‘God Particle’ glimpsed at Hadron

From American Thinker.Com

December 12, 2011

Rick Moran

Just to get a healthy discussion going this morning, we have news from the BBC that scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Bern, Switzerland can barely contain their excitement over the prospect of discovering the elusive Higgs-Boson particle one of the fundamental building blocks of matter.

Sometimes irreverently – and inaccurately – referred to as the “God Particle,” the physicists at LHC believe they are on the cusp of confirming the particle’s existence.

There is intense excitement among physicists working at Cern, the Geneva-based organisation which operates the collider, over hints that the hunters have cornered their quarry.

“It is a fantastic time at the moment, you can feel people are enthusiastic,” Dr Christoph Rembser, a senior scientist on the Atlas experiment, told BBC News. “It is really very lively.”

Prof Stefan Soldner-Rembold, from the University of Manchester, called the quality of the LHC’s results “exceptional”, adding: “Within one year we will probably know whether the Higgs particle exists, but it is likely not going to be a Christmas present.”

He told me: “The Higgs particle would, of course, be a great discovery, but it would be an even greater discovery if it didn’t exist where theory predicts it to be.”

The Higgs boson is a “fundamental” particle; one of the basic building blocks of the Universe. It is also the last missing piece in the leading theory of particle physics – known as the Standard Model – which describes how particles and forces interact.

What exactly is Higgs-Boson?

The way the Higgs field works has been likened to the way photographers and reporters congregate around a celebrity. The cluster of people are strongly attracted to the celebrity and create resistance to his or her movement across a room. In other words, they give the celebrity “mass”.

“The thing about the Higgs is that we always say we need it to explain mass. But the real importance of it is that we need it to make sense of the Universe,” said Dr Tara Shears, a particle physicist at Liverpool University.

She told BBC News: “Discovering the Higgs confirms that the approach we have been taking to understand the Universe is correct.”

With the Webb space telescope being built and a possible launch set for 2018 – a space telescope that will aid us in understanding the macro universe – and the LHC that helps us understand the micro universe, the strides being made to answer fundamental questions of our existence (at least from a scientific point of view) have never been more rapid or as large in the history of civilization.

Finding Higgs-Boson will be a remarkable achievement – one of the truly monumental discoveries in the history of science.

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A faster than light particle?

From American Thinker.Com

September 23, 2011

Rick Moran

It’s rare that a science story leads the news but this one is a shocker. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it is not possible for matter to travel faster than the speed of light.The cosmic speed limit was set in stone largely because it would take an astronomical amount of energy to exceed lightspeed.

Much of modern physics is based on Einstein’s work. Now there is a possibility that Einstein was wrong and that physics may have to rethink the concept of matter and energy:

The science world was left in shock when workers at the world’s largest physics lab announced they had recorded subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light

If the findings are proven to be accurate, they would overturn one of the pillars of the Standard Model of physics, which explains the way the universe and everything within it works.

Einstein’s theory of special relativity, proposed in 1905, states that nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. But researchers at the CERN lab near Geneva claim they have recorded neutrinos, a type of tiny particle, travelling faster than the barrier of 186,282 miles (299,792 kilometers) per second.

The results have so astounded researchers that American and Japanese scientists have been asked to verify the results before they are confirmed as a discovery.

Neutrinos have long been suspected of being able to travel beyond light speed but the ability to measure their speed accurately has only recently been possible thanks to the CERN lab. This may be one of those moments in science history that acts as a hinge that opens the door to a burst of new discoveries, changing the way we understand the universe – and ourselves.

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Physics and The Bible: The Terrible Flood of Noah

From KHouse.Org

PHYSICS AND THE BIBLE: THE TERRIBLE FLOOD OF NOAH

The 104th Psalm is a beautiful hymn about creation that complements the information given to us in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible. Here, as in other Scriptures, the origin of the universe and our planet is not pictured as a massive explosion (such as a Big Bang) but as an orderly series of events in which everything was crafted by the hands of an artisan, a Master Builder.

The early earth after creation is nowhere pictured as a place of smoking volcanoes, sulfureous fumes and violent quakes. The Apostle Peter quite simply says that the earth “was formed out of water and by means of water” (2 Peter 3:5).

Seventy-one percent of the earth’s surface today is indeed water – the oceans average 3.8 kilometers deep. Only 29% of the earth’s surface is land – whose average elevation is only 623 meters! If all the continents and land masses were leveled into the sea using a giant bulldozer, nearly two miles of water would cover our entire earth. Glaciers and ice caps hold about two percent of earth’s water; were they all to melt, sea levels around the world would rise 40 meters – a big problem for many large sea-level cities should this happen. The earth’s atmosphere today holds only about two inches of precipitable water – this is constantly being replenished by the hydrologic cycle.

Before the Flood
The earth before the Flood of Noah was a very different place! God’s intervention in human affairs during the time of Noah, the tenth man from Adam, changed things forever on our planet. The earth before the Flood seems to have possessed a uniform sub-tropical climate. There may have been no rainfall, no ice and snow, and no major seasonal changes. (For instance, palm tree fossils have been found in Alaska, frozen warm-climate mammoths in Siberia, and coal in Antarctica.) The oceans would have been much warmer, and earth’s rivers and streams may well have originated in powerful springs-such as the spring that supplied the four rivers of Eden.

In his classic pioneering study,The Waters Above: Earth’s Preflood Vapor Canopy Joseph Dillow suggested a pre-Flood atmospheric pressure at sea level twice the present value – a big help to the extinct flying reptile Pteranadon, who would probably not get off the ground in today’s atmosphere. But too much water vapor in the upper atmosphere before the Flood would obscure the stars, and even the sun and moon, because of perpetual cloud cover. And for the atmosphere to support the weight of additional water vapor, the surface temperature would have to rise rapidly toward the boiling point of water. Condensation of water vapor during very heavy, prolonged rainfall would release enormous amounts of latent heat of condensation.

However, in spite of these difficulties, a modest vapor canopy – perhaps holding 40 feet of rain water – may have existed prior to the deluge of the Flood.

The Flood
Most of the water for the great Flood of Noah came from the so-called “fountains of the great deep” (Gen 7:11). This source of water is mentioned before the rain from the “windows of heaven.”

During the formation of the earth on the second and third days of creation, large quantities of water were evidently placed between the earth’s crust and mantle in what might be called giant subterranean reservoirs. This water was probably under high pressure to begin with (causing artesian springs and geysers to abound), but after the fall of man and the angels – when some of the heavier atomic elements were apparently made unstable by reduced nuclear binding forces so that radioactive decay commenced – the shorter-lived isotopes could well have heated the subsurface to a point of criticality where it could scarcely be contained by the strength of the overlying crust.

Extensive volcanic activity may have occurred at the same time – the fountains of the great deep were thus broken open and volcanic ash hurtling into the stratosphere could have collapsed the vapor canopy by dispersing condensation nuclei around which raindrops formed.

[Incidentally, gravitational compaction of the earth at the time of earth's formation would not have raised the interior temperature above 1000 degrees C, yet the earth's core-present temperature about 4300 degrees - has evidently melted and overturned in the past. Radioactive heating is believed to have supplied the extra energy needed.]

The Flood in Noah’s time was certainly a direct act of judgment by God on a world which had become thoroughly and continually evil:

Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. And the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.’ (Genesis 6:5-7)

Since God is in full control of nature – there are no “accidents” in God’s universe – the exact mechanisms the Lord used to initiate the Flood need not preoccupy our attention. Erudite scientific models for the geophysical processes that accompanied the Flood have been presented at three Pittsburgh International Conferences on Creation. Dr. Walter Brown’s outstanding book on the Flood, In the Beginning, especially concentrates on possible mechanisms for the bursting open of the fountains of the great deep.

Was the Flood Global?
The Hebrew language has several words to describe ordinary floods, but Genesis 7-11 uses the unique word mabbul (found only elsewhere in Psalm 29:10). When Hebrew scholars put the Old Testament into Greek, they chose the Greek word kataklusmos, from the verb “to inundate,” in place of the Hebrew mabbul. All the language of Genesis, and especially the words of the Apostle Peter, give us the clearest possible picture of a worldwide, cataclysmic, universal disaster from which only eight human beings escaped with their lives. Warning of false teachers and strong-willed skeptics, Peter tells us:

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly… Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.’ For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water. But the present heavens and earth by His Word are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men…(2 Peter 2:4-5, 3:3-7)

There would be no need to labor many decades building a boat to escape a local flood – simple flight to the next valley or to a nearby mountain would have sufficed. Nor would a local flood require such an elaborate plan to save representative animal species.

Scripture is clear: the purpose of the Flood was to judge and destroy a decadent, thoroughly evil human civilization that probably numbered some billions of individuals – along with their cities and all the infrastructures.

Noah escaped not because he was blameless (justified by his faith as we are), but because he (and his family) responded to God’s mercy and grace. A good many other individuals who lived in the 1655-2255 years between Adam and Noah no doubt responded to the gospel preached by Adam, by Enoch, and by others who knew the Lord. But by the time of the Flood, apparently the entire “civilized” world had become totally unresponsive to the offer of God’s free salvation.

And all flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind; of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died. Thus He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky, and they were blotted out from the earth; and only Noah was left, together with those that were with him in the ark. And the water prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days….(Genesis 7:21-24)

After The Flood:
The Ark finally landed on the very same day of the Hebrew calendar that Jesus Christ would be raised from the dead about three millennia later in history, taking into account the calendar change in Exodus 12. The subterranean caverns of the great deep collapsed, so that the waters receded into what are now our deep ocean basins.

With the tremendous weight of water removed from the land, isostatic rebound allowed great mountains, capped with sediments, to “float” up on the underlying mantle below the crust. (Mountains before the Flood were most likely much lower than they are now.) Seeds sprouted, life began again, and Noah and his family left the Ark to repopulate the earth under a new covenant with God (Gen 8:18-9:17). Four men and four women, who knew and loved the living God personally, began to repopulate the earth. They started with only meager resources and animals from the Ark – plus the bountiful grace of God.

[This article was excerpted from Lambert Dolphin's article, "The Terrible Flood of Noah" published by Koinonia House in June 1997.]

Related Links:
• The Ice Age and the Genesis Flood – ICR
• Creation and Catastrophe – Lambert Dolphin Library
• Concerning the Early History of Planet Earth – Lambert Dolphin Library
• The Terrible Flood of Noah – by Lambert Dolphin – Koinonia House

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Our Digital Universe

From Koinonia House

OUR DIGITAL UNIVERSE

“The entire universe is a cryptogram set by the Almighty. “   - Sir Isaac Newton

Fans of the popular TV science fiction series, Star Trek, are familiar with the “Beam-me-up-Scotty” concept of “teleporting.” In an Austrian laboratory several years ago, scientists were able to destroy bits of light in one place and make perfect replicas appear about three feet away. They did this by transferring information about a crucial physical characteristic of the original light bits, or photons. The information was picked up by other photons, which took on that characteristic and thus became replicas of the originals.

While broader applications of these techniques still remain rather distant on the horizon of our new 21st century, the experiment raises some basic questions. Is our universe itself digital?

Our Macro-Boundary:
The startling discovery of 20th century science was that our universe is finite. Scientists now acknowledge that the universe had a beginning. They call the singularity from which it all began the “Big Bang.” While the details among the many variants of these theories remain quite controversial, the fact that there was a definite beginning has gained widespread agreement.  This is, of course, what the Bible has maintained throughout its 66 books.

From thermodynamic considerations, it also appears that all processes in the universe inevitably contribute their losses from their inefficiencies to the ambient temperature, and thus the universe ultimately will attain a uniform temperature in which no work – all of which derives from temperature differences – will occur. Scientists call this final ultimate physical destiny the “heat death.”

Mankind, therefore, finds itself caught in a finite interval between the singularity that began it all and its inevitable termination. The mathematical concept of infinity – in any spatial direction or in terms of time – seems astonishingly absent in the macrocosm, the domain of the astronomers and cosmologists.

Our Micro-Boundary:
In the microcosmic domain, there appears to be an even more astonishing boundary to smallness.  If we take a segment of length, we can divide it in half.  We can take one of the remaining halves, and we can divide it in half again.  We naturally assume that this can go on forever.  We assume that no matter how small a length we end up dealing with, we can always – at least conceptually – divide any remainder in half.  It turns out that this is not true. There is a length, known as the Planck length, 10^-33 centimeters, that is indivisible.

The same thing is true of mass, energy, and even time. There is a unit of time which cannot be further divided: 10^-43 seconds. It is in this strange world of subatomic behavior that scientists have encountered the very boundaries of physical reality, as we experience it. The study of these subatomic components is called quantum mechanics, or quantum physics.

The startling discovery made by the quantum physicists is that if you break matter into smaller and smaller pieces, you eventually reach a point where those pieces – electrons, protons, etc. – no longer possess the traits of objects. Although they can sometimes behave as if they were a compact little particle, physicists have found that they literally possess no dimension. They call this non-locality.

The more we know about quantum physics, the less confidence we can have concerning the nature of our own physical reality. It seems that it is but a subset of a larger hyperspace we call the spiritual reality.

A Glimpse of Hyperspace:
Current cosmological conjectures assume a universe of more than three spatial dimensions – mathematically called a hyperspace. Current views envision a universe of ten dimensions: four directly measurable (three spatial dimensions, plus time) and six that can only be determined indirectly. This is precisely what the ancient Hebrew sage, Nachmonides, writing in the 12th century, concluded from his study of Genesis!

The Bible is unique in that it presents a universe of more than three dimensions (Ephesians 3:18), and reveals a Creator that is transcendent over His creation.  It is the only “holy book” that possesses such contemporary insights.

[This is an excerpt from Chuck Missler's article, "Our Digital Universe? Quantum Teleporting: Part 1."]

Related Links:

• Our Digital Universe? Quantum Teleporting: Part 1 – Koinonia House
• Quantum Teleporting, Part 2: Our Holographic Universe – Koinonia House
• Cosmic Codes Book – Koinonia House Store

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What Happens When You Die?

From Koinonia House

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE?

We don’t like to think about death. It’s not a pleasant subject, and we avoid even discussing it seriously or giving it any diligent study. Yet, our appointment with death is an absolute certainty – probably our only certainty. It may come sooner than we expect: a car crash, a stray bullet, an unforeseen stroke. We all know of personal examples where death has come suddenly, without warning, without any preparations. When it finally does come, what do we expect it to be like?

Shedding Our Misconceptions
One of the penalties of our casual – or reluctant – attitude about death and dying is that most people are steeped in myths and misconceptions. Almost every commonly held belief is erroneous, misleading, and contrary to what we do know about the subject.

There are numerous books that have been published about “near-death experiences,” which at best are less than reliable sources, no matter how well intended. But there are several incidences that we can trust as reliable. Stephen, as he was being stoned, gave us a glimpse:

“But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.” - Acts 7:55,56

This notion that being greeted by the Lord Himself – at least in Stephen’s case – is not fanciful. As serious Christians, we can take significant comfort from Stephen’s experience. Paul also speaks of a “near-death” type of experience in which he was caught up to paradise (2 Cor. 12:4).  Since this happened 14 years before writing about it to the Corinthians, some scholars believe it may have coincided with his experience at Lystra where he was stoned and dragged out of the city and left for dead (Acts 14:19-20).  (Whether this was a “near-death” experience or an actual death-and-return, we’ll have to wait until we can ask him.)

Messages From the Dark Side
What makes this subject so difficult to research is that most information is not only unreliable, it is the specific focus of deceit by the ultimate Deceiver himself. One of the first mistakes is to look for answers in the wrong places. Channeling, necromancy (attempted communication with the dead), and all forms of commerce with demonic activity are expressly prohibited in the Scripture (Lev. 19:31; 20:6, 27; Deut. 18:11-22; Isaiah 8:19-20). Even such ostensibly harmless things such as a Ouija board or role-playing parlor games can prove extremely dangerous and are not to be taken lightly.

Satan’s deceptions are designed to eliminate any awareness of a coming judgment and accountability, and to promote the perceptions that all roads lead to the same place. [Remember, he is the "prince of this world," and the "prince of the power of the air." (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; Eph. 2:2)]

“For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” – 2 Cor. 11:13, 14

So, what position do we take?  Jesus warned us:

“Enter ye in at the strait [narrow] gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” – Matthew 7:13-15

If the gate you’re relying on is wide, with a large majority taking advantage of it, you’ve got the wrong gate!  Get into the Scriptures and learn what God Himself has to say about the issue.

To be continued next week…

Related Links:

• What Happens When You Die? Audio CD – Koinonia House Store
• Physics And The Bible: Six Hours in Eternity – Koinonia House
• A Biblical Mystery: His Unfamiliar Face – Koinonia House

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Physics: Photos from the Red Planet: Fascination with Mars

From Koinonia House

Technical > Physics > Fascination With Mars

This past April all sorts of real scientists, as well as hobbyists and amateurs around the world, were treated to the first NASA images of the Cydonia region of Mars since 1976. This time NASA loaded the raw data on web pages which were mirrored around the world as soon as the Mars Global Surveyor orbiting camera had relayed the stored data to earth. Within a few hours, processed and refined images were also posted for all the world to see and to study.

It is the Cydonia region of Mars where, in 1976, much-published images of a humanoid face, pyramidal mountains and what looked like a “city” and a “fort” had been seen.

I was first involved in studying these anomalous Viking images back in 1983 when my company, SRI International, sponsored a computer conference of scientists to study all the available data from a cross-disciplinary point of view. One of our concerns was that NASA had dismissed the Face as obviously just a trick of shadows and lighting. It seemed clear to us that NASA did not (and we did not) have enough actual data to take such a dogmatic position. Suppose these strange pictures were telling us about some ancient civilization on Mars? It was a far-out idea, but who could be certain? (See “Mars the Mysterious,” Personal UPDATE 8/97, pp. 11-14.)

There has certainly been a lot of wild speculation about the Face on Mars in the past 22 years! But there has also been much legitimate review of the data and many quality journal articles published by reputable scientists.

In 1992 Professor Stan McDaniel of Sonoma State University in California organized a special committee of scientists which made a strong case for the possibility that the anomalies on Mars might not be natural.¹

So a great flurry of e-mail crossed my desk just after the release of the new Cydonia images. At first, many of my colleagues who were committed to the belief that the artifacts were non-natural seemed very disappointed. Had NASA been right all along? However, a careful look at the new images (on the following pages) showed that there were still many unexplained symmetries at the site of the Face. Plus, triangular, rectangular, and repeating structures were still to be seen in Cydonia. Many strange things on Mars are surely natural without a doubt. Cellular features are very much like ice-wedge polygons found in frozen Arctic soils. But are some of the strange features on Mars still bearing muted evidence that intelligent beings once lived there?

To me, Mars is more fascinating than ever, and I myself still think some of the strange features on Mars may be artificial. We may have to wait for actual “ground-truth”-information at some future date-to be certain about this.

Our sister planet has lost its atmosphere in the past. The water from once-flowing streams, and perhaps even seas, has been lost to space or is frozen in the ground. Mars has evidently suffered some great catastrophe in its past. (See “Exploding Planets and Ancient Catastrophes,” Personal UPDATE, 5/97, pp. 8-13.) But Venus is geologically fascinating also, and the outer planets and their moons are in the news as well.

Scientific curiosity – a desire to know and understand the universe in which we live – is a God-given characteristic in mankind. The accumulation and systemization of knowledge is not forbidden to man by our Creator, rather it is encouraged – except in the area of the occult, which is off limits to us. Psalm 115:15 says, “The heavens are the LORD’s heavens, but the earth he has given to the sons of men.” To some this seems to suggest that we are presently limited in what we can learn about our planetary neighbors and the universe as a whole.

The limitations are probably practical ones, including the enormous cost of space exploration, the new technology required, and the vast distances to be reached. We are indeed in an era of rapidly exploding knowledge about just about everything, but we are also very near to the end of the age. Our civilization will probably come to a crashing collapse from multiple causes long before we can get much farther into space.

The story of the Bible focuses on the redemption of a lost race on earth. It is on this one, unique planet that God placed one man and one woman. They bore the Creator’s likeness and His very image. It is on our planet that evil came into the human race through fallen angels who inhabit the spiritual realm of the created cosmos. Earth is a visited planet, because God Himself came here. Taking on the form of a man, the Son of God identified with our race, becoming one of us as a child born in Bethlehem. Yeshua was taught, trained and prepared until He took our sins upon Himself and died in our place on a cruel cross just outside the city walls of Jerusalem.

There is much more we wish the Bible had told us about creation – about the planets and outer space and the marvels of our world. But God’s self-disclosure of His Person in Christ and in the Bible is, in that sense, sparse. We wait for the rest of the story to be told to us.

And, surely, our generation is obsessed with the possibility of life on other planets. Today’s new scientific research seems to be driven more by yesterday’s science fiction than by a desire to tackle and solve the problems of overpopulation, the dangers of biological, chemical, and nuclear war, and the imminent danger of a last terrible world war in the Middle East.

Indeed, the Bible makes it very clear that our planet is to be visited again from outer space-very soon. When the Man, Jesus, who has been placed in charge of all of creation makes His return appearance, He will not show up in Cydonia on Mars but on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. It is He and He alone who holds the future in His hands. It is He who will guide His followers into all the mysteries of creation and of life. Knowing Him personally, which he invites us to do, is surely the most important secret in the universe. It is Jesus who said:

*  *  *

1. See The Case for the Face: Scientists Examine the Evidence for Alien Artifacts on Mars, Stanley V. McDaniel and Monica Rix Paxson, ed. 1998, Adventures Unlimited Press, One Adventure Place, Kempton, IL, 60946.

   Related Websites:

   http://cmex-www.arc.nasa.gov (Center for Mars Exploration. Includes links to most of the major Pathfinder and Global Surveyor sites.)

   http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/education/education_home.html (Educational and space image resources from National Space Science Data Center.)

   http://www.psrw.com/http://www.psrw.com/~markc/marshome.html (Face on Mars homepage from Mark Carlotto, also has copies of his referenced journal articles.)

   http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov (Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Planetary Photojournal-many beautiful images and extensive data from all of the planets.)

   http://barsoom.msss.com (Malin Space Science Systems Mars images. Global Surveyor images and analysis from the MGS Camera operator.)

   http://www.mcdanielreport.com (Stanley McDaniel discusses the science and politics of Cydonia.)

The Mysteries of the Planet Mars – Chuck Missler Is there life on the Planet Mars? Are there monuments on Mars? What about the mile-wide Face on Mars? Click for more information – Audio Cassette

Signs in the Heavens – Chuck MisslerWhat we know as the Signs of the Zodiac is known in Hebrew as the Mazzeroth. Click for more information – Audio Cassette

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Physics and the Bible: What Is Light?

From Koinonia House

Technical > Physics > What Is Light?

Physics and the Bible: What Is Light? by Lambert Dolphin Lambert Dolphin, Physicist Website

Human vision is utterly amazing in its ability to receive and process a wealth of information concerning levels of light intensity, colors, motion, and stereoscopic depth of field. However, as wonderful as our eyesight is, we are able to see only electromagnetic waves between 400 and 700 nanometers (4 to 7 x 10^-9 m) in wavelength.

Young Isaac Newton in 1666 used a prism to break visible white light  into the rainbow colors of the spectrum, giving impetus to the development of what is now the vast science of optics. Discovery of the wave nature of light soon led to the realization that our universe is permeated with electromagnetic waves ranging in wavelength over at least 16 orders of magnitude – from ultra low-frequency radio waves, which are tens of kilometers in wavelength, to cosmic rays with wave crests and troughs only a millionth of a millionth (10^-12 ) meter apart.

Just in our century, science has quickly extended the range of the eye for explorative purposes. Many different kinds of electronic sensing instruments now tell us vastly more about the cosmos than our eyes alone can tell us directly.

Light from the sun arrives at the top of the earth’s atmosphere at a power level of about one kilowatt per square meter. It is this heat and light from a modest star (surface temperature only 5500 degrees C), that all life processes on earth are ultimately driven. Without the sun’s constant energy input, our planet would quickly radiate away its latent heat and freeze us and everything else very solid in short order.

Heat and light from the sun are obvious, but we are unaware of cosmic rays penetrating our bodies at the rate of perhaps 10 per second. Nor do we realize that radio and television signals from a hundred stations fill our living rooms. Many of these “rays” pass through our bodies unimpeded. Light waves, radio waves, heat signals,  X-rays, and the like, are electromagnetic (EM) radiation – all forms of which can transmit energy and carry useful information even across vast reaches of “empty” space. The signal speed of EM waves ranges upwards to a maximum value which is the current speed of light, ~3 x 10⁸ meters/sec.

In this century has also come the realization that we can equally well describe light and other EM radiation as if it were corpuscular in nature. EM radiation is a result of moving electrical charges (currents), and all forms of EM radiation can be described mathematically as consisting of streaming photons. Each photon constituting a “particle” of light has an energy equal to Planck’s constant times the speed of light divided by the wavelength. (Photons are very small, yet the human eye is sufficiently sensitive that we can sometimes detect even a single light photon with dark-adapted eyes).

Whether one uses a wave model or a particle model for light is largely a matter of convenience for the physicist. The concept of “wave-particle duality” is well established by experimental evidence and the excellent models of Quantum Mechanics.

Gravitational forces seem to us to be powerful, because it is gravity which holds us to the earth’s surface and makes us work hard to lift and move things. But the force of gravity is actually some 42 orders of magnitude weaker (10^-42) than the electrical forces which generate light waves and radio waves!

Because of this huge difference in energy levels, we actually know little about gravity. For instance, many scientists have tacitly assumed that gravity signals, and the force of gravity between masses, are communicated (“mediated”) back and forth by streams of photons traveling at the velocity of light – some have assumed that gravity will be explained as arising from some type of EM wave. But as we saw in the March issue of Personal UPDATE, it is now more probable that gravitational forces are communicated by particles called gravitons, which are very much smaller than photons.¹

Furthermore, the speed of gravitons is apparently some ten orders of magnitude higher than the current speed of light. This raises the possibility of space travel throughout the entire known universe in very reasonable time periods. From energy considerations (in the universe considered as a whole entity) it now appears that the speed of light initially had the same high value as gravity still has, but the speed of light has decreased whereas the speed of gravity has not. [Ed. note: Many competent scientists disagree with the theory that the speed of light has decreased.]

A great frontier lies before us now in better understanding gravity. For example, we cannot as yet be certain whether the hypothesized gravity waves are transverse in nature (as are EM waves), or compressional (like sound waves).

Suffice it to say that energy and information can be transmitted across the universe by means others than ordinary photons. That is, energy and information transmission in the physical world is probably not always electromagnetic in nature.

(And this is not taking into account how prayer and spiritual forces travel between God, men and the angels – about which we know next to nothing.)

On the First Day of creation week, having brought into existence space, time and matter, the second creative act of God was (I believe) the creation of light. Light was spoken into existence by the Second Person of the godhead, Jesus, the Logos or Word of God:

And God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.

I like to think of this second event in God’s work of creating everything as the making of a vast energy source. The Lord then incorporated potential and kinetic energy reservoirs in many forms into His universe as He constructed things during the six days of creation. These energy endowments would allow the universe to function indefinitely with built-in power supplies. (Before The Fall I think this energy supply also included means of replenishment of reserves to make up for dissipation and losses).

The statement “Let there be light” may mean (in my opinion) “Let there be energy of all wavelengths and in all forms.” I believe it was from these four working substances created on Day One-(1) space, (2) time, (3) matter and (4) energy-that God constructed (and filled) the universe we live in.²In His work as Creator, the Son of God was the “master craftsman” of Proverbs 8.

The activity of creation week involved many separate actions by all the Persons of the godhead, as can be seen by the numerous action verbs in Chapter One which refer to God.

Many good people will probably not agree with my own interpretation of the opening verses of Genesis – so I won’t be dogmatic about the model I have just suggested. Dozens of books and hundreds of scholarly theological papers have disputed exactly how to interpret these opening verses of Holy Writ and I don’t claim to have the final word by any means. The important point is that light, as we know it and understand it in the physical world, was created by God on the First Day of creation.

The Bible says that “God is Light” and this is not the same as saying “Light is God.” If we claimed that the Light shining forth on Day One of creation week was simply God Himself we would have major problems – because God is a Spirit and He does not directly emit protons or waves! Such a hypothesis as saying that the Light of Day One came from God Himself puts us on the fast road to pantheism, which we must refute. The God of the Bible is separate from, and transcends, His creation.

Because God is Light, a more profound problem appears when we consider other passages in the Bible which speak figuratively of light, and of spiritual light. Writing to Timothy, Paul the Apostle tells that God, “alone has immortality, [and that He] dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see.” (1 Tim 6:16). Moses, who enjoyed a very intimate relationship with God, on one occasion asked God that He might see Him as he was:

And Moses said, “Please, show me Your glory.”

Then God said, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the LORD before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”

But God said, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.” And the LORD said, “Here is a place by Me, and you shall stand on the rock. So it shall be, while My glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with My hand while I pass by. Then I will take away My hand, and you shall see My back; but My face shall not be seen.” (Exodus 33:18-23)

The whole point about God’s being Light is that the splendor and radiance of His immediate presence is so intense it must be veiled in clouds of thick darkness. Otherwise mere mortals would be burned to a crisp if they came into the unveiled presence of His effulgent power.

Spiritual realities are more permanent and more substantial than the shadows they cast into our physical world. Jesus is likened to the rising Day Star and called by Malachi the “Sun of Righteousness” – symbols which suggest to us that His true splendor is greater than that of any star or any known source of light and power in our physical world.

Revelation describes the face of Jesus as shining like the sun in full strength (Rev 1:16).

Light is a common symbol in the Bible for truth as opposed to ignorance and error. “Enlightenment” means true understanding and comprehension in the inner man. It was Jesus who declared, to the consternation of his enemies, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.” (John 8:12).

So in some way there is a connection in Scripture between spiritual light and life itself! The New Testament furthermore insists that the man Christ Jesus is the exact visible expression of God the invisible. It is by knowing Jesus that we who once were “sons of darkness” become “sons of light.” Unlike Moses we are invited to look full into the face of Jesus:

…we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, all this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Cor 3:18)

God, were His Light unveiled, would fill and flood the entire universe with His presence to such a degree that there could be no ordinary night time anywhere. Therefore the spiritual world where He dwells, surrounding us on all sides, a world in which the material creation is embedded, is not only more solid than our world, it is also brighter – it is full of light in fact. Living as we do at present in a world still relatively dark, we await the coming of the Dawn.
Sources:

S.R. Filonovich, The Greatest Speed, 1983, Mir Publishers, 2 Pervy Rizhsky Pereulok, 1-110 GSP, Moscow, 129820. A good discussion of the physics of light at an elementary level.

Sobil, Michael L., Light, 1987, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Bova, Ben, The Beauty of Light, 1988, John Wiley and Sons, New York.

1. Gravitons are probably on the order of a Planck length in size, L* = (hG/c³)^0.5 = 1.6 x 10^-33 cm. In current thinking on the nature of the vacuum, space has a granular structure and is composed of particles emerging from and vanishing back into the background sea of Zero Point Energy. The “Planck density” of these particles is at the present time about 4 x 10⁹³ gms per cubic centimeter, incredibly greater than known particle densities encountered in the atomic nucleus which do not exceed 10¹⁴ g/cm³ , or water which is only 1 g/cm³ . As we noted in an earlier article, the Planck density would have been smaller still in the early history of the universe assuming a decreasing velocity of light over time. A good discussion of these issues is given by Gerardus D. Bouw on his web pages, www.baldwinw.edu/~gbouw/g/index.html. I recommend his discussion on the plenum aether whether or not one agrees with Dr. Bouw’s views on Geocentricity.
2. I have tried to clarify the events of creation week in my current thinking in my article “The Uniqueness of Creation Week,” available on my web pages. I reserve the right to learn and grow and change my views!

The Creator Beyond Time & Space Audio Series – Chuck Missler and Dr. Mark EastmanIncludes: The Creator Beyond Time and Space, The Bible: An Extraterrestrial Message, Immanuel: The Deity of Messiah and The Divine Watchmaker Click for more information – Audio Cassette

Stretching the Heavens and the Dilation of Time – Chuck MisslerThis includes an exclusive interview with Barry Setterfield whose controversial discoveries concerning the slowing down of the speed of light may yet disrupt the previous dictums of modern physics. Click for more information – Audio Cassette

Genesis – MP3 Commentary – Chuck MisslerRecent breakthroughs in the fields of physics, technology and biology led Chuck Missler to update and re-record this wonderful study in Genesis. Click for more information – MP3 on CD-ROM

Genesis and the Big Bang – Chuck MisslerRecent discoveries in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, particle physics, and molecular biology have cast a new light on the traditional accounts of Genesis One. Click for more information – Audio Cassette

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Physics and the Bible: Faster Than The Speed of Light

From Koinonia House

Technical > Physics > Faster Than The Speed Of Light

Superman was able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, he was more powerful than a locomotive, and he was said to be able to travel faster than a speeding bullet.

The speed of a bullet is no big deal in these days of supersonic aircraft and spacecraft. Yet our fastest space vehicles do no better than one one-hundred thousandth of the current speed of light.

Overcoming gravity (the weakest of all the forces of physics) still takes lots of push and power. The moon remains many days away and the planets many months when traveling as fast as current chemical rocket technology allows.

The nearest star is 4 x 10¹⁷ meters away, and the current estimated size for the entire universe is greater than that by ten orders of magnitude or so (about 10²⁶ meters). For a long time the hope of space travel has been left almost entirely in the hands of the science fiction writers.

Yet with God there are invariably hidden truths waiting to be discovered that make the best that men can imagine seem like kindergarten.

Newtonian mechanics imposes no maximum upper limit to attainable velocities in the universe, but Einstein’s relativity theory does. As charged particles are pushed up near the present speed of light they grow heavier, and more and more energy input is required to gain a smaller and smaller increment of increased velocity.

At the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), near where I live, electrons injected in the accelerator reach 99.999% of the velocity of light in the first few feet of travel, and then they ride, traveling radio waves for two miles down a long evacuated pipe, gaining virtually no additional speed, but mostly acquiring mass (and therefore energy). There is no reason to doubt the highly successful and well-verified theory of relativity in this regard. One can point to countless examples of proven relativistic effects whenever charged particles are involved.

Physicist Hal Puthoff¹ has recently suggested that the ability of a spacecraft to modify the properties of space in its immediate vicinity could allow it to travel faster than light. This is because the speed of light is simply a measure of two properties of the medium of space, or the vacuum: permeability and permittivity. It has been tacitly assumed by some theoreticians that the speed of light might be a measure not only of the electrical properties of space, but the mechanical properties of space as well. It now turns out that this is probably not the case!

A very exciting possibility has now come into the light. It has long been known that gravitational forces apparently act instantaneously over the entire universe. Why this should be so is simply glossed over and ignored in every generation of physics classes and in countless technical papers.

One way to understand this is to consider what is called “the classical aberration of light”-which was discovered by Bradley in 1728. In fact, aberration data became one of the early methods for measuring the speed of light. Light from the sun requires 8.3 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth during which time the sun and the earth have moved as much as 20 arc seconds with respect to each other.

Similarly, light from the stars arrives at an angle which can be as much as 20 arc seconds because the earth is moving with respect to the stars. It is by carefully measuring these aberration angles, and knowing the relative velocities involved, that Bradley made excellent and trustworthy measurements of the velocity of light 250 years ago.

However, during the time interval it takes light to travel from the sun to the earth, the sun and the earth have kept in touch with each other “instantaneously”-or at least very much faster than c! In fact every mass in the universe communicates with all other masses in the universe in a time frame that makes the present speed of light seem like the velocity of molasses on a cold day!

Astronomer Tom Van Flandern has recently detailed all the evidence that shows that gravitational forces, unlike light, operate with no measurable aberration!²

But Van Flandern shows that there are sound reasons for believing that the “speed of gravity” is not infinite. By carefully studying the observable data, Van Flandern now concludes that the speed of gravity is greater than or equal to the present speed of light by a factor of 2 x 10¹⁰.

This velocity (6 x 10¹⁸ meters per second) turns out to be just below Barry Setterfield’s latest estimate of the speed of light everywhere in the universe on Day Two of creation week! Setterfield arrives at this initial velocity of light on the basis of the maximum observed Hubble constant, which gives an initial value of c that turns out to be 2.54 x 10¹⁰ times the present value.³

Since creation week, the diameter of the universe has been constant (a static universe) and the speed of light has dropped precipitously to its present value-following decay curves we can now piece together with some confidence based on (a) measured values of c for the last 300 years, (b) corrections to known radioactive decay dates which go back to approximately 2000 B.C., and (c) the observed quantization of the red shift of light from distant galaxies for the time period from creation to about the time of Abraham.

As the universe aged, the free space permittivity and permeability increased and c decreased – but the velocity of gravity may not be tied to the permittivity and permeability of free space!

If this is the case, the velocity of gravity stayed at the original velocity of c. If we can produce a propulsion system based on gravitational principles rather than electromagnetic or chemical ones, we could travel at absolutely enormous speeds-we could hope to push a space craft anywhere in the universe, very literally at warp speeds beyond what even the Starship Enterprise could produce!

By the way, this discussion solely relates to the physical part of the created universe. For now we must defer discussion about how angels travel and communicate – they are spiritual beings. And we must postpone speculation about what we followers of Jesus the Lord may find ourselves capable of doing when we don our new resurrection bodies (these bodies are, after all, “not of this creation”-but spiritual bodies-see 1 Corinthians 15).

If Van Flandern and Setterfield are correct, space travel may indeed be just around the corner! A fringe benefit is that we may at last have clues to help us begin to understand the well-documented behavior of countless UFOs, whose velocity and acceleration behavior has thus far defied explanation by conventional physics.

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1. JSE Review by H. E. Puthoff, Ph.D., Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, Austin, TX 78759. Available on my web pages, http://www.ldolphin.org/hill.html. Puthoff reviews the book Synopsis of Unconventional Flying Objects, by Paul Hill, Hampton Roads Publ. Co., Charlottesville, VA, 1995 (ISBN 1-57174-027-9). The latter is an outstanding analysis of possible UFO propulsion schemes by a retired a Chief Scientist-Manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center.
2. 2.Tom Van Flandern, “The Speed of Gravity: What the Experiments Say”, Meta Research Bulletin, Vol. 6 No. 4, December 15, 1997. See http://www.metaresearch.org.

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Geology and the Bible: The Great Mediterranean Sea

From Koinonia House

Technical > Physics > The Great Mediterranean Sea

While quite a few new scientific discoveries make the evening news, Time or Newsweek, or merit an hour program on the Discovery Channel, other important finds are neglected. Perhaps some things are too hard to fit into the prevailing secular scientific world view or have consequences that don’t seem to mesh with evidence from other sources. This article deals with a much-neglected discovery in the latter category.

A Strange Discovery

Forty years ago sonar studies through the Mediterranean Sea and into the sea floor below revealed a strange reflecting layer 100-200 meters below the bottom and unexpected stratification of the sediments. Buried sub-bottom salt domes were also detected. The seismic data were tantalizing enough to merit a Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) by the Glomar Challenger, beginning in 1970. ^{1 2}

This amazing ship was equipped with side thrusters for accurate position control and a drilling rig capable of core sampling the sea floor even through water several miles deep. The first core samples off the coast of Barcelona, Spain did not yield sands, gravels and muds as expected, but gypsum, oceanic basalt, small fossil shells and hardened ocean oozes.

The fossils were those one would expect from a shallow salty lagoon, or a surface evaporation pond, yet the water depth at the drilling site was 2000 meters deep!

Subsequent drilling revealed that the floor of the Mediterranean most everywhere was underlain with layers of evaporites, and more fossils such as blue green algae, which can live only in sunlit waters. The fossils dated from the end of the Miocene Epoch and were all 5 to 6 million years old on the atomic time scale.

The researchers were reluctantly, but excitedly, driven to the conclusion that the Mediterranean Sea had dried up and refilled a dozen times in a million years. Since the Mediterranean basin is as much as 16,000 feet deep, the dry sea floor must have been an incredibly hot desert for long periods of time. The lowest place on earth nowadays is the Dead Sea, which is only 1300 feet below sea level.

Further studies confirmed that deep gorges in solid rock (now filled with ocean sediments and then river muds) lay under the Nile River and the Rhone River, suggesting that these rivers were once great torrents, steeply dropping water into the empty Mediterranean basin. (However, other filled-in gorges are also found around the world and are not unique to the Mediterranean).

Best of all, the researchers imagined a prehistoric waterfall at the Straits of Gibraltar bringing in Atlantic ocean water with the volume of a hundred Victoria Falls or a thousand Niagaras at intervals lasting a hundred years or more.

Another Explanation

Did the Mediterranean Sea really dry up? Was it once a very hot and dry desert? Probably not. There is another possible explanation for the vast salt and mineral deposits found at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

Let us explore Australian astronomer Barry Setterfield’s hypothesis that atomic time and ordinary calendar time are related by the velocity of light.

Using Setterfield’s red-shift data to give us the expected value of c (the speed of light) for events some millions of years ago in atomic time, we find that the 5 to 6 million years BP (before the present) in atomic time was between 2875 and 2825 B.C. in ordinary dynamical time! ³ The salt sediments in the Mediterranean would then have been deposited in a mere 75 years, not over a million years-too short a time period for evaporation and refilling processes in the basin.

A tight reading of Old Testament genealogies suggests that the Flood of Noah and the accompanying sudden continental breakup took place only hundreds of years before these salt-depositional events in the Mediterranean. (Setterfield’s date for the Flood turns out to be 3536 B.C.).

What happened to cause the Flood of Noah? Most of the water for the Flood did not come from the atmosphere-the so-called vapor canopy could have held only a few tens of feet of water. It was the “fountains of the deep” that released the waters of the Deluge, suddenly and abruptly, covering the entire surface of our planet for a year and wiping out all of mankind except for eight persons safe on the Ark of Noah. ⁴

As originally created, our universe was evidently not characterized by the Second Law of Thermodynamics-the Law of science which describes how the physical world is running down, falling apart and decaying. It is also quite possible that there was no radioactive decay of the higher-ordered atomic elements before the Fall. It seems reasonable to suppose that natural radioactivity was switched on as a result of the fall of man or the fall of the angels subsequent to creation week.

Setterfield has shown that the total energy released by radioactive decay processes is independent of c, the velocity of light. However, assuming radioactivity was indeed switched on suddenly, the shorter-lived radioactive isotopes would have begun to decay rapidly, so there could have been a season of rapid crustal heating during earth’s early history. ⁵

Walter Brown, ⁶ John Baumgardner, and others have proposed a very rapid rupturing of the crust at the time of the Flood. Radioactive decay of the shorter-lived isotopes would have superheated the waters in the crust of the earth.

These waters erupting through thousands of feet of water above them would have been very hot-many hundreds of degrees Centigrade. Coming into contact with the colder ocean waters, the hot water from the crust could have precipitated the salt layers found under the Mediterranean. Living creatures on the surface could well have been killed suddenly, raining debris to the sea floor to add to the salts being rapidly precipitated out in a series of violent events.

The Mediterranean basin is already known for its vigorous past vulcanism (Santorini, Vesuvius, Stromboli, etc.). During the years the earth was recovering from the Flood of Noah it is quite possible that what we now know as deep ocean “black smokers” were present everywhere under the Mediterranean Sea. They could be responsible for the huge copper deposits under Cyprus and the vast salt layers under the Mediterranean sea floor. ⁷

Of course, rapid weather and climate changes were probably taking place during that same time as well. As soon as nature’s upheavals had slowed, the civilization of Egypt could have rapidly expanded and European civilization soon after as well.

Earth’s history appears to have been marked by catastrophes and disasters that were denied vehemently in previous generations by secular science. Catastrophes now seem inescapable. Kenneth Hsü’s book (see endnote 1) is exciting reading no matter how you interpret his amazing research results. Walt Brown’s book is must reading also for the well-informed who want to form a Biblically based scientific world view.

Above all else, our Creator invites us to learn and understand and to inquire of him-the universe has a more remarkable history than we first imagine and we do not yet know very much at all about the world we live in.

Thus says the LORD who made the earth, the LORD who formed it to establish it-the LORD is his name: Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things which you have not known.
Jeremiah 33:2,3

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1. Hsü, K. J., The Mediterranean was a Desert: A Voyage of the Glomar CHALLENGER . Princeton University Press, 1983, 216 p.
2. The Mediterranean is the world’s largest inland sea. It lies between the continents of Europe and Africa and is bounded on the east by the westernmost stretches of Asia. Its length is about 4,025 km (2,500 miles), its average width 805 km (500 miles), and its area about 2,965,500 sq km (1,145,000 sq mi). The greatest depth, 5,092 m (16,706 ft), is in the Matapan Trench of the Ionian Basin. The mean depth is about 1,525 m (5,000 ft). (Grolier Encyclopedia, 1996.)
3. Setterfield, Barry, Creation and Catastrophe, 1993. Available from Box 318, Blackwood 5051, South Australia. Also see www.ldolphin.org/constcs.html.
4. See my article, “The Terrible Flood of Noah”, in Personal UPDATE, 6/97, pp.8-13.
5. Radioactive heating is thought to be the main source of earth’s interior heat. A core meltdown within the earth with a subsequent redistribution of the elements in the core and crust is a popular model among leading geologists today. See “Questions Concerning the Early History of the Earth”  at www.ldolphin.org/Early.html
6. Brown, Walter, Ph.D., In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood.  On-line book as well as ordering information at www.creationscience.com

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Physics and the Bible: When the Universe Became Fuzzy

From Koinonia House

Technical > Physics > When The Universe Became Fuzzy

Physics and the Bible: When the Universe Became Fuzzy by Lambert Dolphin Lambert Dolphin, Physicist Website

The “Clockwork Universe”

Classical Physics reached its apex in Sir Isaac Newton’s day (1642-1727). The “Clockwork Universe” was so tightly linked together that the chains of cause and effect – which we called “determinism” – were obvious to everyone.

God was in His heaven and watchfully controlled everything down to the smallest detail. The same universal laws of physics prevailed within the miniature universe of the atom and beyond the furthermost star.

In 1801 Thomas Young reported his famous double-slit experiment with light beams. If light were corpuscular, photons directed at the slits should divide equally and exit the other side uniformly. Instead, Young found interference patterns that cleared showed light was a wave phenomenon. Soon, electric and magnetic fields were discovered and the propagation of light waves was accounted for eloquently by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879).

By the turn of this century it was clear that light and atomic particles behaved at times as if they were bunched-up wave packets, and at other times like rigid billiard balls.

Quantum Mechanics

An obscure clerk in a Swiss patent office began to turn things upside-down in 1905. The young Albert Einstein explained the photoelectric effect. Light shining on certain chemically coated surfaces resulted in the emission of electrons, in numbers proportional to the light intensity but not at constant velocities.

Einstein’s paper came the same year that Max Planck (1858-1947) explained “blackbody” radiation-light emission from heated surfaces.

Building on the work of Wein, Stefan, and Boltzmann, Planck’s formula showed that the intensity of radiated light from a heated object involved quantum jumps within the atoms of the surface-and these were statistically distributed. His formula contained a new constant, Planck’s constant, h (6.6 x 10^-24 joule-second).

The next surprise was that light photons, though massless, carried momentum and energy-and photon energy and momentum were quantized. When atoms emit photons, they do so only at discrete wavelengths. The energy of photons could be calculated from the simple formula, E = hf = hc/l where h is Planck’s constant, c the velocity of light, f the frequency of the light and l, the wavelength. Soon a mathematical model for atomic particles known as “Quantum Mechanics” was developed.¹

This theory has been spectacularly successful, but it has disturbed some theologians who see the probability based calculations of QM as undermining the principle of determinism.

Though quantum mechanics dismissed the notion of so-called “hidden variables,” this does not mean that God has lost control of things. “Chance” is not an entity that does things-it is philosophically meaningless, for example, to say that “time plus chance” has brought our universe into being or brought order out of chaos.² In spite of the complex probability-based models of QM, God still is in full control.³

Very upsetting discoveries have been made about photons (and now other particles) from quantum mechanics: apparently one particle is able to communicate information with another particle after the particles have been separated by time and distance-as much as 10 km in a recent experiment!⁴

But this communication is “instantaneous”-or at least much faster than the speed of light. This leads to the hypothesis that two particles separated by time and space in our ordinary four-dimensional world may be at the same point in hyperspace-they may be connected in a higher dimension.

Similar weird and wonderful things seem to occur with gravitational forces: apparently all objects in the universe are “in touch” with each other instantly as far as ravity is concerned, yet ordinarily information signals can not travel from point A to point B faster than the speed of light.⁵

At latest count at least 11 higher dimensions have been invoked in the mathematical models that attempt to tie together the Laws of Physics.⁶

Physicists like to keep things simple: to do as little work as possible, they follow “Occam’s Razor”⁷ and have a sense of elegance and beauty about nature. Therefore simple theories are to be preferred to complex theories-and if possible a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) would be wonderful to discover. GUTs attempt to link together the four forces of physics⁸ and the fundamental constants – c, the velocity of light; e, the charge on the electron; h, Planck’s constant; and, G, the gravitational constant. When one brings quantum mechanics into attempts to unify the laws of physics, Planck’s constant is found to define the “fuzziness,” or the “grain size” of the universe. Thus the smallest meaningful length is (Gh/c³)^1/2 = 10^-35 meters. The smallest time increment of time is the Planck time, 10^-42 seconds, the Planck mass, (hc/G²)^1/2 = 10¹⁹ Gev, etc.

Quantum mechanics furthermore has revealed that attempts to make measurements-for instance, on an atom-would disturb the atom such that precision in one type of measurement automatically meant fuzziness in another parameter.

If one wanted to locate an electron’s location accurately by means of a measuring apparatus, the apparatus disturbed the environment; precision in position measurement meant the electron’s momentum became proportionally uncertain. The same was true for particle momentum and time and for angular momentum and spin angle as pairs of variables. Planck’s famous Uncertainty Principle can be expressed as DpDx  h/4þ or DE Dt D h/4þ (read, “the uncertainty in momentum times the uncertainty in position is greater than or equal to Planck’s constant, h,” etc.).

The phenomenon is not unlike the work of a pollster who sets out to measure public opinion. If he is hasty, works rapidly, but alerts the public so that they become opinionated, and if his sampling methods are not careful, he will get results quickly, but his results will not likely be very representative of the true state of public sentiment on the topic. A second pollster who takes a longer time to collect his data, works quietly, and takes care so as not to alert people ahead of time will get better results.

Recently, QM has been applied to cosmology in attempts to unravel the early history of our universe-assuming the basic Big Bang model is correct-and assuming the speed of light is a fixed constant in time!

All of the above discussion is based on the assumption-since Einstein-that the speed of light, c, is indeed a fixed constant. However as we noted in our earlier Personal UPDATE articles on the aether, the velocity of light, c, is determined by the properties of space – and space may be a very real medium after all. When all of the available measurements of c are carefully studied-using the best possible methods of statistical analysis-the result is that the speed of light has apparently decreased in the past 300 years-with a statistical confidence level of at least 95%.⁹

Some have thought that a non-constant c would lead to an unstable universe, but so far no papers have been presented that show that changing c would disturb the basic operation or stability of the cosmos. In fact, several theoretical papers have suggested that the velocity of light after the second day of creation week-when God stretched out the aether-had an initial value of about 5 x 10⁸ times greater than the present value of 3 x 10⁸ meters/sec.

As far as this writer has been able to understand, changing c mostly affects the run rate of atomic clocks versus ordinary (Newtonian) dynamical time. Thus the universe appears to be 10 – 20 billion years old in atomic time, when in reality it was all created only thousands of years ago.

We began this discussion by mentioning the relationship between Planck’s constant, c, and the wavelength (or frequency) of photons emitted from orbital transitions within the atom: E = hf = hc/l.

Astronomers measure wavelength of light from distant stars (not frequency) and wavelengths of stellar light are known to be invariant with time, as is the “fine-structure constant” a= e²/hc = 1/137. This means that hc is a fixed constant, invariant with time. But if c was much higher in the past, then h was a much smaller number than it is now – h and c are inversely proportional.

Therefore, the universe was less “fuzzy” in the beginning, quantum mechanical effects would have been negligible, and Planck length and time were even smaller than they are now (they are already very small numbers)! The universe was more “certain” in the past, and more “orderly” than it is now! This increased uncertainty in the physical world is, of course, paralleled by the inexorable deterioration of the human condition due to sin as revealed in the Bible.

Of course a decrease in the value of Planck’s constant by 10 orders of magnitude in the past pretty well shoots down Quantum Cosmology as a viable model. (There are many other reasons for discarding Big Bang cosmology anyway!)

The laws of physics have been disrupted in the past by the fall of the angels and the fall of man as we have pointed out in this series. One cannot take observations of the present universe for 50 or 100 years and extrapolate the results back to t = 0. This will give the wrong answer-the real history of our universe is not based on “uniformitarian” principles (2 Peter 3:4).

The Big Bang model also ignores the many steps God took to create the raw material of our universe and to mold and fashion it over a unique period of time (144 hours) called “creation week.” During creation week the universe, being uncompleted, was not yet set in motion. It was “Under Construction”-the Laws of Effects went into effect for the first time after the Seventh Day. And the original creation has been since drastically disrupted by cosmic forces of evil.

In any case, the mysteries of our universe only deepen as we understand more and benefit from God’s unfolding (“general”) revelation hidden in nature, as well as by new light on his (“special”) revelation given to us in Holy Writ:

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory for ever. Amen.

Romans 11:33-36

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1. Edward Speyer, Six Roads from Newton: Great Discoveries in Physics, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1994.
2. For more on the amazing world of chaos-where hidden patterns of order have been discovered, see Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick, Viking, NY, 1987, and also Can Order Come out of Chaos, by Henry M. Morris and John D. Morris, Institute of Creation Research, San Diego, June 1997. Available at http://www.ldolphin.org/chaos.html
3. R. C. Sproul, Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science & Cosmology, Baker Books, Grand Rapids MI, 1994 and Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution, by Lee Spetner, Ph.D., The Judaica Press, Brooklyn, 1997.
4. Malcolm W. Browne, “Far Apart: Two Particles Respond Faster Than Light, The New York Times, July 22, 1997, p. C1.
5. On the Speed of Gravity, by Tom Van Flandern, Galilean Electrodynam- ics, vol. 4., no. 2, March/April 1993. 141 Rhinecliff St. Arlington, MA 02174.
6. The New Physics, Paul Davies, Ed., Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 1989.
7. Occam’s razor is a logical principle attributed to philosopher-theologian William of Occam (c. 1285-1349). The principle states that we should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything, or that we should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. This principle is often called the principle of parsimony.
8. The “strong” nuclear and “weak” nuclear forces operate at ranges of the order of the size of the nucleus; i.e., < 10^-15 meters. The other important forces in physics are the electromagnetic force (between charged particles) and gravity. The latter two forces are active out to infinite distances between objects, but decrease as the inverse square of the distance. Gravity (attractive only) is weaker than electromagnetic forces (either attractive or repulsive), by a factor of 38 orders of magnitude (10^-38)!
9. All of the available data on c, two statistical analyses and some preliminary explanations may be found at http://www.ldolphin.org/constc.shtml. Only those constants that have units of time in them are apparently changing. (The speed of light has units of distance divided by time. Planck’s constant has units or work times time). The speed of light seems to have dropped precipitously until about the time of Abraham (c. 2150 BC) and then decreased slowly with an exponential tail down to the modern epoch.

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