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Imagine a black hole, if you can. There is one or more in every galaxy. These cosmic sized vacuum cleaners suck everything in their neighborhood down a funnel much like water going down the drain. As matter enters the vortex it’s structure becomes more and more compressed.
This is possible because matter primarily consists of empty space. Space between molecules, space between atoms in molecules, space between electrons and nuclei, etc. As the space between these particles of matter decreases the process generates heat. Tremendous amounts of heat. In fact, the trillions of degrees of heat are so intense the particles actually revert to their primal form, energy. Einstein’s theory tells us that the amount of energy created equals the material mass times the speed of light squared.Now lets assume the process occurred on a universe sized scale billions of years before the birth of our universe. Every single gram of matter became a part of a soccer sized ball of pure energy and there is no physical matter left. All knowledge, time, and matter are encompassed in this ball of energy….God, if you will. Then, for reasons not even guessed at yet, the ball blows up. We have the big bang. Energy is spewed out in all directions in a trillion degree heat wave. Our universe is born. As the energy becomes dissipated things begin to cool off. Millions of years later matter begins to form in a process similar to water vapor condensing to steam, and then water droplets. Clouds of the simplest from of matter, one electron circulating one proton, hydrogen, begin to form in galaxy sized clusters.
Which brings us to today. Billions of years after the big bang we find ourselves living on the third rock from our sun in the Milky Way galaxy. We begin to look outward with ever more powerful instruments. But we are not just looking away from our planet; we are looking back in time. Because light takes time to reach us, the light we see tells us the way things were when it first began to travel in our direction. If we look back far enough we can glimpse the birth of our universe.
China is now developing an array of antennas about two miles long in a high plains desert area where a clear and undistorted view of the heavens is possible. This antenna array is a form of radio telescope which permits detection of something called background microwave radiation. This is radiation believed to be left over from the big bang. When information begins flowing from this giant instrument we should be able to determine the circumstances surrounding the birth of our universe.
There is an interesting conflict growing as a result of the increase in knowledge provided by instruments of this sort. Our increasing wealth of knowledge is creating an ever widening gulf between science and conventional western religions. Christian based religions believe the world we live in was created a mere 6000 years ago by a single act of a supreme being. This doctrine, however, is being contradicted by an ever increasing body of evidence supported by mathematics and science which, interestingly enough also give us our laptops and IPODs.
At some point, perhaps today, these opposing points of view will have to be resolved if the world is to move forward without conflict. As any student of history knows, religious conflicts have been the reason for some of the biggest bloodbaths in human history. We must begin to put superstition and mysticism at rest. The world of make believe served the organizers of man well for centuries but inevitably leads to an ungodly amount of blood shed.
It is time to move on; time to give peace a chance.
December 18th, 2007 at 12:05 am
Dear BB,
There is no conflict between Science and Religion, because Science is a part of religion. Religion is what one believes is the truth about the nature of the universe, and how men relate to it and one another, what one thinks about it, feels about it, and does about it. The former is cosmology, the study of the cosmos, and all the workings within it. The latter is morality, the realm of right and wrong, how people treat others.
Science is mainly concerned with cosmology; it has little to say directly about right and wrong, but rather must be subject to morality informed by religious belief. As such, it is not a complete religion, but rather a component of a complete view of the world and how it works.
In the same way, religions whose cosmologies are stuck in myths and stories thousands of years old are no more complete than science without morality; they don’t stand up to the test of skepticism, which doesn’t lend credence to their moral stands. A religion with either weak morality or weak cosmology is a weak thing, subject to loss of faith on any number of counts.
Most people make a separation in their minds between their “religious” and “scientific” beliefs, not lending literal credence to creation myths passed down by shepherds, but knowing human nature doesn’t change, they follow the moral precepts of their chosen cult. But science works, and so its cosmology wins hands down over ancient texts.
Some people don’t make such a separation, somehow requiring the texts to be completely true in order to believe any of it, so they furiously refuse to believe some science, even as they use the products of science, and even teach science. I once had a soil science teacher who was an ardent creationist. There was no conflict for him; his work was mostly with chemicals, and I learned a lot from him.
And even in science, there is conflict over basic dogma, like whether there even was a beginning of the universe or a Big Bang. I can’t imagine such a thing; it’s as absurd as a Being outside the universe (where?) creating the universe, or even a world.
The Big Bang theory is based on the idea that the red shift is a Doppler effect. All the other galaxies we can see show a shift in their light to the red end of the spectrum, increasing with distance from us. Taking this as a Doppler effect means that they are all flying away from us and each other very fast, implying that they all originated at the same point billions of years ago.
This is absurd, and should have led to a checking of that premise. But people have a bias towards beginnings and ends of things, and therefore think in terms of a beginning and end to the universe, which is why we have creation myths. It fit well into our predilection for creation myths, so it was little questioned. It is easy to fit a creator Lord God into the scenario, as well.
My own thought is that the red shift is a natural loss of energy (frequency) in photons that is only measurable at intergalactic distances. It is now known that photons shift red from passing close to large masses of gravity. Again, the effect is only measurable with large masses. Photons have to pass a lot of mass to get here from billions of light-years away. They’re bound to build up a lot of red shift over that distance.
I’ve watched, over the years, as astrophysicists have adjusted the supposed age of the universe as their telescopes are able to look farther and farther out. The age is always a little further than they can see. Their theories now tell us that we can’t ever see the very beginning, because it was shrouded until matter thinned enough for the light to burst forth. “Let there be light!” And there was light. And it was good.
Funny thing is, as far as they can see, they see galaxies that look old, as well as young ones. They keep adjusting their theories for this, too. But they never check their premise.
“Dark matter,” that the astrophysicists are all concerned about figuring out now, that strange matter that can’t be seen, measured, or detected, but must be all around us, is just an artifact of the math that they use to explain the Big Bang and the supposed rate of the expansion of the universe. It isn’t expanding fast enough for their theories, so they’ve deduced the existence of matter that they can’t detect except for the fact that their figures don’t add up.
But there are heretics among scientists as well as among other cults. Steady Staters have been shouted down since the discovery of the red shift. And all the government grants go to the guys trying to see the beginnings of time.
Live Free and Prosper,
Rycke