EVERY morning is a miracle. Deep inside the morning sun, hydrogen is
being fused into helium at temperatures of millions of degrees. X rays
and gamma rays of incredible violence are pouring out of the core into
the surrounding layers of the sun. If the sun were transparent, these
rays would blast their way to the surface in a few searing seconds.
Instead, they begin to bounce from tightly packed atom to atom of solar
"insulation," gradually losing energy. Days, weeks, centuries, pass.
Thousands of years later, that once deadly radiation finally emerges
from the sun's surface as a gentle shower of yellow light—no longer a
menace but just right for bathing earth with its warmth.
Every night is a miracle too. Other suns twinkle at us across the
vast expanse of our galaxy. They are a riot of colors, sizes,
temperatures, and densities. Some are supergiants so large that if one
were centered in the position of our sun, what remained of our planet
would be inside the surface of that superstar. Other suns are tiny,
white dwarfs—smaller than our earth, yet as heavy as our sun. Some will
peacefully drone along for billions of years. Others are poised on the
brink of supernova explosions that will obliterate them, briefly
outshining entire galaxies.
Primitive peoples spoke of sea monsters and battling gods, of dragons
and turtles and elephants, of lotus flowers and dreaming gods. Later,
during the so-called Age of Reason, the gods were swept aside by the
newfound "magic" of calculus and Newton's laws. Now we live in an age
bereft of the old poetry and legend. The children of today's atomic age
have chosen as their paradigm for creation, not the ancient sea monster,
not Newton's "machine," but that overarching symbol of the 20th
century—the bomb. Their "creator" is an explosion. They call their
cosmic fireball the big bang.
What the Big Bang "Explains"
The most popular version of this generation's view of creation states
that some 15 to 20 billion years ago, the universe did not exist, nor
did empty space. There was no time, no matter—nothing except an
infinitely dense, infinitely small point called a singularity, which
exploded into the present universe. That explosion included a brief
period during the first tiny fraction of a second when the infant
universe inflated, or expanded, much faster than the speed of light.
During the first few minutes of the big bang, nuclear fusion took
place on a universal scale, giving rise to the currently measured
concentrations of hydrogen and helium and at least part of the lithium
in interstellar space. After perhaps 300,000 years, the universewide
fireball dropped to a little below the temperature of the surface of the
sun, allowing electrons to settle into orbits around atoms and
releasing a flash of photons, or light. That primordial flash can be
measured today, although greatly cooled off, as universal background
radiation at microwave frequencies corresponding to a temperature of 2.7
Kelvin.
*
In fact, it was the discovery of this background radiation in 1964-65
that convinced most scientists that there was something to the big bang
theory. The theory also claims to explain why the universe appears to be
expanding in all directions, with distant galaxies apparently racing
away from us and from each other at high speed.
Since the big bang theory appears to explain so much, why doubt it?
Because there is also much that it does not explain. To illustrate: The
ancient astronomer Ptolemy had a theory that the sun and planets went
around the earth in large circles, making small circles, called
epicycles, at the same time. The theory appeared to explain the motion
of the planets. For centuries as astronomers gathered more data, the
Ptolemaic cosmologists could always add extra epicycles onto their other
epicycles and "explain" the new data. But that did not mean the theory
was correct. Ultimately there was just too much data to account for, and
other theories, such as Copernicus' idea that the earth went around the
sun, explained things better and more simply. Today it is hard to find a
Ptolemaic astronomer!
Professor Fred Hoyle likened the efforts of the Ptolemaic
cosmologists at patching up their failing theory in the face of new
discoveries to the endeavors of big bang believers today to keep their
theory afloat. He wrote in his book
The Intelligent Universe:
"The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over
contradictions in the big bang theory, to build up an idea which has
become ever more complex and cumbersome." After referring to Ptolemy's
futile use of epicycles to rescue his theory, Hoyle continued: "I have
little hesitation in saying that as a result a sickly pall now hangs
over the big bang theory. As I have mentioned earlier, when a pattern of
facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that it rarely
recovers."—Page 186.
The
New Scientist magazine of December 22/29, 1990, echoed
similar thoughts: "The Ptolemaic method has been lavishly applied to
. . . the big bang cosmological model." It then asks: "How can we
achieve real progress in particle physics and cosmology? . . . We must
be more honest and forthright about the purely speculative nature of
some of our most cherished assumptions." New observations are now
pouring in.
Questions the Big Bang Does Not Answer
A major challenge to the big bang has come from observers using the
corrected optics of the Hubble Space Telescope to measure distances to
other galaxies. The new data is giving the theorists fits!
Astronomer Wendy Freedman and others recently used the Hubble Space
Telescope to measure the distance to a galaxy in the constellation of
Virgo, and her measurement suggests that the universe is expanding
faster, and therefore is younger, than previously thought. In fact, it
"implies a cosmic age as little as eight billion years," reported
Scientific American
magazine just last June. While eight billion years sounds like a very
long time, it is only about half the currently estimated age of the
universe. This creates a special problem, since, as the report goes on
to note, "other data indicate that certain stars are at least 14 billion
years old." If Freedman's numbers hold up, those elderly stars would
turn out to be older than the big bang itself!
Still another problem for the big bang has come from steadily
mounting evidence of "bubbles" in the universe that are 100 million
light-years in size, with galaxies on the outside and voids inside.
Margaret Geller, John Huchra, and others at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics have found what they call a great wall of
galaxies some 500 million light-years in length across the northern sky.
Another group of astronomers, who became known as the Seven Samurai,
have found evidence of a different cosmic conglomeration, which they
call the Great Attractor, located near the southern constellations of
Hydra and Centaurus. Astronomers Marc Postman and Tod Lauer believe
something even bigger must lie beyond the constellation Orion, causing
hundreds of galaxies, including ours, to stream in that direction like
rafts on a sort of "river in space."
All this structure is baffling. Cosmologists say the blast from the
big bang was extremely smooth and uniform, according to the background
radiation it allegedly left behind. How could such a smooth start have
led to such massive and complex structures? "The latest crop of walls
and attractors intensifies the mystery of how so much structure could
have formed within the 15-billion-year age of the universe," admits
Scientific American—a problem that only gets worse as Freedman and others roll back the estimated age of the cosmos still more.
The Light-Year—A Cosmic Yardstick
The universe is so big that measuring it in miles or kilometers is
like measuring the distance from London to Tokyo with a micrometer. A
more convenient unit of measurement is the light-year, the distance that
light travels in a year, or about 5,880,000,000,000 miles
[9,460,000,000,000 km]. Since light is the fastest thing in the universe
and requires only 1.3 seconds to travel to the moon and about 8 minutes
to the sun, a light-year would seem to be truly enormous! |
"We Are Missing Some Fundamental Element"
Geller's three-dimensional maps of thousands of clumped, tangled, and
bubbled galactic agglomerations have transformed the way scientists
picture the universe. She does not pretend to understand what she sees.
Gravity alone appears unable to account for her great wall. "I often
feel we are missing some fundamental element in our attempts to
understand this structure," she admits.
Geller enlarged on her misgivings: "We clearly do not know how to
make large structure in the context of the Big Bang." Interpretations of
cosmic structure on the basis of current mapping of the heavens are far
from definitive—more like trying to picture the whole world from a
survey of Rhode Island, U.S.A. Geller continued: "Someday we may find
that we haven't been putting the pieces together in the right way, and
when we do, it will seem so obvious that we'll wonder why we hadn't
thought of it much sooner."
That leads to the biggest question of all: What is supposed to have
caused the big bang itself? No less an authority than Andrei Linde, one
of the originators of the very popular inflationary version of the big
bang theory, frankly admits that the standard theory does not address
this fundamental question. "The first, and main, problem is the very
existence of the big bang," he says. "One may wonder, What came before?
If space-time did not exist then, how could everything appear from
nothing? . . . Explaining this initial singularity—where and when it all
began—still remains the most intractable problem of modern cosmology."
An article in
Discover magazine recently concluded that "no reasonable cosmologist would claim that the Big Bang is the ultimate theory."
Let us now go outdoors and contemplate the beauty and the mystery of the starry vault.
*
A kelvin is the unit of a temperature scale whose degree is the same as
the degree on the Celsius temperature scale, except that the Kelvin
scale begins at absolute zero, that is 0 K.—the equivalent of -273.16
degrees Celsius. Water freezes at 273.16 K. and boils at 373.16 K.
SOURCE: http://www.watchtower.org/e/19960122/article_01.htm
Checked by :
Prof. Crisencio M. Paner
