A physicist claimed that heaven has a physical location

A former professor of physics at Harvard University has stated that heaven could have a physical location. While he invokes fundamental ideas such as Hubble’s law and the cosmic horizon, his claim mixes modern cosmology with biblical imagery.

In an op-ed on Fox News in late January 2026, Michael Gillen, Ph.D., former Harvard physics professor and science promoter, took the Internet by storm with a provocative claim: that heaven might have a physical location.

Relying on the basic concepts of cosmology, he says that what many religious traditions call “heaven” can be located at a distance of about 439 billion trillion kilometers, beyond the cosmic horizon. Alex Gianinas, Ph.D. and associate professor of astronomy at Connecticut College, is among the scientists who have disputed the claim.

“The cosmic horizon is not a physical place, but a finite boundary beyond which we can neither see nor communicate,” says Gianinas. He explains that this limit does not exist because the universe ends at that point, but because light takes time to travel and the universe has a finite age. The age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years and light travels at a speed of about 300,000 kilometers per second; In the sense that we can only observe the areas whose light had enough time to reach the earth. Therefore, some areas are too far away and their light has not yet arrived or will never arrive.

Guillen considers the cosmological limit as the natural stopping point of the physical world; a point beyond which the “divine realm” may begin. Gianinas takes the exact opposite view, saying that space almost certainly continues beyond it. He says it’s probably a continuation of the same universe full of planets, stars, and galaxies, but there’s no scientific basis for claiming that realm belongs to God, the gods, or the summit of Mount Olympus.

However, Gillen’s claim did not emerge from a vacuum. This claim has been formed in the context of a wider space in which some scientists openly play with ideas that are at least partially religious, spiritual or metaphysical.

According to Gianinas, this situation is the result of new ways of spreading ideas rather than new science. In an age shaped by social media and instant publishing, a person who might once have kept a controversial metaphysical belief to himself can now disseminate it quickly and widely, he says.

This is not to say that we live in a unique moment in history. Gianinas reminds us that physics has long entered the realms that did not have the possibility of immediate testing. Albert Einstein published his paper on general relativity in 1915, but its experimental confirmation did not come until years later.

Michael Prawicka, Ph.D. and physicist at the University of Nevada, says that ideas about spiritual realms do not belong in physics but in metaphysics; A branch of philosophy that deals with concepts so abstract that they may have no basis in reality. Maybe in the future, he says, if we develop techniques to access tunnels or hyperdimensional communication, we might be able to understand heaven.