Much further away is our nearest galaxy-neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, with its nineteen satellite galaxies. It is called the Andromeda Galaxy because it is found in the constellation of Andromeda. It is about 2.5 million light years away—that’s about fifteen quintillion miles. It is estimated that there are something like 100 billion galaxies in the universe. This means that there are about as many galaxies in the universe as there are stars in a galaxy! The universe therefore contains somewhere in the order of ten sextillion stars. To grasp this number, consider that, if you could count up to three million every second, then it would take over a hundred million years to count ten sextillion. Finally, the universe itself is thought to be something like 13,700 million light years in radius, which means that it is 27,400 million light years in diameter. This distance is a staggering 165 sextillion miles. Travelling at the speed of light, it would take about 27,400 million years to get from one side of the universe to the other. These staggering distances should give us an idea of the size of the universe and also make us realize the greatness of the God who created it.
We will now consider some of the enormous variety of stars that we find in this huge universe, for this, too, is truly amazing. Stars have colours ranging from red to orange, yellow, white, and even bluish-white. Not only do they have differing colours, but the brightness of the stars also ranges from 100,000 times the brightness of the sun down to one ten-thousandth of the brightness of the sun. Some stars even have variable brightness. Two stars sometimes revolve around each other—these are called binary stars. Star clusters are also common. The size of stars also varies. Some stars, called dwarfs, are of comparable size to that of the earth but are much heavier. An egg-cup full of the matter of a white dwarf star, for example, would weigh several thousand tons! At the other end of the scale there are the giants. If the sun was placed in the centre of the red giant star Betelgeuse5 so that their centres coincided, the earth would also be inside the star, millions of miles away from its surface!
An even more fascinating type of star is the neutron star. These are about five to ten miles in radius and are composed completely of neutrons. The neutrons are so closely packed together that the stars have a density of about 100 trillion times that of water. This means that a gallon bucket full of neutron star dust would weigh something like 500 billion tons and would take about 5,000 years to empty if the star dust was poured out at a rate of three tons per second!
The famous Crab Nebula has such a neutron star at its centre. This nebula is the result of a star that was seen to explode in broad daylight by Chinese astronomers on 4 July 1054. The Crab Nebula is about 6,500 light years away and about 60 trillion miles across, and it is expanding at a rate of about 1,000 miles per second. The neutron star at the centre of the Crab Nebula is spinning very rapidly (30.2 times per second!) and it has on its surface a particular area which emits radio frequencies. As the star rotates, this radiation sweeps through space in a narrow beam similar to light from a lighthouse. Hence astronomers observe 30.2 pulses of radiation per second on their radio-telescopes—such a pulsating radio star is called a ‘pulsar’. Hundreds of pulsars have been discovered since the first pulsar (designated ‘CP 1919’) was identified in July 1967. However, when the radiation of CP 1919 was first detected in the middle of the twentieth century, it was not known what it was. Because of the seemingly unnatural regularity of its emissions—it had a regular period of 1.3373 seconds—the evolutionary astronomers designated it ‘LGM-1’, which stood for ‘Little Green Man One’—claiming it to be intelligent beings of extra-terrestrial origin who were trying to communicate with people on earth!
Finally, probably the most incredible stars in existence are called ‘black holes’. Such stars are just a couple of miles or so in diameter and are again composed of neutrons packed so densely that 500 trillion tons of matter is packed into a sphere about the size of a football! The force of gravity at the surface of such a star is so great that it prevents any light from leaving the surface—hence the star appears black even though it may be white-hot. Although black holes cannot be seen directly, their presence can be inferred from the gravitational influence they exert on nearby stars. In January 2005, astronomers from the University of California, Los Angeles, presented evidence that, some 30,000 light years away, tens of thousands of black holes are orbiting a monstrous black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.6
The Big Bang
Among evolutionists, the Big Bang is the most popular and probably the most widely held view of the origin of the universe. It must be pointed out that not all cosmologists accept the Big Bang theory, and views about the origin of the universe are constantly changing. Basically, the Big Bang hypothesis states that the universe began with an infinitesimally small, and infinitely hot and dense, point that is called a ‘singularity’. This singularity is supposed to have contained not only all the mass and energy of the universe, but also ‘space’ itself. According to this hypothesis, at time equals zero, about 13.7 billion years ago, the singularity expanded rapidly, giving rise to the universe that we observe today.
One of the questions that immediately springs to mind is: Where did this singularity come from? To try to answer this question, cosmologists run into problems with explanations that simply do not make sense. If ‘when the singularity started to expand’ is the moment at which time started, then the question that we have just asked is meaningless. It is illogical to ask what existed before time began. However, cosmologists suggest that before the Big Bang there was nothing—no space, no time, no matter, no energy—absolutely nothing. This could be thought of as ‘absolute nothingness’. It is interesting to note that the popular astronomer Heather Couper and her co-author Nigel Henbest have, in their book Big Bang, stated that the nothing before the Big Bang ‘was a “nothing” so profound it defies human comprehension’.7 Indeed it does! When we think of ‘nothing’, we tend to think of dark, empty space. But this is not ‘nothing’—it is dark, empty space. So if we have ‘nothing’ and leave it for hundreds of millions of years, nothing will happen—it certainly won’t explode! But there is a problem there, too: there is no time if you have ‘nothing’, so it cannot exist for hundreds of millions of years. One can therefore argue that the Big Bang hypothesis states that ‘In the beginning nothing exploded’. It is interesting to contrast this with what the Bible teaches in Genesis 1:1:that ‘In the beginning God created …’
It is not just creationists who are wary of believing that the universe came from nothing without the intervention of any supernatural agent. British astronomer and science writer David Darling has also sounded the following note of caution:
Don’t let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one. They have not got a clue either … ‘In the beginning,’ they will say, there was nothing—no time, space, matter, or energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which—whoa! Stop right there. You see what they mean? First there is nothing and then there is something—and before you know it, they have pulled a hundred billion galaxies out of their quantum hats.8
In fact, it is difficult to imagine how anything can exist if nothing exists! However, to get around this, the cosmologists maintain that the laws of physics are in operation even when there is nothing. Cosmologist Victor Stenger, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Hawaii, has stated that ‘the laws of physics are the laws of nothing’ and that ‘something is more stable than nothing’.9 Victor Stenger is therefore maintaining that the same laws of physics existed when there was nothing as they do today when there is something. He believes that the laws of physics caused the universe to come into being because these laws determine that the universe is more stable than absolute nothingness. It has to be said that Professor Stenger (and those who embrace his arguments) is putting his faith in the laws of physics rather than in the Creator. Following Stenger’s line of argument, Marcus Chown, who at the time of writing is cosmology consultant for New Scientist, has concluded, ‘There is no need to imagine there being no
laws of physics and then the laws of physics coming into being—along with everything else—in the Big Bang.’10
Basically, the cosmologists are fudging the issue. There is nothing—absolute nothingness—and yet, at the same time, there is something—the laws of physics. This really is a fudge; the cosmologists are asking us to believe that there never was a time when there was absolutely nothing, and that the laws of science—in this case, the laws of physics—have always existed, even before time existed! They are therefore asking us to believe that these laws have always existed and are responsible for the creation and subsequent development of the universe. Thus they replace God, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, with the laws of physics.
A totally different explanation of how the universe came from nothing is that suggested by Neil Turok of the University of Cambridge and his colleague Paul Steinhardt of the University of Princeton, New Jersey. It has to be admitted that their explanation sounds more like science fiction than science. In fact, the details in this account are reminiscent of the story in Alice in Wonderland, when the Queen told Alice that when she was younger she believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast! We are used to thinking in four dimensions: length, breadth, height and time. Hence imagining more than four dimensions is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Similarly, imagining four dimensions when one of these is not time is equally difficult. In spite of this, these two scientists argue that, before the Big Bang, there were ‘branes’—four-dimensional ‘island universes’—and that these existed in a ten-dimensional space–time. They then argue that the Big Bang that caused our universe to come into existence was the result of the collision of two of these branes.11 Such an explanation is so esoteric that it is difficult to bring any scientific arguments to bear on it.
If we assume that the Big Bang occurred, what is the account of the subsequent development of the universe? It has to be acknowledged that cosmologists’ description of the Big Bang is subject to much speculation—primarily because no one was there to see it happen, if it happened at all. In the account I have set out below, the term ‘explosion’ is used; however, the Big Bang should not really be thought of as an explosion in the conventional sense. The universe—its space and time—is thought to be the result of its appearing (rather than ‘exploding’) from nothing. I have used the term ‘explosion’ to follow conventional descriptions of the Big Bang. Although the universe is thought to be expanding as a result of the Big Bang, it does not have a global centre and it is not expanding into anything; neither has it expanded from anything, because the universe is not embedded in another space—our universe is space. One of the best explanations of how to view this is provided by Peter Coles, Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Cardiff University:
This difficulty is often also confused in one’s mind with the question of where the Big Bang actually happened: are we not moving away from the site of the original explosion? Where was this explosion situated? The answer to this is the explosion happened everywhere and everything is moving away from it. But in the beginning, at the Big Bang singularity, everywhere and everything was in the same place.12
So what is the cosmologists’ account of the development of the universe? They point out that quantum theory13 suggests that at 10−43 second after the beginning of the Big Bang—an infinitesimally short period of time after the initial explosion occurred—the four forces of nature—the strong nuclear, the weak nuclear, the electromagnetic and gravity—were combined as a single ‘super force’. It is believed that quarks—the elementary particles which are the fundamental constituents of matter—began to bond together in trios, forming photons, positrons and neutrinos, and that these formed together with their anti-particles (particles that are identical except that they have opposite charges). Evolutionary cosmologists believe that minute amounts of protons and neutrons also formed at this stage—approximately one for every one billion photons, neutrinos or electrons. These cosmologists then tell us that at approximately 10−37 second after the Big Bang started, a phase transition caused what is called a ‘cosmic inflation’ to happen. This inflation period can be thought of as a time when the universe underwent a rate of expansion many times the speed of light. The size of the universe grew exponentially during this inflationary stage; it is believed that, in less than one thousandth of a second, the universe doubled in size at least 100 times. This ‘isotropic inflation’ of the universe ended at 10−35 second after the beginning of the Big Bang, with the universe almost perfectly smooth. Cosmologists argue that, if it were not for a slight fluctuation in the density distribution of matter, galaxies would not have been able to form.
If all this sounds like science fiction, there is more, as the following story told by evolutionary cosmologists amply demonstrates. It is argued that, at the close of the inflationary period, the temperature of the universe was so high that the random motions of particles were at relativistic speeds (that is, speeds approaching the speed of light) and that particle–antiparticle pairs of all kinds were being continuously formed and destroyed in collisions. The cosmologists then believe that, at some point, an unknown reaction resulted in a very small excess of quarks and leptons (leptons are another family of elementary particles) over anti-quarks and antileptons—of the order of one part in thirty million. They believe that this resulted in the predominance of matter over anti-matter in the universe.
We are told that, after the inflation stopped, the universe was, at this point, composed of ionized plasma in which matter and radiation were inseparable. Additionally, cosmologists tell us that there were equal quantities of particles and anti-particles. However, when the universe was one hundredth of a second old, neutrons begin to decay on a massive scale, allowing free electrons and protons to combine with other elementary particles. It is believed that the formation of matter from energy was made possible by photons materializing into baryons and anti-baryons (baryons are made of three quarks), with their subsequent annihilations transforming them into pure energy. Cosmologists further believe that, because of these collisions and annihilations, matter was unable to remain viable for more than a few nanoseconds (10−9 second) before a bombardment of electrons would have scattered these photons.
Evolutionary cosmologists maintain that the universe continued to grow in size and the temperature continued to fall. They believe that, one full second after the initial explosion, the temperature of our universe had dropped to ten billion degrees Celsius. At this temperature, photons no longer have the energy to disrupt the formation of matter as well as transform energy into matter. After three minutes, it is believed that the temperature had dropped to one billion degrees Celsius, and the protons and neutrons were slowing down enough in order to allow nucleosynthesis—the formation of the nuclei of atoms—to take place. The cosmologists inform us that, at this stage, atomic nuclei of helium were produced as two protons and two neutrons bonded together. For every helium nucleus that was formed, there were apparently about ten protons left over, allowing for 25 per cent of the universe to be comprised of helium. We are told that the next important phase of the evolution of the universe occurred around thirty minutes later, when the formation of photons increased through the annihilation of electron–positron pairs. It is argued that the universe began with slightly more electrons than positrons, and that this ensured that our universe was able to form the way it did. According to the cosmologists, the next significant stage in the history of the universe happened about 379,000 years after the start of the Big Bang, when electrons and atomic nuclei combined into atoms (mostly hydrogen) and the radiation decoupled from matter and continued through space largely unimpeded. This relic radiation is known as the ‘cosmic microwave background radiation’.
Then, the cosmologists inform us, over a long period of time, the slightly denser regions of the nearly uniformly distributed matter gravitationally attracted nearby matter. This means that these denser regions grew even denser, forming gas clouds, stars, galaxies and
the other astronomical structures that we observe in the universe today.
Cosmologists believe that the universe today is dominated by a mysterious form of energy known as ‘dark energy’, which apparently permeates all of space. They believe that 72 per cent of the total energy density of today’s universe is in this form. They maintain that, when it was very young, the universe was probably infused with dark energy. However, with less space, and with everything closer together, gravity had the upper hand, with the result that gravity slowed down the expansion. Eventually, after many billions of years of expansion, the growing abundance of dark energy caused the expansion of the universe to slowly begin to accelerate, and this is where we are today.
What About Origins? (CreationPoints) Page 13
