If there is one thing everyone (well maybe not quite everyone) knows
about Einstein is that according to the Theory of Relativity, it is impossible
for anything to travel faster than light, which is constant everywhere in the
universe.

After Einstein published his theory, a piece of doggerel that made  fun of the
strange effects as something approaches the speed of light did the rounds:

There was a young lady called Bright
Who travelled much faster than light
She set out one day
In a Relative way
And arrived on the previous night!

Einstine showed that to be impossible, because the speeding girl would then
have had infinite mass. (No obesity jokes here please).

However... new thinking is that in the first tiny fraction of a second after
the Big Bang, the Einstein rule did not apply. At the moment of the Big Bang,
time itself came into existence and for a few billion billionths of a second
light must have travelled billions of time faster than it does now. Or
alternatively time was making a transition from 'time does not exist' to
'time exists' and between those two was a very strange once-only existence.

In a week or so (May 2009), a European satellite - named after Planck the quantum
physicist - will be blasted into space to look for tiny fluctuation of temperature
across the whole sky which would be the evidence of this dramatic 'inflation'
at the beginning of the universe's existence.

Why do we care?

This data will help cosmologists to decide whether the universe will keep expanding
'for ever' or the expansion will slow down progressively and then go into reverse,
giving a Big Crunch. It will also produce other information about the universe,
most of it incomprensible to mere mortals.

Which one of these scenarios would be more consistent with a divine creator?
Do let me know what you think. I'll get back to this topic when some results
are in.

Note to chronic worriers - this should not be on the top of your
worry list. The Big Crunch would not be due for billions of years. In fact our
sun will run out long before that so there would be no-one around to notice it.

If you want something more immediate to worry about, the Large Hadron Collider
at CERN will switch on (again) in the summer, and there will more scare stories
about the possible creation of a black hole that will suck in all the world's
bankers...