When Science Finally Agreed: The 1965 Discovery That Proved the Universe Was Created

For more than two millennia, from ancient Greek philosophy until as late as 1965, most of the educated world — scientists and philosophers alike, believed that the universe had always existed.
According to this view, the cosmos was eternal, uncreated, and unchanging, existing forever without a beginning or an end.

This worldview stood in direct contradiction to the Torah’s clear statement that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The ancient assumption that the stars and constellations look today just as they did thousands of years ago was seen as “proof” that the universe was fixed and eternal. As a result, the idea of an eternal cosmos became a scientific dogma, accepted as unquestionable truth — even into the mid-20th century.

The Discovery That Changed Everything

In 1965, two American scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were experimenting with a highly sensitive radio antenna designed to measure faint radio waves from space. To their astonishment, they detected a weak, uniform electromagnetic radiation coming from every direction in the sky.

At first, they were puzzled. But soon it became clear that what they had found matched the long-ignored prediction of an earlier theory: the Big Bang.

The Big Bang: A Universe Born from Light

In 1946, physicist George Gamow and his colleagues proposed the Big Bang theory — that the universe began as an immense burst of light and energy, emerging suddenly from nothing. At that initial moment, no atoms could exist, since the heat and density were so extreme that matter instantly disintegrated. Only after the universe expanded and cooled could atoms and galaxies begin to form.

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1905–1915) had already made this model possible, by showing that matter and energy are interchangeable:

E = mc²
E stands for energy, m for mass, and c for the speed of light.

This equation revealed that even a small amount of matter can produce an enormous amount of energy — the principle behind atomic power — and conversely, that vast energy could give birth to matter.

The Proof: Cosmic Background Radiation

According to the Big Bang model, after the explosion and initial cooling, there should remain a faint glow of radiation permeating the entire universe — a kind of “afterglow” of creation itself. Before 1965, such radiation had never been detected due to technological limitations.

When Penzias and Wilson discovered it by accident, the scientific world was stunned. It was undeniable proof that the universe had a beginning — that it was created from nothing.

This discovery completely overturned the “steady-state” model that had dominated scientific thought for centuries. The eternal-universe theory — still taught as fact in the 1960s by respected scientists like Prof. H. Bondi in his Oxford University textbook Cosmology, was suddenly obsolete.

Galaxies in Motion: Hubble’s Confirmation

Another powerful confirmation came from Edwin Hubble, who observed that galaxies are rapidly moving away from each other in all directions — a phenomenon now called the expansion of the universe. The rate of this expansion is known as the Hubble Constant, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is named in his honor.

This “galactic flight” perfectly matched the Big Bang model: if everything is moving outward, it must once have been concentrated in a single point — the beginning.

Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science

While scientists were astonished to find that the universe had a beginning, the Jewish people were not surprised. For thousands of years, Jews had already believed and taught that God created the universe ex nihilo — from absolute nothingness.

Skeptics once mocked this belief as “primitive,” claiming that “a creation from nothing violates the laws of physics.” But the “primitive” believers were right all along. Those “laws” themselves only exist because a Creator established them.

Even today, science still wonders how and why the universe began.
It has uncovered that it had a beginning, but not what caused it.

Meanwhile, the Torah revealed the answer over 3,000 years ago: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Bereishit 1:1)