Denver Newsroom, May 3, 2022 / 17:00 pm
The Vatican Observatory announced last week a new mathematical model — drafted by two Catholic priests — for describing how gravity worked at the time of the creation of the universe.
The discovery hinges on scientists’ understanding of how the laws of gravity behaved at the time of the Big Bang, when the universe suddenly and rapidly expanded outward from a small, dense spot known as a singularity.
The new model, proposed by Fathers Gabriele Gionti S.J and Matteo Galaverni of the Diocese of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla, seeks to describe, using mathematics, how gravity would have functioned in the midst of what is known as “cosmological inflation,” i.e. this rapid expansion of the universe during and after the Big Bang.
The effects of gravity on large objects in the universe, such as planets and stars, are described by scientists according to Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. In contrast, the tiniest objects in the universe — atoms, electrons, quarks, etc. — behave according to very different rules, known as quantum mechanics.