In Harmony with Creation: How Jewish Physicists Unlocked Bereshit’s Timeline
The Jewish Physicists Behind the Big Bang and the Cosmic Clock of Genesis
In his 1978 Nobel Banquet speech, Jewish-American astrophysicist Arno Penzias remarked: “Curiosity is a precious gift which comes so naturally to us that we sometimes fail to appreciate it.”
That same curiosity — the kind Penzias described as almost too natural to notice — is something I’ve carried since childhood.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been curious. I simply wanted to know how things work. When I was a kid and my dad took my siblings and me to the library, alongside fiction, I was always searching the shelves for programming and computer books. Later, when I had to choose a high school major, I chose physics—partly, I admit, because my dad is a physics teacher (now retired), but also because I was genuinely curious to understand the physical world. After high school, my favorite reading list—alongside software books—consisted of works exploring Torah and science.
My favorite books on Torah and science included Bereshit Bara (In the Beginning) by the American-Israeli physicist Prof. Nathan Aviezer, and Torah and Science: Their Interplay in the World Scheme by Prof. Yehudah (Leo) Levi, former rector and professor of electro-optics at the Jerusalem College of Technology—which, among its many fascinating topics, includes a remarkable chapter on psychology in the Torah. But my absolute favorite was The Science of God by Prof. Gerald Schroeder, a physicist from MIT. While Schroeder’s book is somewhat more scientifically complex and benefits from a basic background in physics, it is deeply rewarding.
This week, as we begin reading the Torah anew, we return to Parashat Bereshit. It has always been one of my favorite Torah portions—precisely because there is so much science in it. Beyond cosmology and astronomy, it touches on paleontology, biology, and the very foundations of the natural world. For anyone who loves science, seeing the perfect harmony between modern discovery and the text of the Torah is nothing short of astonishing.
For centuries, the primary apparent contradiction between Torah and science has been time: a few thousand years versus 13.8 billion years. Yet, one of the frameworks that reconciled this disparity didn’t originate with theologians alone, but with breakthrough discoveries by Jewish scientists who unlocked the mechanics of time dilation, cosmic expansion, and Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB).
In the following paragraphs, I want to explore how 20th-century Jewish physicists—from Albert Einstein and Alexander Friedmann to Arno Penzias—revolutionized modern cosmology and unexpectedly bridged the ancient gap between biblical Creation and the age of the universe.
This was, in many ways, a Jewish vanguard of modern cosmology. Key figures such as Alexander Friedmann, Yakov Zeldovich, and Vera Rubin played crucial roles in proving that the universe is dynamic and had a definitive beginning—aligning modern physics with the core premise of Bereshit Bara.
Ever since science began estimating the age of the universe in billions of years, it has stood as perhaps the most famous tension between Torah and modern science. According to Jewish tradition, we just celebrated the new Hebrew year of 5787. On the surface, that is a massive gap: thousands of years versus billions.
Is it really a contradiction?
Modern physics offers a surprising answer. In The Science of God, Prof. Schroeder presents a fascinating explanation showing how the six days of creation actually equal roughly 14 billion years—the age of the universe accepted by science today. Interestingly, this scientific understanding was made possible in large part by Jewish scientists—especially one in particular: Arno Penzias, whom I mentioned earlier.
The Big Bang is widely considered one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century. According to the theory, the universe is not ancient and eternal, but was created at a distinct moment in time.
Seven hundred years before the Big Bang had a name, the Ramban described creation as a single, substance-less point expanding into everything we know. He wasn’t guessing. He was reading the text.
Parashat Bereshit opens with the creation of the universe and describes how G-d created the world in six days. If you look at the first verses and read the text directly without the commentary, you can see a description that fits the Big Bang. But what is even more amazing and mind-blowing is reading the commentary of the Ramban (Nachmanides) on those first verses. Writing in the 13th century—roughly 700 years before the Big Bang theory was developed—he describes the initial creation as a minute, substance-less point of matter that expanded to form everything in existence. He was essentially describing the Big Bang.
The fundamental principle of Jewish faith is that the universe is not kadmon—ancient and self-existent—but was created anew by G-d at a specific moment.
The discovery of the Big Bang, together with Penzias’s breakthrough, made it possible to actually calculate how time flowed in the early universe. Penzias and his colleague Robert Woodrow Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation—the radiation left over from the Big Bang. In his book, Prof. Schroeder shows how, by using this background radiation, we can calculate the flow of time during those first six days of creation right after the Big Bang.
Before diving into the physics, Prof. Schroeder highlights a fundamental textual detail: the counting of years in the Jewish calendar does not begin at the very moment of creation, but on the sixth day, with the creation of Adam HaRishon. From that point until today, it has been 5,787 years.
Furthermore, the celestial bodies we use to measure time—the sun and the moon—were only set into place on the fourth day. Technically speaking, the passage of days and years as governed by solar and lunar cycles didn’t even exist before then.
So, all we really need to calculate is the flow of time in the expanding universe from the moment of Bereshit Bara until that sixth day. If those six days equate to roughly 14 billion years, we have our reconciliation. Simple, right?
Schroeder’s core thesis relies on the discoveries of another revolutionary Jewish scientist: Albert Einstein. Through Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, we know that time is not an absolute constant; its flow depends on gravity, velocity, and the expansion of space itself.
I’d like to try and explain Schroeder’s thesis through one of my favorite films, which I watched years after reading his book.
If you’ve seen Interstellar—or know the famous Twin Paradox, where an astronaut twin returns from near-light-speed space travel decades younger than their sibling on Earth—you’re already familiar with time dilation. In short, the flow of time depends on gravity and velocity. A minute on the Moon ticks away slightly faster than on Earth because the Moon has far less mass, whereas a minute on the Sun passes more slowly because of its immense gravitational field.
Now, scale this concept up to the universe as a whole. Right after the Big Bang, when all matter and energy were compressed into an unimaginably small space, the gravitational and energetic conditions were extreme. As the universe expanded—a phenomenon demonstrated by the Jewish Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann—space itself stretched. Light traveling through this expanding space undergoes a “redshift,” where its wavelengths stretch toward the infrared end of the electromagnetic spectrum. (Explaining the full electromagnetic spectrum is beyond the scope of this column, but I highly encourage reading up on it—it is truly fascinating).
As space stretched, so too did the cosmic perception of time. Schroeder references a scientific paper demonstrating that when you factor in this cosmic stretch factor, the first 13.8 billion years of cosmic history—when viewed from the raw inception of space—correspond to six literal 24-hour days in our current frame of reference. That paper, published in the American Journal of Physics in February 1990, was titled “Did the Big Bang begin?“—and interestingly, its author, Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, is also Jewish. (A Levi, no less!).
Amazing, isn’t it?
Throughout his book, Schroeder shows how traditional Mefarshim (commentators) hinted that the six days of creation were far from simple 24-hour periods as we experience them today. Weaving classical Torah commentary with modern physics, the synthesis he creates is nothing short of breathtaking.
But how did scientists actually calculate the flow of time in the early universe? As Schroeder points out, no one was standing there with a wristwatch during the Big Bang. So where is the clock?
This brings us back to another pivotal Jewish scientist I mentioned earlier: Nobel laureate Arno Allan Penzias. In the 1960s, working at Bell Labs right here in New Jersey, Penzias and Robert Wilson stumbled upon the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation—the residual thermal radiation released during the Big Bang. This relic radiation acts as our ultimate “cosmic clock.” By measuring how its wavelengths have stretched over billions of years, physicists can precisely calculate the expansion of space and the flow of time from the very dawn of creation.
In his book and subsequent updates, Schroeder goes a step further, showing how each of the six creation days—when translated into their corresponding cosmic time spans—aligns seamlessly with the geological and fossil records.
For instance, on the third day, the Torah describes the emergence of plant life. Looking at paleontology, the fossil record reveals a massive explosion of plant life on Earth during the exact corresponding epoch in cosmic time. The same remarkable alignment appears with the emergence of marine life, land animals, and ultimately human beings.
When you apply this mathematical framework—accounting for the non-linear acceleration of cosmic expansion, which yields a total of 14 billion years—the vast timeline of the universe doesn’t contradict the six days of Creation. It maps directly onto them, day by day.
Science only discovered the “Big Bang” in the 20th century. But every Jew who learned Torah for thousands of years already knew that the universe was created from nothing (Yesh Me’Ayin) at a specific moment in time by Hashem and is not ancient. This has always been one of the foundational principles of our Emunah.
Before moving on, I want to share something a senior physicist told me many years ago when we discussed these topics. All of these incredible matches between Torah and science should only serve as a Chizuk—a strengthening of our Emunah. Because Emunah is not knowledge. We have Emunah in Hashem. Science can help strengthen our Emunah, but we need to believe in Hashem.
It is no wonder that Penzias himself famously noted, as cited by Stephen C. Meyer in The Return of the God Hypothesis:
The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.
For years now, I’ve been searching the Torah and classical Jewish texts for an allusion to what might be the most mind-bending phenomenon in quantum mechanics: Quantum Entanglement and its “spooky action at a distance.”
It was this very concept that led Albert Einstein—another brilliant Jewish mind—to famously object that “G-d does not play dice with the universe.” Remarkably, the landmark 1935 paper that laid the foundation for this phenomenon (the EPR paradox) was co-authored by three Jewish physicists: Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen.
Perhaps one day we will discover an ancient insight hidden in our texts revealing the depth of quantum entanglement, just as we did with time dilation and the expansion of space. But until then, as we open Parashat Bereshit once again, I remain in deep awe—not only of the universe itself, but of the endless curiosity granted to us to decode its mysteries.
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Further reading: Gerald Schroeder, The Science of God.
