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 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.
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.
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.
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.