describe bumba choosing our universe
Answers
Explanation:
Choosing Our Universe. CCORDING TO THE BOSHONGO PEOPLE of central Africa, in the beginning there was only darkness, water, and the great god Bumba. One day Bumba, in pain from a stomachache, vomited up the sun. In time the sun dried up some of the water, leaving land.
Answer:
in the beginning there was only darkness, water, and the great god Bumba. One day Bumba, in pain from a stomachache, vomited up the sun. In time the sun dried up some of the water, leaving land. But Bumba was still in pain, and vomited some more. Up came the moon, the stars, and then some animals: the leopard, the crocodile, the turtle, and finally man. The Mayans of Mexico and Central America tell of a similar time before creation when all that existed were the sea, the sky, and the Maker. In the Mayan legend the Maker, unhappy because there was no one to praise him, created the earth, mountains, trees, and most animals. But the animals could not speak, and so he decided to create humans. First he made them of mud and earth, but they only spoke nonsense. He let them dissolve away and tried again, this time fashioning people from wood. Those people were dull. He decided to destroy them, but they escaped into the forest, sustaining damage along the way that altered them slightly, creating what we today know as monkeys. After that fiasco, the Maker finally came upon a formula that worked, and constructed the first humans from white and yellow corn. Today we make ethanol from corn, but so far haven’t matched the Maker’s feat of constructing the people who drink it.
Creation myths like these all attempt to answer the questions we address in this book: Why is there a universe, and why is the universe the way it is? Our ability to address such questions has grown steadily in the centuries since the ancient Greeks, most profoundly over the past century. Armed with the background of the previous chapters, we are now ready to offer a possible answer to these questions.
One thing that may have been apparent even in early times was that either the universe was a very recent creation or else human beings have existed for only a small fraction of cosmic history. That’s because the human race has been improving so rapidly in knowledge and technology that if people had been around for millions of years, the human race would be much further along in its mastery.
According to the Old Testament, God created Adam and Eve only six days into creation. Bishop Ussher, primate of all Ireland from 1625 to 1656, placed the origin of the world even more precisely, at nine in the morning on October 27, 4004 BC. We take a different view: that humans are a recent creation but that the universe itself began much earlier, about 13.7 billion years ago.
The first actual scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning came in the 1920s. As we said in Chapter 3, that was a time when most scientists believed in a static universe that had always existed. The evidence to the contrary was indirect, based upon the observations Edwin Hubble made with the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson, in the hills above Pasadena, California. By analyzing the spectrum of light they emit, Hubble determined that nearly all galaxies are moving away from us, and the farther away they are, the faster they are moving. In 1929 he published a law relating their rate of recession to their distance from us, and concluded that the universe is expanding. If that is true, then the universe must have been smaller in the past. In fact, if we extrapolate to the distant past, all the matter and energy in the universe would have been concentrated in a very tiny region of unimaginable density and temperature, and if we go back far enough, there would be a time when it all began—the event we now call the big bang.
The idea that the universe is expanding involves a bit of subtlety. For example, we don’t mean the universe is expanding in the manner that, say, one might expand one’s house, by knocking out a wall and positioning a new bathroom where once there stood a majestic oak. Rather than space extending itself, it is the distance between any two points within the universe that is growing. That idea emerged in the 1930s amid much controversy, but one of the best ways to visualize it is still a metaphor enunciated in 1931 by Cambridge University astronomer Arthur Eddington. Eddington visualized the universe as the surface of an expanding balloon, and all the galaxies as points on that surface. This picture clearly illustrates why far galaxies recede more quickly than nearby ones. For example, if the radius of the balloon doubled each hour, then the distance between any two galaxies on the balloon would double each hour. If at some time two galaxies were 1 inch apart, an hour later they would be 2 inches apart, and they would appear to be moving relative to each other at a rate of 1 inch per hour. But if they started 2 inches apart, an hour later they would be separated by 4 inches and would appear to be moving away from each other at a rate of 2 inches per hour. That is just what Hubble found: the farther away a galaxy, the faster it was moving away from us.