Welcome to all of you tonight on this very warm evening. We have asked for the custodians to turn on the air conditioners and it should soon be comfortable in here.
As mentioned at the close of last weeks lecture, Dr. Dan Smoot, noted cosmologist is here with us tonight to share with us what he has found and presented to the International Academy of Science's convention in 1996. We feel honored and privileged that he accepted our request to come. Dr. Smoot, we welcome you to our community, and eagerly await to hear your contribution to our symposium. We turn the time over to you.
Thank you Dr. Grey for inviting me to come and share with you what is the love of my life, God's wonderful cosmos. I will begin by giving you a brief background into this subject and how I was led into this field.
Since the late 1920s and early 1930s, the powerful idea surfaced about the origin of the Universe that, if true, would change man's concept of space forever. Also, that if correct, it would support the theory that the cosmos had an origin and was not a static universe but one that had a cataclysmic beginning and was ever expanding both in time and space. As a result, cosmologists (scientists who study the cosmos, space, or the Universe) were divided by two groups of thought.
The Static View:
From the time when man first began to study and observe the Universe and its visible celestial bodies, at a time when the heavens could only be viewed with the naked eye, the Universe appeared to be STATIC. The stars and planets always appeared in the same spot in the heavens at the same time in earth's year. From earliest times planetariums made of stone were erected to view the stars as they passed across stones placed in the ground. The pyramids were built facing only one direction, oriented toward a fixed star.
The Expanding View:
It was not until the time of Galileo, when he invented and used the first telescope, that man's understanding began to gradually change about the Universe. Man could not see that there was movement in space, dynamic happenings, comprising stupendous events. With the invention of giant optical and radio telescopes, space exploring satellites, and sophisticated measuring devices, man's concepts and ideas about space expanded, multiplying his knowledge and understanding of the Universe and the laws governing its operation.
The giant new Hubble telescope located in space is revealing startling new images of a dynamic, ever expanding space. New objects in the universe never before seen are uncovered to the amazement of all. Every new discovery supports the observations that our infinitely vast Universe is an ever-expanding universe. The current line of reasoning about the Universe is 1) IT IS FINITE, that is, HAD AN ORIGIN, a beginning, or was CREATED. This event is labeled the "Big Bang," and 2) IT IS AN EVER EXPANDING UNIVERSE IN BOTH TIME AND SPACE. It appears that new galaxies star clusters are constantly forming, and the means whereby this is taking place can now be observed.
THE SEARCH FOR ORIGINS:
Eighteen years ago I entered the field of cosmology with a burning desire to prove the "big bang" theory to be truth. After years of heartbreak, disappointment, trial and error, I was finally successful in reaching my goal and wrote a book describing my experience and findings. The solid scientific proof, which supports the premise that the universe is dynamic and ever expanding, is there for all to see.
But more important to me is that this was the creation of a super mind with incomprehensible power defined as God, who created matter, time and space from nothing. Beyond this, the findings indicate clearly THE METHOD which God used to create the cosmos, HOW He formed stars and heavenly bodies, and WHEN in time He began the process. Furthermore, this creative process has an order and timing that excludes the idea that the universe just happened by random chance, as atheistic minds like to believe. After I became heavily involved in this project, which became my life's work, I realized that God's hand had been leading and guiding me; that I had a contribution to make which would glorify Him and prove to be irrefutable evidence against those who do not believe in a finite being or if they believe, doubt His methodology.
I believe that my search for truth is a prime example of how God leads when we seek knowledge and understanding about Him and His Universe. I deem it a privilege to have had the opportunity to do this. Any person (scientist) who is honest and seeking for answers about God, will be lead to the truth regarding God's existence and the vindication of His Word. (The following information was taken from Dan's book, "Wrinkles in Time.").
ORIGIN OF THE COSMOS:
Cosmology is defined as 'the science of the Universe.'...No study has excited more interest and conjecture than that of the universe, the cosmos, or outer space. Beginning twenty-five hundred years ago the ancient Greeks organized their observations of the world into cosmological models. The Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy altered it in his time to account for celestial observations and it remained the standard cosmological model for another fifteen hundred years. (p 2,3)
Over the past four centuries a series of astronomical observations and experiments have radically altered our view of the Universe. Just as Aristotle's geocentric Universe was replaced by the heliocentric Universe of Copernicus, Copernicus's Universe was soon replaced by Newton's, and Newton's eventually by Einstein's. We currently live in Einstein's Universe, but this worldview may also someday become inadequate. One of the themes of my book, and of the history of science, is that no theory is sacrosanct. As we expand our powers of observation through technology and experimental ingenuity, we must modify our theories to fit what we see.
When I took up cosmology in 1970, a change was taking place in the science. In the past, astronomy and particle physics had independently pursued fundamental questions about nature. But by 1970, a union of these two disciplines had begun to occur. This union of the study of the incomprehensibly large (astronomy) and the unbelievably small When I took up cosmology in 1970, a change was taking place in the science. In the past (particle physics) promises to move human curiosity closer to answering the ultimate questions. Indeed, it is already delivering on that promise, as experiment and theory allow us to look back toward the slimmest imaginable margin of time, some 10 to the 42 seconds (that is, one millionth of an trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second) after what we believe to be the origin of the universe.
The scope of cosmology begins at that moment and encompasses the subsequent evolution of our cosmos, which grew from being the tiniest fraction of the size of a proton (one of the elementary particles from which all known matter is made) to an essentially endless expanse. This theory of an expanding cosmos is popularly known as the "BIG BANG." To cosmologists, the big bang is a powerful theory that has dominated the science for the past three decades. As words imply, the theory envisages the universe's beginning with a mighty eruption. Unlike a conventional explosion, however, the big bang did not move into existing space; IT CREATED SPACE AS IT EXPANDED (AND CONTINUES TO DO SO). The big bang was the cataclysmic creation of matter and space. To understand the conditions that allowed the big bang to occur, we must abandon our commonsense notion of matter and energy and time and space as separate. The universe at the moment of creation existed under very different conditions and probably operated according to different laws than it does today. Reality in cosmology sometimes evades our comprehension.
Big bang cosmology holds that the universe is expanding and evolving. When one looks back in time, the Universe is more dense and hotter and its contents younger. At the very beginning, there are only seeds.
Though the pedigree of big bang cosmology reaches back to an idea developed between 1927 and 1933 by Georges-Henri Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, it wasn't until 1964 that the theory emerged as the dominant explanation of how the universe came to be the way it is. (p 8-9)
Science has moved from the Greeks' four basic elements to the modern view of a world made of atoms. At low temperatures these atoms combine to form very complex and complicated structures. As temperature increases, the higher random heat energy breaks the linked atoms apart into simpler and more symmetric pieces. For example a solid snowflake melts into water, a liquid, which vaporizes into steam—a gas composed of individual molecules of H2 O. At higher temperatures the molecules split apart into individual atoms of oxygen and hydrogen. At a still higher temperature the electrons are stripped from the atoms. Scientists had found that atoms were actually simpler than they looked—they were made of electrons in a cloud around a tiny dense nucleus and that nucleus was composed only of protons and neutrons. The number of protons determined the number of electrons in the atomic cloud and thus the chemical properties of the atom. The electrons on the outside of the atomic cloud were the handles by which atoms could join together to make substances. The electrons were clearly simple—very lightweight, point-like particles, all identical, and carrying a single unit of electric charge. "This made a wonderfully simple picture: All of matter is made by combining in different ways just three simple particles, the electron, proton, and neutron. These composites, in turn, combine to make even more complex structures. Unfortunately nuclear physicists found out that the proton and neutron are not simple, like the electron.
In high-energy collisions, new particles were being discovered by the handful. The force holding the neutrons and protons in the nucleus (the strong nuclear force) turned out to be not nearly as neat and simple as the electrical force holding electrons to atoms, or the gravity holding us on the earth. At high energies, physics seemed to have turned messy. The strong force was very complicated. This was a reversal of the pattern that made physics so beautiful and fundamental.
Ideally, physics should reduce the number of things that are separate and that have to be remembered and explained. Instead, the interactions were now more complicated and there was a plethora of particles with no known use.
This also gave me pause about the big bang model. If elemental nuclei were so hard to understand, how could anyone hope to understand Georges-Henri Lemaitre's primordial atom with its nucleus as big as the Solar System? At nuclear densities the universe would be very complicated. How could we find out how the universe began? (p 14-15)
This perceived problem gave impetus to my desire to find an answer. Fortunately or providentially, I met Professor David Frisch, who recruited me to work with his group for his senior thesis project. They had set up a detector at the big accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and had gathered reams of data showing the debris resulting from collisions of the accelerator's high-energy protons including deuterium nuclei in the detector. In this debris were traces of many unstable particles traveling nearly at the speed of light. The results of this data showed that "all the extra particles the scientists had found were simply unstable combinations of quarks that quickly split into more stable combinations." (p 16)
It showed that "at higher energies, things get less complicated and more symmetric. This made the big bang look more tractable. Things became simpler and easier the closer one got to the beginning of the Universe. It was now easy for me to imagine everything in the Universe compressed into a region smaller than a proton. When one reaches Lemaitre's primordial nucleus, just keep pushing. The protons and neutrons dissolve into a soup of quarks. If the quarks are really point-like, or at least very, very tiny, then it is no problem to push them into a region the size of a proton. With a great many quarks packed together, they resist less than when there are only three in the volume of a proton. This compression does, however, require an unimaginably high temperature. (p 16,17)
Without getting too technical, I realized that this concept provided the breakthrough I needed. At that point I realized that the origin of the cosmos was probably the creation of God, rather than a state of just being, and that time and space were interwoven, meaning that there had to have been a beginning point.
In 1993, an annual meeting was held in Boston by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In a session called "The Theological Significance of Big Bang Cosmology," scientists and theologians sought connections between the fundamental science of the big bang, as described by current theory, and the Christian story of creation. (p 17)
It was agreed upon that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing. As science, the big bang is a powerful theory for explaining the origin and the evolution of the universe. (P 17,18)
In 1938, a researcher, Carl Friedrich von Weizsaker, after concluding that the interior of the Sun and other stars wasn't hot enough to fuse light elements into an abundance of heavier elements, suggested that a super-hot primordial "fireball" might have been involved in the creation of the Universe. He conceived of a fireball as big as the Milky Way—perhaps even as large as the whole cosmos.
A fireball of this size would, he conjectured, fly apart, ejecting matter into space that we now see as the galaxies. He theorized that that matter would include heavy elements "baked" in the intense heat (4 million degrees), elements that eventually condensed into celestial objects such as the earth, sun, and moon. The thought was that this intense heat of a created star would fuse lighter elements such as hydrogen into an abundance of heavier elements. But it was argued that no such heat was available in space. Eddington, wrote in his book, "Stars and Atoms," "I am aware that many critics consider the conditions in the stars not sufficiently extreme to bring about the transmutation—the stars are not hot enough. The critics lay themselves open to an obvious retort, we tell them to go and find a hotter place." (pp 60-64)
In that year, two American radio astronomers discovered what appeared to be the dim afterglow of the ancient cataclysmic event. That afterglow, an all-pervasive hum of radiation with a temperature equivalent of barely more than 3 degrees Kelvin (three degrees above absolute zero), is known as cosmic background radiation, and it provides us with a faded snapshot of the universe as it was some three hundred thousand years after the big bang. It is within the background radiation that my colleagues and I hoped to discover our wrinkles in time, the Holy Grail of cosmology.
One of the greatest challenges to the big bang theory has been to explain how matter is distributed through the ever-expanding space of the cosmos. It is possible to imagine that all matter would have been scattered evenly through space, making the Universe a homogeneous cloud of gas, with an average density of about one hydrogen atom every ten cubic meters....Had the Universe today, some 15 billion years after it formed, been a virtually unending cloud of gas, the night sky would be unrelentingly black, and we would not be here to observe it. However, we know from our very existence that something (GOD) in the evolution of the Universe caused matter to condense, into stars and planets—and, ultimately, LIFE (However, not just life on earth, with a probability approaching 100 percent, but on millions of other planets too, including some in our own Milky Way). "Again, it is possible to imagine that stars, like our own Sun with its orbiting planets, could have been distributed evenly throughout the Universe, a uniform cloud of countless billions of points of light in the night sky. But, again, we know from our own experience that that is not the case.
Our sun is but one of a hundred million similar stars in a huge, disk-shaped, rotating spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, seen as a wispy band across the night sky. To all intents and purposes, all stars are members of such galaxies. Matter is therefore dumped together not only as stars gut also as collections of stars, or galaxies.
Again, it is possible to imagine that all galaxies, once they had formed from the condensation of matter into a community of stars, could have been distributed evenly throughout the Universe, a uniform cloud of blurred spirals in the night sky. A major discovery of recent cosmology is that this, too, is not the case. Galaxies are often collected together, not only as clusters of thousands of galaxies, but as even larger entities known as super-clusters, and structures larger yet, some many millions of light-years in extent. In other words, matter in the universe is highly structured. A useful image of the universe is a foam composed of soap bubbles, in which the walls of the bubbles represent concentrations of galaxies and their interiors represent vast empty volumes of space.
But the structure and formation of visible matter is only part of the conundrum for the modern cosmologist. Go out tonight and, if you are blessed with a clear sky and little extraneous light, look deep into the heavens. If you use binoculars or a telescope you will see a night sky ablaze, such as Galileo saw it four centuries ago, holding millions of stars and galaxies, the stuff of creation. This is what we usually think of when we talk about the Universe. However, it is what you are not seeing that is of increasing importance to theorists.
If modern cosmology is correct, the shining stars in the dark night sky represent LESS THAN 1 PERCENT OF THE STUFF OF CREATION (emphasis added). Most matter CREATED during the big bang may be completely alien to us: invisible to our eyes and quite beyond our physical experience. (pages 8-12)
A COSMOLOGICAL PUZZLE—HOW?
This is a "giant cosmological puzzle which relates to the central search of cosmology for the past three decades. The discovery in 1964 of cosmic background radiation appeared to confirm the reality of the big bang. But it left unanswered a key issue: How did the big bang lead to the formation of stars, galaxies, galactic clusters, and so on, by the condensation of the stuff of creation? If the big bang happened, clues to the formation of the structures we see in today's universe should be evident in the earliest remnants of the fury of creation.
The clues should be evident in the cosmic background radiation.
Background radiation from all regions of the universe looked uniform, a picture showing a smooth fabric of space and energy. But IN ORDER FOR STRUCTURES TO CONDENSE FROM THE PRODUCTS OF THE BIG BANG, THE SMOOTH FABRIC MUST HAVE BORNE TINY WRINKLES, FLUCTUATIONS IN TEMPERATURE CAUSED BY AREAS OF HIGHER DENSITY.
According to the big bang theory, matter (familiar and unfamiliar) could have condensed and subsequently formed galactic structures in such areas through gravity. These wrinkles—we can also call them cosmic seeds from which the galaxies grew—must have been present, otherwise modern cosmology, and specifically the big bang theory, would be in serious trouble. Ibid, pp 12-14.
Because of this puzzle, I was driven to look for these "wrinkles" or variations in the fabric of space which would prove the big bang theory, which describes an instantaneous creation of the universe. This endeavor took me 17 years, after which time my colleagues and I eventually, by the use of a satellite, found these wrinkles, thus proving that the "big bang" hypothesis was correct.
IMPLICATIONS ENORMOUS:
For creationists the implications are enormous, for once having proved by the laws of nuclear physics (God's natural laws regulating matter and space), that the universe had a beginning, the cosmologist was then forced to answer THE QUESTION OF WHO OR WHAT STARTED THIS BIG BANG. Newton recognized and admitted that a divine power must be necessary to ensure that stars "would continue in that posture [spaced at equal distances] without motion for ever (the law of gravity and the attraction of one body toward another). This of course was a very unpopular idea with the scientists of his day.
As the data from space was compiled, we felt there was only one possible explanation for the beginning or origin of the universe. ONLY AN INTELLIGENT, POWERFUL MIND COULD HAVE CREATED THIS UNIVERSE. Our scientific research and exploration, undeniably confirms this hypothesis. There is no other possible answer that can adequately explain the order and structure of the cosmos. A universe created by random chance could never have happened without an overriding intelligent controlling power, which of course could only be God the Creator.
WHERE DOES GOD DWELL?
If one accepts that the Universe had its beginnings 15 billion years ago, was created by the Word of God, and is an ever expanding universe from its initial creation, then of necessity heaven, or God's dwelling place had to be somewhere else, perhaps in another Universe. If this is so, then COULD THERE NOT BE OTHER CLUSTERS OF UNIVERSES, A SYSTEM OF UNIVERSES?
It is utterly impossible for the human mind to grasp or understand concepts of this magnitude and vastness. But then, it is not necessary for us to do so, for the only point which God would have us mindful of is that He is LOVE, that He is our Creator, and that there is no limit to His creative power and abilities, which includes His power to save us from the enemy Satan.
Most important of all is that, OUT OF LOVE, He sent His only Son, the Creator, to earth to die for our sins so that we might someday, if faithful, live for eternity in God's eternal universe to live in the glory of His presence. What incomprehensible unfathomable love is this, coming from a being with such vast powers that He holds not only our world in place but all the numberless stars, planets, galaxies, and possibly unnumbered universes?
I thank you for allowing me to come and share my findings. If my remarks were somewhat over your heads, I apologize. Of necessity I had to present this bare minimum to show the principles of particle physics and how this proves the "Big Bang" theory.
Thank you Dr. Smoot for your most enlightening contribution, and thank you audience for coming tonight. Next weeks symposium topic will be "The Witness of Nature." This involves nature around us in the natural world.