Origins Quest
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          • The First Light
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          • A Day Not The First Day
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        • An Uncreated Unchanging Universe
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    • Simple Elements and Morning Stars >
      • First Evening Energy and Particles >
        • The Energy of Different Kinds of Rays
        • The Most Energetic Rays
        • Natural Particle Production >
          • Simulating the Process
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        • Darkness in the Bible >
          • Why Darkness Comes First
          • Isaiah on Darkness and Light
      • First Morning-Simple Elements >
        • Doppler Shift Expansion and Cooling >
          • The Beginning of Nucleosynthesis
          • Four Forces
          • Forces Present in Empty Space
        • Nucleosynthesis >
          • The First Elements
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          • Insufficient Complexity
        • The First Light Was Good >
          • The Immediate Cause of the First Light
          • Forming the Light
          • The Confirmation of Darkness and Light
    • Stars that Formed Complex Elements >
      • Second Evening-Expansion >
        • The Expanding Universe >
          • The Giant Atom that Exploded
          • Expansion Not a Big Bang Explosion
          • Expansion Preserves Order
        • Expanding Now But Later What? >
          • Expanding but Uncreated
          • Continuous Creation
          • The Cyclic Version of Continuous Creation
        • The Expanding Universe Prevails
      • Second Morning-Heavy Elements >
        • Heat and Light Make Heavy Elements >
          • Differences in Stellar Composition
          • Nuclear Binding Energy
        • Energy from Fusion and Fission >
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        • Different Kinds of Fission
        • Burning Helium and Heavier Elements
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        • Supernovas Begin the Third Evening
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        • Lighting the Sun
        • The Carbon to Oxygen Reaction
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        • The Search for a Planet Suitable for Life
    • How Does God Create? >
      • Conditions at the Very Beginning >
        • Creation from Nothing
        • Can We Create Energy? >
          • God Works to Create Energy
          • The Work Necessary to Create the Universe
        • Denial of Creation
        • The Simplest Explanation
        • Creation in a Singularity >
          • Can We Investigate the Instant of Creation?
          • The First Light Has Fluctuations
      • The Next Three Days >
        • Structure in the Genesis Narrative >
          • Examples of Parallelism
          • Parallel Structure in the Creation Narrative
        • Day Four >
          • Not All Stars Formed on the Fourth Day
          • When Did the Stars and Sun Start to Shine?
          • Signs for Animals and People
      • What Is the Origin of the Universe?
    • Appendices >
      • Appendix A
      • Appendix B
  • Design or Luck?
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Expansion Preserves Order

Both COBE and WMAP photographed the first light in all directions, making a sky map of the early universe. There is a serious scientific puzzle about the first light. It is of nearly uniform temperature, to within a few tens of parts per million. Something had to make it uniform. In particular, there are regions or spots with the same temperature.

We know that random collisions between gas molecules usually establish the temperature of the gas. Gas molecules move at random speeds. The average speed is comparable with the speed of sound in the gas. The speed of sound is much less than the speed of light. Therefore establishing thermal equilibrium in a region of gas takes much longer than the time light takes to pass across the region once.

The warm spots in the cosmic background are typically one degree across and the distance to them is 13 820 million light years. Therefore their diameters are about 240 million light years. It should have taken much longer than 240 million years for random collisions to establish a uniform temperature in the spots. But the postulated age of the universe at the time was only 380 thousand years. Even if there were some physical mechanism that could establish thermal equilibrium with one pass across the spots at the speed of light, it would have taken 240 million years to operate. But in a little more than the thousandth part of that time the job was done! The spots appear to defy physical causality, but there they are!

There is a related point. The temperature is very nearly uniform throughout the early sky. Suppose we look in any given direction and measure the sky temperature, compensating for the motion of the Earth. When we look in the exact opposite direction, the temperature is the same to within a part in 50 000. Yet it would take many times twice the age of the universe for the two opposite points to reach thermal equilibrium, because no physical effect can propagate faster than the speed of light.

Before discussing the simplest solution, we will explain a much more complicated solution that is part of the present climate of opinion among physicists.

Inflation Soon After the Beginning
Some theories say that the organization of dense and rarefied regions appeared the tiniest fraction of a second after the gamma rays collided. The theories say that a physical change in the hot material of the early universe produced the fluctuations and incidentally set the rate of expansion.

When water is put on to boil, bubbles of vapor appear in it. These drive a rapid expansion of the water as steam. Conversion from water to steam is called a phase change.

Alan Guth published an inflation theory[i] in 1981 to explain why the universe expands at a finely adjusted rate. Later he published popular versions.[ii]–[iii] Guth proposed that some sort of phase change could have driven rapid inflation when the universe was very new. The spots had already reached thermal equilibrium in very small regions, and then the regions suddenly inflated by a huge factor. He proposed that the age of the universe at the beginning of inflation was between 1 micro-micro-micro-microsecond and 10 micro-micro-microseconds old.

In Guth’s theory the rate of growth has to be much faster than the speed of light.

That in itself makes some scientists say that inflation theory violates causality. A few other theoreticians have proposed that the speed of light was much faster at the beginning. Until there were atoms we have no way of determining the speed of light. Was the speed of light variable at the beginning, and did it settle down to a constant value just before people could begin to check up on it? The assumption seems gratuitous. Does light act like speeders when they enter the “halo zone” around a police car?

The photographs do not show how long the uniform regions took to grow to the sizes we see. Though the photographs seem like a confirmation of Guth’s inflation theory, we must remember that the idea that the universe was 380 000 years old when it emitted the first light is a deduction based on a certain model. A simpler idea is that the universe was much older than 240 million years at the time, and that the equilibrium came about without any inflation or expansion faster than the speed of light.

Whatever the age of the universe was when thermal processes established its equilibrium temperature, the subsequent expansion preserved that established order. This is another reason for avoiding the term “Big Bang.” The universe did not explode at the beginning. It expanded in an orderly way. The Bible says five times in Genesis 1:6‑8 that God put expansion in the heavens. The expansion preserved the order we see in the photographs of the first light.

The Expansion Rate is Finely Tuned
We now know that the rate of expansion was finely tuned to produce a habitable universe. Einstein’s theory of general relativity allows physicists to calculate the critical rate of expansion. The critical rate is the slowest possible rate that allows the galaxies to expand forever to infinite distances from one another.


[i] Guth, A. H., “Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problems,” Physical Review D, 23 (Number 2, 15 January 1981), pp. 347–356.

[ii] Guth, A. H. and P. J. Steinhardt, “The Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, 250 (Number 5, May 1984), pp. 116–127.

[iii] Guth, A. H., The Inflationary Universe (Reading, Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley, 1997).
Expanding Now But Later What?
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  • Home
  • Breaking News
  • The First Three Days of the Earth
    • Reconciling Science and the Bible >
      • Precise Science Confirms the Bible
      • Moses Foresaw Three Discoveries >
        • First Discovery >
          • Mass and Weight of Energy
          • Transformations and Materialization
          • Different Kinds of Rays and Materialization in Empty Space
          • Was Energy the Source of Material
        • Second Discovery
        • Third Discovery >
          • The First Light
          • Separating Light from Darkness
        • Early Ideas about the Beginning
        • An Up-to-Date Ancient Cosmology
        • The Confirmation
        • A Challenging Question
      • Cycles of Darkness and Light >
        • Teaching Children
        • The Idea the Word “Day” Expresses >
          • A Day Not The First Day
          • Not Literal 24-Hour Days
        • How Long Did the First Three Days Last?
        • Earth Rotation and the First Two Days
        • The Duration of the First Day
        • The First Three Cycles of Darkness and Light
      • Was There a Beginning? >
        • An Uncreated Unchanging Universe
        • Evidence for a Beginning >
          • Elements in the Stars
          • Natural Radiation from Space
          • Stars Consume Their Fuel
        • Cosmology and Relativity
        • Instability Determinism Uncertainty, Predestination >
          • Instability
          • Stability and Determinism
          • Predestination Indeterminacy Uncertainty
        • Einstein Science and Philosophy
        • Predestination versus Timely Intervention
    • Simple Elements and Morning Stars >
      • First Evening Energy and Particles >
        • The Energy of Different Kinds of Rays
        • The Most Energetic Rays
        • Natural Particle Production >
          • Simulating the Process
          • Particles from Darkness
        • Darkness in the Bible >
          • Why Darkness Comes First
          • Isaiah on Darkness and Light
      • First Morning-Simple Elements >
        • Doppler Shift Expansion and Cooling >
          • The Beginning of Nucleosynthesis
          • Four Forces
          • Forces Present in Empty Space
        • Nucleosynthesis >
          • The First Elements
          • The First Halt in Nuclei Production
          • Insufficient Complexity
        • The First Light Was Good >
          • The Immediate Cause of the First Light
          • Forming the Light
          • The Confirmation of Darkness and Light
    • Stars that Formed Complex Elements >
      • Second Evening-Expansion >
        • The Expanding Universe >
          • The Giant Atom that Exploded
          • Expansion Not a Big Bang Explosion
          • Expansion Preserves Order
        • Expanding Now But Later What? >
          • Expanding but Uncreated
          • Continuous Creation
          • The Cyclic Version of Continuous Creation
        • The Expanding Universe Prevails
      • Second Morning-Heavy Elements >
        • Heat and Light Make Heavy Elements >
          • Differences in Stellar Composition
          • Nuclear Binding Energy
        • Energy from Fusion and Fission >
          • The Proton-Proton Reaction
          • Nuclear Stability
        • Different Kinds of Fission
        • Burning Helium and Heavier Elements
    • Forming the Sun and Earth >
      • Third Evening-A Dusty Yellow Star >
        • Supernovas Begin the Third Evening
        • Extraterrestrial Water
        • Lighting the Sun
        • The Carbon to Oxygen Reaction
        • The Darkness of the Third Evening
      • Third Morning-The Earth Forms >
        • The Search for a Planet Suitable for Life
    • How Does God Create? >
      • Conditions at the Very Beginning >
        • Creation from Nothing
        • Can We Create Energy? >
          • God Works to Create Energy
          • The Work Necessary to Create the Universe
        • Denial of Creation
        • The Simplest Explanation
        • Creation in a Singularity >
          • Can We Investigate the Instant of Creation?
          • The First Light Has Fluctuations
      • The Next Three Days >
        • Structure in the Genesis Narrative >
          • Examples of Parallelism
          • Parallel Structure in the Creation Narrative
        • Day Four >
          • Not All Stars Formed on the Fourth Day
          • When Did the Stars and Sun Start to Shine?
          • Signs for Animals and People
      • What Is the Origin of the Universe?
    • Appendices >
      • Appendix A
      • Appendix B
  • Design or Luck?
    • Creative Design >
      • Darwin and Adaptive Variation >
        • Finches and Form Adaptation
        • Adaptive Behavior and Structure
        • Intelligence and Autonomy
      • Biological Structure and Reproduction
      • Adaptive Form
      • Darwin and Darwinism >
        • The Development of the Sciences
        • Contrasting Darwinism and Thermodynamics
        • Darwinism Today
      • The Limits of Automatic Design
    • Why Are Not All Darwinists Rich? >
      • Automatic Design: Artificial and Natural >
        • The Automatic Lens-Design Program
        • Company Top Secret
        • Comparing Evolution and Lens Design
        • My Colleagues Reacted
      • Conclusion-Darwinism Does Not Work >
        • Can Design Be Automatic?
        • Darwinism and Automatic Design
      • How Far Can Small Steps Take Us? >
        • Small Improvements Are Merely Engineering
        • The Vastness of Hyperspace
        • Primordial Alphabet Soup >
          • Wide Coding Overcomes Noise
          • DNA is a Natural Language
          • Common Ancestry
          • Accepted Words Span the Space
        • Is Creative Design Consistent with Darwinism? >
          • Engineering Design
          • A Challenge for Darwinists
    • Thermodynamics >
      • Thermodynamics Information and Creation >
        • The First Law of Thermodynamics
        • Physical Law Keeps Life from Starting by Itself
        • Spontaneous-assembly-by-random-action >
          • Random action cannot produce living beings
        • Prigogine’s Explanation of His Method
        • Reasons for Not Applying Thermodynamics
        • Does Crystallization Defeat the Second Law?
        • Does Gravity Organize Things?
        • The Second Law of Thermodynamics >
          • Entropy
          • Perpetual Motion
        • Information and Order >
          • Entropy Probability and Information
          • Multiplying Probability and Adding Entropy
          • Probability and Information
        • Structure Design Intelligence and Creativity >
          • Structure and Breakdown--Death and Decay
          • Perfection and Beauty
      • Earth-Sun Thermodynamics >
        • A Simple Example of a Thermodynamic Process
        • The Example Applied to the Sun and Earth
      • Another Error about Thermodynamics >
        • A Darwinist Argument about Thermodynamics
        • Sunlight and Earth Temperature
        • What Makes Sunlight Suitable?
      • The Night Sky Is Dark >
        • Olbers and his Paradox
        • A Black Forest and the Stars >
          • Seeing to the Far Limit of the Universe
          • The Limit of the Known Universe
          • Ordinary Darkness
      • A Planet Suitable for Life
      • The Thermodynamics of Life >
        • Living Organisms and Heat Engines >
          • The Thermodynamics of Life without Sunlight
        • Entropy Thermodynamics and Prigogine >
          • Darwinism and Thermodynamics
      • Thermodynamics and the Universe >
        • Formless and Dark but Energetic and Orderly >
          • Entropy and Penrose
        • Creative Agencies and Their Characteristics
    • Complex Order-Life-Intelligence >
      • Random Action and Complexity
      • Does Matter Organize Itself?
      • Complexity Can Be Specified
      • Information and Physical Laws
      • Did Our Life Begin Elsewhere?
      • Discovering Alien Life Will Change Nothing
      • Creative Design Suits the Universe for Life
    • The Quest Continues
  • Creationism that Scientists Can Accept
  • About
  • Contact
  • DVD
  • Booklet