific minds happen to be people of religion:

• Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics was an Austrian monk
• Georges Lema?e, one of the founders of the Big Bang Theory was a Belgian priest/physicist
• Fr. Christoph Scheiner was one of the discoverers of sunspots and discovered the rotation of the sun on its axis
• Fr. Francesco Grimaldi discovered an extremely important effect in physics called the "diffraction" of light
  
• Fr. Lazzaro Spallanzani was considered as one of the top biologists in the world in the 18th century
• Fr. Marin Mersenne, the father of acoustic, discovered basic facts about wave motion and sound
• Fr. Giovanni Riccioli discovered the first "binary star"
• Fr. Angelo Secchi was one of the the founders of modern astrophysics
• Bisghop  Nicholas Oresme was the first to graph mathematical functions and discovered how to combine exponents
• Fr. Niels Stensen is considered as one of the founders of geology

Apparently abstinence is good for the brain as well as the soul.

Read the rest of the article after the jump.