A prophet looking into a curved universe

One of the more curious asides in modern revelation is D&C 121 when God tells Joseph that he was living in a time “Which our forefathers have awaited with anxious expectation.” When all sorts of truths would finally be revealed:

And also, if there be bounds set to the heavens or to the seas, or to the dry land, or to the sun, moon, or stars—All the times of their revolutions, all the appointed days, months, and years, and all the days of their days, months, and years, and all their glories, laws, and set times, shall be revealed in the days of the dispensation of the fulness of times

This revelation is all the more curious because it comes as a seeming non-sequitur in the middle of Joseph’s famous dirge about suffering. It’s almost like God was situating the immediate events in their proper context. Yes, you are suffering in a dank prison in a small town in Missouri for “but a small moment,” but the universe and gospel is so grand and I will reveal a piece of that to you.  D&C 121 threads the needle more than almost any other document I’ve read between placing suffering in its proper context, almost downplaying it relative to the glories beyond, while seamlessly lifting up and fortifying Joseph in the process. It’s the ultimate football coach telling him to walk it off because he believes in him.  

I’d wager the default assumption most people bring to this text is that the things mentioned will be revealed via standard revelation, and given that it’s in D&C 121 and the fact that included in the list is a series of things that could only be revealed through direct religious means (“whether there be one God or many gods”) that’s a warranted assumption. However, given that some of these things are very much discoverable through modern-day scientific means I actually assume that this is one of those cases where our own distinction between religious revelation and scientific discovery becomes artificial as everything is collapsed into one great whole, or as Brigham Young said “if an Elder shall give us a lecture upon astronomy, chemistry, or geology, our religion embraces it all. … The truth that is in all the arts and sciences forms part of our religion. Faith is no more a part of it than any other true principle of philosophy.”

So I see modern-day scientific discoveries as fulfilling this prophecy, and given the subject matter that is also a warranted take. So where are we on these questions?  “All the times of their revolutions” has been more or less fulfilled with instruments like the Kepler telescope, TESS and James Webb as we have catalogued the positions and characteristics of stars and their planets. 

What about “bounds set to the heavens”? Or does it go on forever? The question of whether space is bounded, or in other words what the “shape” of space is is an old one. Is space “flat” in a 3-dimensional sense and infinite, so in a sense we can continue to move through it forever? Or are we positively curved like a ball, so in theory a rocket ship could end up in the same place where it started by moving forward in a straight line (ignoring the effects of an expanding universe)?  But wait, we might also be what’s called a torus, where space is flat and bounded like a game of space invaders, but once you get to the edge of the screen you pop right back up on the other side. Space could also be negatively cured like a saddle. Or maybe we are in a universe that occasionally  interacts with other universes. 

The last possibility is untestable right now, but the shape of the universe is not. On this we are making some progress, but like a lot of physics we are having success in terms of coming up with narrower and narrower possibilities. Using satellites and high altitude balloons we’ve looked at the early light from the Big Bang to that suffuses the universe in order to test whether a curved universe is shaping it, and as far as we can tell it is not, so it is flat to within a few percentage points. However, it might be a case that the curve is too small for us to detect with current instruments, like trying to see an atom in a Wal-Mart microscope, and one preprint that I can’t begin to understand is claiming to find evidence that it could be negatively curved, but it’s also possible to interpret the data in favor of a slight positively curved universe, while the consensus is still that the universe is flat.   

Testing whether the universe ends is also difficult, but it typically takes the form of looking for matching patterns in the sky since in theory if the universe was closed and looped back on itself you could see the same object from different angles in the same sky. So far we haven’t detected anything, so if it is closed it is so large that we don’t see anything repeat in the observable universe. 

So where do we go from here? While it might take a Moses 1-level experience to know for sure that we aren’t just ants walking along a seeming flat surface on a spherical earth, we are continually developing more sophisticated instruments that force our universe to be flatter and flatter and more and more open. For example,  the CMB-S4, when it comes online, will map the light from the Big Bang in exquisite, fine-grained detail. Even if it just finds more flatness, I am convinced we really are living through the era “our forefathers have awaited with anxious expectation.”