Can We Investigate the Instant of Creation?
Now we come to one of the great ironies in the historical development of physics. We have in place quantum mechanics, and with it we can get around difficulties with singularities in electromagnetic forces that arise in zero distance situations. The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics is the key factor that helps us. As we said before, Einstein contributed to the early development of quantum mechanics, but later repudiated it because he rejected its probabilistic nature. He thought that there was no limit to the precision with which one can define or measure the position and velocity of a point-like particle. Einstein is also the originator of the general theory of relativity, which describes gravitation even when Newton’s theory breaks down. However, the general theory of relativity retains from Newton’s theory the same essential singularity for the force between two massive particles separated by zero distance.
Some people think that a quantum mechanical theory of gravity would enable them to get around the essential gravitational singularity in the same way that quantum mechanics gets around the essential singularity in electromagnetic forces. But there is no acceptable quantum mechanical theory of gravity yet. No one knows what it would look like. Many researchers are pursuing methods they hope will lead to such a theory. There are three major approaches, but none has yet borne fruit. Meanwhile, Einstein and Bohr died a long time ago without ever reconciling their theoretical differences. Will it take a greater genius than both of them put together to solve this problem?
At the moment, therefore, conditions at the very beginning are inaccessible to research, even theoretical research. No one knows what happened at the beginning. All science knows is that a powerful agency, operating in some way as yet unknown to physics, created the energy that makes up the universe.
The singularity at the beginning of time keeps us from fathoming what God has done from the beginning until now, because we don’t know the initial conditions and can’t trace them through the singularity. A verse from the Bible is appropriate here.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
Even if we ever find out what happened at the beginning, we can’t find out the end without waiting for it.
It is for this reason that we do not know how long the first night lasted. Asking “how long” presupposes that time was passing. Perhaps we should say that time started to pass when the darkness expanded and the energy density dropped to conceivable values. At the very beginning, if everything was concentrated in a point, then the darkness was inconceivably dense and its gravity was inconceivably strong. Time was slowed to a standstill. The gravity tangled up time and space into an unsolvable knot.
Another possibility is that the universe never began in a point, and that God coordinated the first waves over an extended space. A variation of this idea is that God created the universe completely empty, devoid of matter and energy, and made it expand to a certain size before releasing cosmic rays in such a way that they would collide in all regions of the universe nearly simultaneously and produce a nearly uniform distribution of matter and energy, with the necessary fluctuations. Presumably God is not subject to the laws of physical causality. If He worked this way, the very beginning is simply one of the moments when God intervened in ways unknown to physics. God’s intervention overcomes the problems that physics cannot solve.
The beginning is the first time when Moses uses the verb בָּרָא bara´, a verb the Hebrew Scriptures reserve exclusively for Divine creative activity. The word marks other events of Divine intervention, as we have seen.
Now we come to one of the great ironies in the historical development of physics. We have in place quantum mechanics, and with it we can get around difficulties with singularities in electromagnetic forces that arise in zero distance situations. The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics is the key factor that helps us. As we said before, Einstein contributed to the early development of quantum mechanics, but later repudiated it because he rejected its probabilistic nature. He thought that there was no limit to the precision with which one can define or measure the position and velocity of a point-like particle. Einstein is also the originator of the general theory of relativity, which describes gravitation even when Newton’s theory breaks down. However, the general theory of relativity retains from Newton’s theory the same essential singularity for the force between two massive particles separated by zero distance.
Some people think that a quantum mechanical theory of gravity would enable them to get around the essential gravitational singularity in the same way that quantum mechanics gets around the essential singularity in electromagnetic forces. But there is no acceptable quantum mechanical theory of gravity yet. No one knows what it would look like. Many researchers are pursuing methods they hope will lead to such a theory. There are three major approaches, but none has yet borne fruit. Meanwhile, Einstein and Bohr died a long time ago without ever reconciling their theoretical differences. Will it take a greater genius than both of them put together to solve this problem?
At the moment, therefore, conditions at the very beginning are inaccessible to research, even theoretical research. No one knows what happened at the beginning. All science knows is that a powerful agency, operating in some way as yet unknown to physics, created the energy that makes up the universe.
The singularity at the beginning of time keeps us from fathoming what God has done from the beginning until now, because we don’t know the initial conditions and can’t trace them through the singularity. A verse from the Bible is appropriate here.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
Even if we ever find out what happened at the beginning, we can’t find out the end without waiting for it.
It is for this reason that we do not know how long the first night lasted. Asking “how long” presupposes that time was passing. Perhaps we should say that time started to pass when the darkness expanded and the energy density dropped to conceivable values. At the very beginning, if everything was concentrated in a point, then the darkness was inconceivably dense and its gravity was inconceivably strong. Time was slowed to a standstill. The gravity tangled up time and space into an unsolvable knot.
Another possibility is that the universe never began in a point, and that God coordinated the first waves over an extended space. A variation of this idea is that God created the universe completely empty, devoid of matter and energy, and made it expand to a certain size before releasing cosmic rays in such a way that they would collide in all regions of the universe nearly simultaneously and produce a nearly uniform distribution of matter and energy, with the necessary fluctuations. Presumably God is not subject to the laws of physical causality. If He worked this way, the very beginning is simply one of the moments when God intervened in ways unknown to physics. God’s intervention overcomes the problems that physics cannot solve.
The beginning is the first time when Moses uses the verb בָּרָא bara´, a verb the Hebrew Scriptures reserve exclusively for Divine creative activity. The word marks other events of Divine intervention, as we have seen.