Moses Foresaw Three Discoveries
Precise science has opened a new way to search for our cosmic origins. Scientists gathering data with satellites and astronomers peering through giant telescopes have combined forces with nuclear physicists to advance new ideas about the universe.
The scientific basis of these ideas consists mainly of three discoveries from the last hundred years or so. These have shaped current views of the origin of the cosmos. Our ideas will continue to change and develop, but the three discoveries we identify here have been confirmed in many ways. They form a tripod, a stable foundation for cosmology. Cosmologists expect that further discoveries will only refine, not refute, the three discoveries.
The three discoveries are not ideas that emerge through philosophical reasoning. If they were, they would not have remained undiscovered until the twentieth century. Even careful, patient, thoughtful observers cannot see the evidence for the three discoveries without modern instruments.
Here we will outline the discoveries. We will then show how remarkably the discoveries confirm the Bible. Subsequent chapters will tell how the discoveries refuted many historical atheistic presuppositions and led to additional confirmation of the Bible.
The First Discovery
The first discovery was a step toward answering the age-old question: How did all that we see appear?
A sheet of paper was originally part of a tree. Trees come from seeds, soil, water, air and sunlight. Soil is a mixture of small grains of sand and organic matter. The organic matter and seeds came from previous trees. Which came first, the acorn or the oak? What is the origin of minerals, water, and air? Also, where does the sunlight fit in?
Pre-scientific people may have thought that processes like biological growth create material like wood, and that other processes like burning destroy material. In the 18th and 19th centuries chemists began to keep careful track of the weight of materials that enter and leave a reaction. They proved that the total input weight is always equal to the total output weight. From this they concluded that material or matter is neither created nor destroyed in any chemical reaction, but only transformed from one kind to another. “Matter is conserved,” they said.
Heat dissipates some of the energy of movement. For instance, it makes a ball stop bouncing. James Prescott Joule (English physicist, 1818–1889) did many experiments that established the equivalence between heat and the energy of movement. One watt-second is one joule, an energy unit named in his honor. Recognizing heat as a form of energy completed the balance sheet for many kinds of energy transformations. Physicists and engineers also had a conservation law. “Energy can’t be created or destroyed,” they said.
The two conservation laws come together on the subject of combustion. Fire is a chemical reaction that produces heat and light. Observation without instruments easily leads to the idea that fire destroys material and changes it into energy. Firewood is heavy. Ashes weigh much less than firewood, but they still fall to the bottom of the fire pit as the flames shoot upwards. However, chemists using delicate balances showed that fire does not change the total mass of material. They trapped and weighed the gases that enter and come from the burning. The weight of the firewood and the oxygen consumed is equal to the weight of the ashes and the smoke, but what about the energy? Doesn’t it weigh anything? Is firelight just the sunlight that the leaves absorbed, and the wood stored somehow?
These two laws led to great progress in chemistry and physics. But if they apply at all times then the universe did not begin, nor will it end, though the Bible teaches otherwise. Do the conservation laws apply to the universe as a whole? What is the origin of matter and energy?
The Mass and Weight of Energy
Albert Einstein (German-born American physicist, 1879–1955) in 1905 proposed his theory of special relativity. He combined the two conservation laws, showing that both matter and energy have mass and weight.
Precise science has opened a new way to search for our cosmic origins. Scientists gathering data with satellites and astronomers peering through giant telescopes have combined forces with nuclear physicists to advance new ideas about the universe.
The scientific basis of these ideas consists mainly of three discoveries from the last hundred years or so. These have shaped current views of the origin of the cosmos. Our ideas will continue to change and develop, but the three discoveries we identify here have been confirmed in many ways. They form a tripod, a stable foundation for cosmology. Cosmologists expect that further discoveries will only refine, not refute, the three discoveries.
The three discoveries are not ideas that emerge through philosophical reasoning. If they were, they would not have remained undiscovered until the twentieth century. Even careful, patient, thoughtful observers cannot see the evidence for the three discoveries without modern instruments.
Here we will outline the discoveries. We will then show how remarkably the discoveries confirm the Bible. Subsequent chapters will tell how the discoveries refuted many historical atheistic presuppositions and led to additional confirmation of the Bible.
The First Discovery
The first discovery was a step toward answering the age-old question: How did all that we see appear?
A sheet of paper was originally part of a tree. Trees come from seeds, soil, water, air and sunlight. Soil is a mixture of small grains of sand and organic matter. The organic matter and seeds came from previous trees. Which came first, the acorn or the oak? What is the origin of minerals, water, and air? Also, where does the sunlight fit in?
Pre-scientific people may have thought that processes like biological growth create material like wood, and that other processes like burning destroy material. In the 18th and 19th centuries chemists began to keep careful track of the weight of materials that enter and leave a reaction. They proved that the total input weight is always equal to the total output weight. From this they concluded that material or matter is neither created nor destroyed in any chemical reaction, but only transformed from one kind to another. “Matter is conserved,” they said.
Heat dissipates some of the energy of movement. For instance, it makes a ball stop bouncing. James Prescott Joule (English physicist, 1818–1889) did many experiments that established the equivalence between heat and the energy of movement. One watt-second is one joule, an energy unit named in his honor. Recognizing heat as a form of energy completed the balance sheet for many kinds of energy transformations. Physicists and engineers also had a conservation law. “Energy can’t be created or destroyed,” they said.
The two conservation laws come together on the subject of combustion. Fire is a chemical reaction that produces heat and light. Observation without instruments easily leads to the idea that fire destroys material and changes it into energy. Firewood is heavy. Ashes weigh much less than firewood, but they still fall to the bottom of the fire pit as the flames shoot upwards. However, chemists using delicate balances showed that fire does not change the total mass of material. They trapped and weighed the gases that enter and come from the burning. The weight of the firewood and the oxygen consumed is equal to the weight of the ashes and the smoke, but what about the energy? Doesn’t it weigh anything? Is firelight just the sunlight that the leaves absorbed, and the wood stored somehow?
These two laws led to great progress in chemistry and physics. But if they apply at all times then the universe did not begin, nor will it end, though the Bible teaches otherwise. Do the conservation laws apply to the universe as a whole? What is the origin of matter and energy?
The Mass and Weight of Energy
Albert Einstein (German-born American physicist, 1879–1955) in 1905 proposed his theory of special relativity. He combined the two conservation laws, showing that both matter and energy have mass and weight.
Einstein reading his first paper on relativity
This seems odd at first. Matter is the substance of a material object, what physicists call a corporeal system or a body. Material objects resist changes in their speed of movement. A heavy truck doesn’t start away from traffic lights as fast as a light-weight sports car. The resistance is called inertia. Energy, on the other hand, rushes from one place to another in powerful rays. When energy stops rushing around and lies latent, ready to rush off again, it is invisible. Ordinarily people don’t think much about latent or potential energy. It took genius to see what matter and energy have in common.
Einstein gave us a way of calculating the mass and weight of energy. His calculations explain why chemists didn’t have to take into account the weight of the firelight and heat when they balanced their input-output equations.
There is heat and light latent in firewood. It is in the energy that holds the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the firewood together. These atoms combine in chemical substances called carbohydrates because of electromagnetic forces between their outermost electrons. Carbohydrates are large, complex, organic molecules that form dense substances. As the wood burns the carbohydrates break up. The carbon and hydrogen combine with oxygen from the air to make carbon dioxide and water vapor. These products are gases with small, simple, inorganic molecules. Together with small particles of soot (unburned carbon) they go up the chimney as smoke. Combustion releases the chemical energy that held the carbohydrates together. This energy leaves the fireplace as heat and light.
To measure the weight of the heat and light, chemists need balances with a precision of nine or ten significant figures. Nobody can yet weigh anything that precisely. Balances need to improve by a factor of 1 000 or 10 000 or more before anyone can weigh matter and light from chemical reactions at the same time.
Atoms store chemical energy in the electromagnetic forces between their positively charged nuclei and their shells of negatively charged electrons. There is much greater energy in the nuclear forces within the nuclei of atoms. When large nuclei break up into smaller ones some of this energy is released in the kind of nuclear burning that we call fission. Einstein’s theory led other scientists to conceive of a “chain reaction” among uranium nuclei. A chain reaction releases a measurable amount of the mass of uranium as nuclear energy. The amount is one tenth of one percent of the mass of uranium.
Separately, of course, we can weigh material or energy. We weigh them by measuring their tendency to fall toward an attracting, gravitating body like the Earth or Sun. Chemical balances compare precisely the gravitational attraction of the Earth for an unknown quantity of material in one balance pan with its attraction for standard weights in the other balance pan. We can’t weigh light the same way.
Einstein proposed, and Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (British astronomer and physicist, 1882–1944) proved, that the strong gravity of the Sun attracts light from a star.
If we see the star at night when the Sun is on the opposite side of the Earth, the star’s rays come to us straight. Ordinarily we can’t see the same star during the day when its rays pass close to the Sun, because the Earth’s atmosphere scatters the Sun’s rays, making the sky blue and too bright to see the star. Eddington waited until an eclipse blocked the Sun’s light, and then photographed the stars. In the photo, the stars closest to the Sun seemed to have moved closer. That was because their rays fell toward the Sun on the way by. The rays bent because they had weight, just as a clothesline bends when heavy, wet clothes are hanging on it.
The tendency of the rays to fall toward the Sun showed that their weight was the weight Einstein’s theory predicted.
Transformation and Materialization
If material and energy both have mass and weight, can one be transformed into the other? Are they really different forms of one substance? Some philosophers
before Einstein thought that some single substance underlies both material and movement, but they couldn’t prove their ideas. Einstein foresaw ways to convert energy into matter and back again. He told us just how much energy we need to make a given amount of matter, and how much energy we can obtain from matter. He presented his idea as follows:
The most important upshot of the special theory of relativity concerned the inert masses of corporeal systems. It turned out that the inertia of a system necessarily depends on its energy-content, and this led straight to the notion that inert mass is simply latent energy. The principle of the conservation of mass lost its independence and became fused with that of the conservation of energy.[i]
[i] Einstein, Albert, “What is the theory of relativity?”, The London Times, November 28, 1919, reprinted in Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Wings Books, 1954), p. 230.
Through Einstein’s theory we came to understand how material can turn into energy, and vice versa.
This conversion does not happen in chemical burning or in nuclear fission. In those reactions, binding energy is released. There is another kind of nuclear burning, fusion, that combines small nuclei into larger ones. Some fusion reactions turn certain subatomic particles completely into energy. Also, physicists invented cyclotrons, machines that whirl electrons round and round, each time a little faster, and accelerate them to very high speeds. When sufficiently high-speed particles crash into others the particles may disappear completely and release energy as very energetic X-rays. Cyclotrons and other instruments that accelerate particles have demonstrated repeatedly that energy can turn into matter (materialize), and that matter can turn into energy. The theory is abundantly confirmed and has become a law of nature. We continue to say Einstein’s “theory” of relativity because Einstein himself did not do the experiments that confirmed it. He liked to propose “thought experiments” but he left real laboratory experiments to others.
Einstein’s formula, E = mc², tells us that a given quantity of energy E is equivalent to an amount of mass m.
Different Kinds of Rays and Materialization in "Empty" Space
Material is composed of subatomic particles like neutrons, protons, and electrons, listed in order from highest to lowest weight. Electromagnetic rays are the tracks of energy particles called photons.
The weight and the energy of a photon are directly proportional to the rapidity of vibration of the rays.
Photons can produce particles if the equivalent mass of the photons is at least as great as the mass of the particles. Since c² is a large number, we need very energetic photons to make even low-mass particles.
X-rays have the most energetic photons scientists can produce with laboratory equipment. Low-energy gamma rays are identical to X-rays, but the term “gamma rays” refers to rays from natural sources. Some gamma rays have photons that are much more energetic than the most energetic X-ray photons we can produce. To materialize, rays must be at least as energetic as the energetic X-rays physicists make with cyclotrons or linear accelerators.
A single ray cannot materialize all by itself. Two rays, or a ray and a particle, must collide to materialize. If there is a particle present then the space is not empty, so let us describe first the collision of two rays in empty space. When gamma rays or energetic X-rays collide, they convert some or all of their energy into particles. The particles may be components of atoms, such as protons, neutrons, and electrons, or other, less well-known particles. We cannot see atoms because atoms are 5 000 times smaller than light waves. Subatomic particles are even smaller. During the collision, some of the original energy may become kinetic energy, the energy of moving objects. If so, the particles will depart from the scene of their materialization at high speed. If any of the original energy remains, it will travel on as one or more photons of lower energy. The photons continue to collide and fracture until they lack enough energy to materialize.
Sufficiently energetic rays become visible when they collide, fracture, and partially materialize as particles. The particles must form atoms, and the atoms must combine in great numbers before there is visible material. The remaining energy may be soft X-rays, ultraviolet rays, light, or heat. Only the light rays are visible.
An electron has the lowest mass of the three most common subatomic particles. Its mass is equivalent to the energy of the hard X-ray photons we use for treating cancer, much more than the energy of the softer X-ray photons we use for medical diagnosis. Visible light photons are far too weak to make electrons, let alone protons or neutrons. Photons of heat, light, ultraviolet rays, and soft X-rays are all too weak to materialize.
Light rays are visible and make other things visible. All other rays are invisible. They carry energy in darkness.
When doctors make an X-ray picture, they send a powerful pulse of energy through the patient’s body. The X-rays expose the film, but the patient sees nothing. To the patient X-rays are dark.
Since we can see the stars, we know that light can travel in space. We say that space is empty when it contains no matter, but empty space always contains the energy of heat and of any light or gamma rays in transit. We have never been able to make any space so cold and dark that it has no energy at all. Electromagnetic rays can exist in empty space, and there they can make material.
First Evening: Energy and Particles
A special kind of energetic darkness made the material of the universe. To understand how pure energy can make particles, we need to know how much energy it takes to make a particle. Finally, we will be ready to look at another confirmation.
The Energy of Particles
How much energy does it take to make a subatomic particle? Once we know the particle’s mass, we multiply the mass by the square of the speed of light to find the latent energy, using Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc².
The mass of an electron is 910.938 188 micro-micro-micro-micro-micrograms.
There are prefixes for combining repetitions of “micro.” A micro-microgram is a picogram, a micro-picogram is an attogram, and a micro-attogram is a yoctogram. However, we promised not to use technical language. Even if we did use technical language, there is no prefix yet established for a micro-yoctogram. We could invent one and say that the mass of an electron is 910.938 188 “itsy-bitsy-grams.” Is that better or worse than awkward repetitions?
Protons and neutrons are nucleons, the major components of nuclei. Nucleons are almost 2000 times heavier than electrons.
The proton mass is 1.672 621 58 micro-micro-micro-micrograms. The neutron mass is slightly heavier, 1.674 927 16 micro-micro-micro-micrograms.
Appendix A collects physical constants that are explained in the text. It also shows an easier way of writing large and small numbers for people who understand mathematical notation. Appendix B corrects the erroneous idea that the Bible says that the Earth doesn’t move.
Was Energy the Source of Material?
Einstein’s discovery showed that all the material of the universe may have come from energetic gamma rays colliding in space. This greatly simplifies our search for a beginning. If neither matter nor energy could ever be created or destroyed, as the old conservation laws stated, then matter and energy would be separate, eternal components of the universe. If they can be created but can’t be transformed into one another then they require separate causes for their origin. Now we know that matter can be destroyed to produce energy and that energy can materialize when rays collide. Therefore, we need only search for one cause.
Which came first, matter or energy? All known forms of matter in quantity contain electromagnetic, gravitational, and nuclear energy. Nuclear energy can only exist where there is matter. Gravitational energy appears when matter or electromagnetic energy or both are distributed unevenly in space. Any quantity of electromagnetic energy can exist by itself in free space, and if it is nearly uniformly distributed in space its gravitational energy is very low. If there is only one cause, then electromagnetic energy filling all of space nearly uniformly came first, and matter came later.
Rays are packets of electromagnetic waves. Waves repeat themselves periodically as they spread through space. Each period of a wave takes a certain amount of time to develop. At the very beginning no time had yet elapsed, so no wave had yet developed. Only the potential for the development of waves and the spreading of rays was present. This makes it hard to describe the very beginning.
It is easier to describe how things were soon after the beginning. We must imagine the picture. We cannot see it, because there was no light at the beginning. The beginning was perfectly dark.
Any nucleus can form an atom if it cools enough to capture a number of electrons equal to its number of protons. The electrons are too lightweight and active to stay in the nucleus. They form a cloud around the nucleus about a hundred micro-micrometers in diameter. The nucleus is about ten thousand times smaller than that. Atoms subjected to intense heat or bombarded with ultraviolet rays or high-energy electrons turn back into plasma, a mixture of bare nuclei and electrons. Flames and the gas in neon signs are examples.
Very soon after the beginning highly energetic rays were spreading throughout space, starting from all points and traveling in all directions. When the rays collided, they collided everywhere, and often partially materialized as particles. The universe filled with an energetic mixture of rays and particles. Partial materialization took so much energy from some of the rays that they became light rays. Suddenly the picture blazed with light. The source of the light was the energetic gamma rays that collided and partially materialized in the first darkness. Since the darkness had been everywhere, the light shone out of everywhere, starting from all points and spreading from them in all directions.
Other rays, those that retained even less energy than light rays, became heat. The mixture had an extremely high temperature and pressure. All the rays and particles collided frenetically with one another. Some of the protons and neutrons hit each other hard enough to stick together and form simple nuclei of a few particles each.
The pressure made the mixture expand and cool. Cooling stopped the formation of nuclei after the first three or four minutes. Some 380 000 years later the mixture was cool enough to let the nuclei move slowly, capture the free electrons, and become atoms.
This was the beginning of matter as we know it.
Matter is neither indestructible nor eternal. Einstein’s discovery shows how material came from the energy of gamma rays, but it does not explain the source of the energy. It takes huge amounts of energy to make a tiny bit of matter.
Physicists have the capability of making gold directly from energy. When a cyclotron’s dark rays collide, they materialize as electrons, protons, and neutrons. Nuclear reactions can put protons and neutrons together to make nuclei, and when the nuclei are cool enough, they will attract the electrons to make atoms. Gold atoms have 79 electrons, 79 protons, and 118 neutrons to help hold the protons together in the nucleus. Probably no one has ever carried out the complete process of constructing a gold atom from particles. Certainly no one can get rich making gold directly from energy. A recent market price check showed that the electrical energy the cyclotron converts into particles costs 1000 times more than the value of the gold.
A very powerful agency must have worked very hard to generate so much energy.
The Second Discovery
Einstein gave us a way of calculating the mass and weight of energy. His calculations explain why chemists didn’t have to take into account the weight of the firelight and heat when they balanced their input-output equations.
There is heat and light latent in firewood. It is in the energy that holds the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the firewood together. These atoms combine in chemical substances called carbohydrates because of electromagnetic forces between their outermost electrons. Carbohydrates are large, complex, organic molecules that form dense substances. As the wood burns the carbohydrates break up. The carbon and hydrogen combine with oxygen from the air to make carbon dioxide and water vapor. These products are gases with small, simple, inorganic molecules. Together with small particles of soot (unburned carbon) they go up the chimney as smoke. Combustion releases the chemical energy that held the carbohydrates together. This energy leaves the fireplace as heat and light.
To measure the weight of the heat and light, chemists need balances with a precision of nine or ten significant figures. Nobody can yet weigh anything that precisely. Balances need to improve by a factor of 1 000 or 10 000 or more before anyone can weigh matter and light from chemical reactions at the same time.
Atoms store chemical energy in the electromagnetic forces between their positively charged nuclei and their shells of negatively charged electrons. There is much greater energy in the nuclear forces within the nuclei of atoms. When large nuclei break up into smaller ones some of this energy is released in the kind of nuclear burning that we call fission. Einstein’s theory led other scientists to conceive of a “chain reaction” among uranium nuclei. A chain reaction releases a measurable amount of the mass of uranium as nuclear energy. The amount is one tenth of one percent of the mass of uranium.
Separately, of course, we can weigh material or energy. We weigh them by measuring their tendency to fall toward an attracting, gravitating body like the Earth or Sun. Chemical balances compare precisely the gravitational attraction of the Earth for an unknown quantity of material in one balance pan with its attraction for standard weights in the other balance pan. We can’t weigh light the same way.
Einstein proposed, and Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (British astronomer and physicist, 1882–1944) proved, that the strong gravity of the Sun attracts light from a star.
If we see the star at night when the Sun is on the opposite side of the Earth, the star’s rays come to us straight. Ordinarily we can’t see the same star during the day when its rays pass close to the Sun, because the Earth’s atmosphere scatters the Sun’s rays, making the sky blue and too bright to see the star. Eddington waited until an eclipse blocked the Sun’s light, and then photographed the stars. In the photo, the stars closest to the Sun seemed to have moved closer. That was because their rays fell toward the Sun on the way by. The rays bent because they had weight, just as a clothesline bends when heavy, wet clothes are hanging on it.
The tendency of the rays to fall toward the Sun showed that their weight was the weight Einstein’s theory predicted.
Transformation and Materialization
If material and energy both have mass and weight, can one be transformed into the other? Are they really different forms of one substance? Some philosophers
before Einstein thought that some single substance underlies both material and movement, but they couldn’t prove their ideas. Einstein foresaw ways to convert energy into matter and back again. He told us just how much energy we need to make a given amount of matter, and how much energy we can obtain from matter. He presented his idea as follows:
The most important upshot of the special theory of relativity concerned the inert masses of corporeal systems. It turned out that the inertia of a system necessarily depends on its energy-content, and this led straight to the notion that inert mass is simply latent energy. The principle of the conservation of mass lost its independence and became fused with that of the conservation of energy.[i]
[i] Einstein, Albert, “What is the theory of relativity?”, The London Times, November 28, 1919, reprinted in Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Wings Books, 1954), p. 230.
Through Einstein’s theory we came to understand how material can turn into energy, and vice versa.
This conversion does not happen in chemical burning or in nuclear fission. In those reactions, binding energy is released. There is another kind of nuclear burning, fusion, that combines small nuclei into larger ones. Some fusion reactions turn certain subatomic particles completely into energy. Also, physicists invented cyclotrons, machines that whirl electrons round and round, each time a little faster, and accelerate them to very high speeds. When sufficiently high-speed particles crash into others the particles may disappear completely and release energy as very energetic X-rays. Cyclotrons and other instruments that accelerate particles have demonstrated repeatedly that energy can turn into matter (materialize), and that matter can turn into energy. The theory is abundantly confirmed and has become a law of nature. We continue to say Einstein’s “theory” of relativity because Einstein himself did not do the experiments that confirmed it. He liked to propose “thought experiments” but he left real laboratory experiments to others.
Einstein’s formula, E = mc², tells us that a given quantity of energy E is equivalent to an amount of mass m.
Different Kinds of Rays and Materialization in "Empty" Space
Material is composed of subatomic particles like neutrons, protons, and electrons, listed in order from highest to lowest weight. Electromagnetic rays are the tracks of energy particles called photons.
The weight and the energy of a photon are directly proportional to the rapidity of vibration of the rays.
Photons can produce particles if the equivalent mass of the photons is at least as great as the mass of the particles. Since c² is a large number, we need very energetic photons to make even low-mass particles.
X-rays have the most energetic photons scientists can produce with laboratory equipment. Low-energy gamma rays are identical to X-rays, but the term “gamma rays” refers to rays from natural sources. Some gamma rays have photons that are much more energetic than the most energetic X-ray photons we can produce. To materialize, rays must be at least as energetic as the energetic X-rays physicists make with cyclotrons or linear accelerators.
A single ray cannot materialize all by itself. Two rays, or a ray and a particle, must collide to materialize. If there is a particle present then the space is not empty, so let us describe first the collision of two rays in empty space. When gamma rays or energetic X-rays collide, they convert some or all of their energy into particles. The particles may be components of atoms, such as protons, neutrons, and electrons, or other, less well-known particles. We cannot see atoms because atoms are 5 000 times smaller than light waves. Subatomic particles are even smaller. During the collision, some of the original energy may become kinetic energy, the energy of moving objects. If so, the particles will depart from the scene of their materialization at high speed. If any of the original energy remains, it will travel on as one or more photons of lower energy. The photons continue to collide and fracture until they lack enough energy to materialize.
Sufficiently energetic rays become visible when they collide, fracture, and partially materialize as particles. The particles must form atoms, and the atoms must combine in great numbers before there is visible material. The remaining energy may be soft X-rays, ultraviolet rays, light, or heat. Only the light rays are visible.
An electron has the lowest mass of the three most common subatomic particles. Its mass is equivalent to the energy of the hard X-ray photons we use for treating cancer, much more than the energy of the softer X-ray photons we use for medical diagnosis. Visible light photons are far too weak to make electrons, let alone protons or neutrons. Photons of heat, light, ultraviolet rays, and soft X-rays are all too weak to materialize.
Light rays are visible and make other things visible. All other rays are invisible. They carry energy in darkness.
When doctors make an X-ray picture, they send a powerful pulse of energy through the patient’s body. The X-rays expose the film, but the patient sees nothing. To the patient X-rays are dark.
Since we can see the stars, we know that light can travel in space. We say that space is empty when it contains no matter, but empty space always contains the energy of heat and of any light or gamma rays in transit. We have never been able to make any space so cold and dark that it has no energy at all. Electromagnetic rays can exist in empty space, and there they can make material.
First Evening: Energy and Particles
A special kind of energetic darkness made the material of the universe. To understand how pure energy can make particles, we need to know how much energy it takes to make a particle. Finally, we will be ready to look at another confirmation.
The Energy of Particles
How much energy does it take to make a subatomic particle? Once we know the particle’s mass, we multiply the mass by the square of the speed of light to find the latent energy, using Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc².
The mass of an electron is 910.938 188 micro-micro-micro-micro-micrograms.
There are prefixes for combining repetitions of “micro.” A micro-microgram is a picogram, a micro-picogram is an attogram, and a micro-attogram is a yoctogram. However, we promised not to use technical language. Even if we did use technical language, there is no prefix yet established for a micro-yoctogram. We could invent one and say that the mass of an electron is 910.938 188 “itsy-bitsy-grams.” Is that better or worse than awkward repetitions?
Protons and neutrons are nucleons, the major components of nuclei. Nucleons are almost 2000 times heavier than electrons.
The proton mass is 1.672 621 58 micro-micro-micro-micrograms. The neutron mass is slightly heavier, 1.674 927 16 micro-micro-micro-micrograms.
Appendix A collects physical constants that are explained in the text. It also shows an easier way of writing large and small numbers for people who understand mathematical notation. Appendix B corrects the erroneous idea that the Bible says that the Earth doesn’t move.
Was Energy the Source of Material?
Einstein’s discovery showed that all the material of the universe may have come from energetic gamma rays colliding in space. This greatly simplifies our search for a beginning. If neither matter nor energy could ever be created or destroyed, as the old conservation laws stated, then matter and energy would be separate, eternal components of the universe. If they can be created but can’t be transformed into one another then they require separate causes for their origin. Now we know that matter can be destroyed to produce energy and that energy can materialize when rays collide. Therefore, we need only search for one cause.
Which came first, matter or energy? All known forms of matter in quantity contain electromagnetic, gravitational, and nuclear energy. Nuclear energy can only exist where there is matter. Gravitational energy appears when matter or electromagnetic energy or both are distributed unevenly in space. Any quantity of electromagnetic energy can exist by itself in free space, and if it is nearly uniformly distributed in space its gravitational energy is very low. If there is only one cause, then electromagnetic energy filling all of space nearly uniformly came first, and matter came later.
Rays are packets of electromagnetic waves. Waves repeat themselves periodically as they spread through space. Each period of a wave takes a certain amount of time to develop. At the very beginning no time had yet elapsed, so no wave had yet developed. Only the potential for the development of waves and the spreading of rays was present. This makes it hard to describe the very beginning.
It is easier to describe how things were soon after the beginning. We must imagine the picture. We cannot see it, because there was no light at the beginning. The beginning was perfectly dark.
Any nucleus can form an atom if it cools enough to capture a number of electrons equal to its number of protons. The electrons are too lightweight and active to stay in the nucleus. They form a cloud around the nucleus about a hundred micro-micrometers in diameter. The nucleus is about ten thousand times smaller than that. Atoms subjected to intense heat or bombarded with ultraviolet rays or high-energy electrons turn back into plasma, a mixture of bare nuclei and electrons. Flames and the gas in neon signs are examples.
Very soon after the beginning highly energetic rays were spreading throughout space, starting from all points and traveling in all directions. When the rays collided, they collided everywhere, and often partially materialized as particles. The universe filled with an energetic mixture of rays and particles. Partial materialization took so much energy from some of the rays that they became light rays. Suddenly the picture blazed with light. The source of the light was the energetic gamma rays that collided and partially materialized in the first darkness. Since the darkness had been everywhere, the light shone out of everywhere, starting from all points and spreading from them in all directions.
Other rays, those that retained even less energy than light rays, became heat. The mixture had an extremely high temperature and pressure. All the rays and particles collided frenetically with one another. Some of the protons and neutrons hit each other hard enough to stick together and form simple nuclei of a few particles each.
The pressure made the mixture expand and cool. Cooling stopped the formation of nuclei after the first three or four minutes. Some 380 000 years later the mixture was cool enough to let the nuclei move slowly, capture the free electrons, and become atoms.
This was the beginning of matter as we know it.
Matter is neither indestructible nor eternal. Einstein’s discovery shows how material came from the energy of gamma rays, but it does not explain the source of the energy. It takes huge amounts of energy to make a tiny bit of matter.
Physicists have the capability of making gold directly from energy. When a cyclotron’s dark rays collide, they materialize as electrons, protons, and neutrons. Nuclear reactions can put protons and neutrons together to make nuclei, and when the nuclei are cool enough, they will attract the electrons to make atoms. Gold atoms have 79 electrons, 79 protons, and 118 neutrons to help hold the protons together in the nucleus. Probably no one has ever carried out the complete process of constructing a gold atom from particles. Certainly no one can get rich making gold directly from energy. A recent market price check showed that the electrical energy the cyclotron converts into particles costs 1000 times more than the value of the gold.
A very powerful agency must have worked very hard to generate so much energy.
The Second Discovery
Hubble adjusting the 100-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California
At the beginning, heat and pressure started the universe expanding. Edwin Powell Hubble (American astronomer, 1889–1953) discovered in 1929 that the universe is still expanding. Most galaxies or galaxy clusters are spreading out, moving away from each other. The farther they are from us, the faster they move away.
This movement must have started at some time in the relatively recent past. If it had always been going on, forever and ever in the past, then by now all the other galaxies would be infinitely far from us, and we couldn’t see any. But the sky is full of galaxies. Therefore, we know that at a certain moment, not infinitely remote in the past, all the material and energy of the universe was close together. This moment marks the beginning of the universe, 13 820 million years ago.
Einstein’s and Hubble’s discoveries, the materialization of energy and the expansion of the universe, lead to a working model of the beginnings of the universe. A fraction of a second after the beginning cosmic rays collided in the darkness, making a fiery mixture of particles and rays that expanded under tremendous pressure. Eventually the material, heat, and light separated from the darkness and formed the first stars and galaxies.
Einstein’s and Hubble’s discoveries, the materialization of energy and the expansion of the universe, lead to a working model of the beginnings of the universe. A fraction of a second after the beginning cosmic rays collided in the darkness, making a fiery mixture of particles and rays that expanded under tremendous pressure. Eventually the material, heat, and light separated from the darkness and formed the first stars and galaxies.
Hubble was working with the largest telescope of his day when he made his discovery. Even so he could not see very far into space. This meant that he could only observe conditions in the relatively recent past.
Light moves very fast, but still takes years to arrive even from the closest stars. We can never see how things are at the present moment in the heavens. What we see there is now past. The farther out one looks into space, the farther back in time one sees.
Telescopes gradually increased in size and performance. Nevertheless, they had to await the invention of electronic detector arrays to replace film before they could see very close to the beginning. Until then, theories based on Hubble’s discovery had to rely on indirect evidence for confirmation. By 1948 Ralph Asher Alpher (American physicist, 1921–), Robert Herman (American physicist and civil engineer, 1914–), and George Gamow (Russian-born American theoretical physicist, 1904–1968) had calculated that the original high temperature of the universe has dropped to about 5 kelvins at present in the coldest empty regions of space.
We now know the temperature more accurately. It is 2.735 kelvins.
Bright red coals or electrical heating elements have a temperature of 850º C to 950º C (1 562º F to 1 742º F). Some people can see incipient red heat beginning at temperatures as low as 500º C (932º F). Five kelvins is ‑268º C (‑450.4º F). This is far too cold to produce any detectable light.
The expansion of the universe makes the first light colder than that. Therefore, no optical telescope can ever see the first light, no matter how far it can look. Only a radio telescope can detect the electromagnetic waves that correspond to so low a temperature.
This movement must have started at some time in the relatively recent past. If it had always been going on, forever and ever in the past, then by now all the other galaxies would be infinitely far from us, and we couldn’t see any. But the sky is full of galaxies. Therefore, we know that at a certain moment, not infinitely remote in the past, all the material and energy of the universe was close together. This moment marks the beginning of the universe, 13 820 million years ago.
Einstein’s and Hubble’s discoveries, the materialization of energy and the expansion of the universe, lead to a working model of the beginnings of the universe. A fraction of a second after the beginning cosmic rays collided in the darkness, making a fiery mixture of particles and rays that expanded under tremendous pressure. Eventually the material, heat, and light separated from the darkness and formed the first stars and galaxies.
Einstein’s and Hubble’s discoveries, the materialization of energy and the expansion of the universe, lead to a working model of the beginnings of the universe. A fraction of a second after the beginning cosmic rays collided in the darkness, making a fiery mixture of particles and rays that expanded under tremendous pressure. Eventually the material, heat, and light separated from the darkness and formed the first stars and galaxies.
Hubble was working with the largest telescope of his day when he made his discovery. Even so he could not see very far into space. This meant that he could only observe conditions in the relatively recent past.
Light moves very fast, but still takes years to arrive even from the closest stars. We can never see how things are at the present moment in the heavens. What we see there is now past. The farther out one looks into space, the farther back in time one sees.
Telescopes gradually increased in size and performance. Nevertheless, they had to await the invention of electronic detector arrays to replace film before they could see very close to the beginning. Until then, theories based on Hubble’s discovery had to rely on indirect evidence for confirmation. By 1948 Ralph Asher Alpher (American physicist, 1921–), Robert Herman (American physicist and civil engineer, 1914–), and George Gamow (Russian-born American theoretical physicist, 1904–1968) had calculated that the original high temperature of the universe has dropped to about 5 kelvins at present in the coldest empty regions of space.
We now know the temperature more accurately. It is 2.735 kelvins.
Bright red coals or electrical heating elements have a temperature of 850º C to 950º C (1 562º F to 1 742º F). Some people can see incipient red heat beginning at temperatures as low as 500º C (932º F). Five kelvins is ‑268º C (‑450.4º F). This is far too cold to produce any detectable light.
The expansion of the universe makes the first light colder than that. Therefore, no optical telescope can ever see the first light, no matter how far it can look. Only a radio telescope can detect the electromagnetic waves that correspond to so low a temperature.