Tag Archives: big bang

Of God and Hubble

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Edwin Hubble and Andromeda Photograph

Edwin Hubble and Andromeda Photograph

Perhaps my favorite proof of God is that, as best we can tell using the best science we have, everything we see today, popped into existence some 14 billion years ago. The event is called “the big bang,” and before that, it appears, there was nothing. After that, there was everything, and as best we can tell, not an atom has popped into existence since. I see this as the miracle of creation: Ex nihilo, Genesis, Something from nothing.

The fellow who saw this miracle first was an American, Edwin P. Hubble, born 1889. Hubble got a law degree and then a PhD (physics) studying photographs of faint nebula. That is, he studied the small, glowing, fuzzy areas of the night sky, producing a PhD thesis titled: “Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae.” Hubble served in the army (WWI) and continued his photographic work at the Mount Wilson Observatory, home to the world’s largest telescope at the time. He concluded that many of these fuzzy nebula were complete galaxies outside of our own. Most of the stars we see unaided are located relatively near us, in our own, local area, or our own, “Milky Way” galaxy, that is within a swirling star blob that appears to be some 250,000 light years across. Through study of photographs of the Andromeda “nebula”, Hubble concluded it was another swirling galaxy quite like ours, but some 900,000 light years away. (A light year is 5,900,000,000 miles, the distance light would travel in a year). Finding another galaxy was a wonderful find; better yet, there were more swirling galaxies besides Andromeda, about 100 billion of them, we now think. Each galaxy contains about 100 billion stars; there is plenty of room for intelligent life. 

Emission from Galaxy NGC 5181. The bright, hydrogen ß line should be at but it's at

Emission spectrum from Galaxy NGC 5181. The bright, hydrogen ß line should be at 4861.3 Å, but it’s at about 4900 Å. This difference tells you the speed of the galaxy.

But the discovery of galaxies beyond our own is not what Hubble is most famous for. Hubble was able to measure the distance to some of these galaxies, mostly by their apparent brightness, and was able to measure the speed of the galaxies relative to us by use of the Doppler shift, the same phenomenon that causes a train whistle to sound differently when the train is coming towards you or going away from you. In this case, he used the frequency spectrum of light for example, at right, for NGC 5181. The color of the spectral lines of light from the galaxy is shifted to the red, long wavelengths. Hubble picked some recognizable spectral line, like the hydrogen emission line, and determined the galactic velocity by the formula,

V= c (λ – λ*)/λ*.

In this equation, V is the velocity of the galaxy relative to us, c is the speed of light, 300,000,000 m/s, λ is the observed wavelength of the particular spectral line, and λ*is the wavelength observed for non-moving sources. Hubble found that all the distant galaxies were moving away from us, and some were moving quite fast. What’s more, the speed of a galaxy away from us was roughly proportional to the distance. How odd. There were only two explanations for this: (1) All other galaxies were propelled away from us by some, earth-based anti-gravity that became more powerful with distance (2) The whole universe was expanding at a constant rate, and thus every galaxy sees itself moving away from every other galaxy at a speed proportional to the distance between them.

This second explanation seems a lot more likely than the first, but it suggests something very interesting. If the speed is proportional to the distance, and you carry the motion backwards in time, it seems there must have been a time, some 14 billion years ago, when all matter was in one small bit of space. It seems there was one origin spot for everything, and one origin time when everything popped into existence. This is evidence for creation, even for God. The term “Big Bang” comes from a rival astronomer, Fred Hoyle, who found the whole creation idea silly. With each new observation of a galaxy moving away from us, the idea became that much less silly. Besides, it’s long been known that the universe can’t be uniform and endless.

Whatever we call the creation event, we can’t say it was an accident: a lot of stuff popped out at one time, and nothing at all similar has happened since. Nor can we call it a random fluctuation since there are just too many stars and too many galaxies in close proximity to us for it to be the result of random atoms moving. If it were all random, we’d expect to see only one star and our one planet. That so much stuff popped out in so little time suggests a God of creation. We’d have to go to other areas of science to suggest it’s a personal God, one nearby who might listen to prayer, but this is a start. 

If you want to go through the Hubble calculations yourself, you can find pictures and spectra of galaxies here for the 24 or so original galaxies studied by Hubble: http://astro.wku.edu/astr106/Hubble_intro.html. Based on your analysis, you’ll likely calculate a slightly different time for creation from the standard 14 billion, but you’ll find you calculate something close to what Hubble did. To do better, you’ll need to look deeper into space, and that would take a better telescope, e.g.  the “Hubble space telescope”

Robert E. Buxbaum, October 28, 2018.

Science is the Opposite of Religion

Some years ago, my daughter came back from religions school and asked for a definition of science. I told her that science was the opposite of religion. I didn’t mean to insult religion or science; the big bang for one thing, strongly suggests there is a God -creator, and quantum mechanics suggests (to me) that there is a God -maintainer, but religion deals with other things beyond a belief in God, and I meant to point out that every basic of how science looks at things finds its opposite in religion.

Science is based on reproducibility and lack of meaning: if you do the same experiment over and over, you’ll always get the same result as you did before and the same result as anyone else — when the results are measured to some good, statistical norm. The meaning for the observation? that’s a meaningless question. Religion is based on the centrality of drawing meaning, and the centrality of non-reproducible, one-time events: creation, the exodus from Egypt, the resurrection of Jesus, the birth of Zeus, etc. A religious believer is one who changes his or her life based on the lesson of these; to him, a non-believer is one who draws no meaning, or needs reproducible events.

Science also requires that anyone will get the same result if they do the same process. Thus, chemistry class results don’t depend on the age, sex, or election of the students. Any student who mixes the prescribed two chemicals and heats to a certain temperature is expected to get the same result. The same applies to measures of the size of the universe, or its angular momentum or age. In religion, it is fundamentally important what sex you are, how old you are, who your parents were, or what you are thinking at the time. If the right person says “hoc es corpus” over wine and wafers, they change; if not, they do not. If the right person opens the door to heaven, or closes it, it matters in religion.

A main aspect of all religion is prayer; the idea that what you are thinking or saying changes things on high and here below. In science, we only consider experiments where the words said over the experiment have no effect. Another aspect of religion is tchuvah (regret, repentance); the idea is that thoughts can change the effect of actions, at least retroactively. Science tends to ignore repentance, because they lack the ability to measure things that work backwards in time, and because the scientific instruments we have currently do not take measurements on the soul to see if the repentance had any effect. Basically, the science-universe is only populated with those things which can be measured or reproducibly affected, and that pretty much excludes the soul. That the soul does not exist in the science universe doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Another main aspect of religion is morality: you’re supposed to do the right thing. Morality varies from one religion to another, and you may think the other fellow’s religion has a warped morality, but at least there is one in all religions. In science, for better or worse, there is no apparent morality, either to man or to the universe. Based on science, the universe will end, either by a bang or a whimper, and in that void of end it would seem that killing a mouse is about as important as killing a person. No religion I know of sees the universe ending in either cold or hot death; as a result. Consistent with this, they all see murder is a sin against God. This difference is a big plus for religion, IMHO. That man sees murder as a true evil is either a sign that religion is true, or that it isn’t depending on the value you put on life. Another example of the moral divide: Scientists, especially academics, tend to be elitists. Their morality, such as it is, values great minds and great projects over the humble and stupid. Classical religion sees the opposite; it promoting the elevation of the poor, weak, and humble. There is no fundamental way to tell which one is right, and I tend to think that both are right in their own, mirror-image universes.

It is now worthwhile to consider what each universe sees as wisdom. An Explanation in the universe of science has everything to do with utility and not any internal sense of having understood, as such. I understand something only to the extent I predict that thing or can do something based on the knowledge. in religion, the motivation for all activity is always just understanding — typically of God on the bone-deep level. This difference shows up very clearly in dealing with quantum mechanics. To a scientist, the quantum world is fundamentally a door from religion because it is basically non-understandable but very useful. Religion totally ignores quantum mechanics for the same reason: it’s non-understandable, but very precise and useful. Anything you can’t understand is meaningless to them (literally), and useful is mostly defined in terms of building the particular religion; I think this is a mistake on many levels. I note that looking for disproof is the glory-work of all science development, but the devil’s work of every religion. A religious leader will grab on to statistical findings that suggest that his type of prayer cures people, but will always reject disproof, e.g. evidence that someone else’s prayers works better, or that his prayer does nothing at all. Each religion is thus in a war with the other, each trying to build belief, while not removing it. Science is the opposite. Religion starts with the answer and accepts any support it can; fundamental change is considered a bad thing in religion. The opposite is so with science; disproof is considered “progress,” and change is good.

These are not minor aspects of science and religion, by the way, but these are the fundamental basics of each, as best I can tell. History, politics, and psychology seem to be border-line areas, somewhere between science and religion. The differences do not reflect a lack in these fields, but just a recognition that each works according to its own logic and universe.

My hope in life is to combine science and religion to the extent possible, but find that supporting science in any form presents difficulties when I have to speak to others in the religious community, my daughter’s teachers among them. As an example of the problem that come up, my sense is that the big bang is a fine proof of creation and should be welcomed by all (most) religious people. I think its a sign that there is a creator when science says everything came from nothing, 14,000,000 years ago. Sorry to say, the religious leaders I’ve met reject the big bang, and claim you can’t believe in anything that happened 14,000,000,000 years ago. So long as science shows no evidence of a bearded observer at the center, they are not interested. Scientists, too have trouble with the bang, I find. It’s a one-time event that they can’t quite explain away (Steven Hawking keeps trying). The only sane approach I’ve found is to keep blogging, and otherwise leave each to its area. There seems to be little reason to expect communal agreement.

by Robert E. Buxbaum, Apr. 7, 2013. For some further thoughts, see here.

Two things are infinite

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Einstein is supposed to have commented that there are only two things that are infinite: the size of the universe and human stupidity, and he wasn’t sure about the former.

While Einstein still appears to be correct about the latter infinite, there is now more disagreement about the size of the universe. In Einstein’s day, it was known that the universe appeared to have originated in a big bang with all mass radiating outward at a ferocious rate. If the mass of the universe were high enough, and the speed were slow enough the universe would be finite and closed in on itself. That is, it would be a large black hole. But in Einstein’s day, the universe didn’t look to have enough mass. It thus looked like the universe was endless, but non-uniform. It appeared to be mostly filled with empty space — something that kept us from frying from the heat of distant stars.

Since Einstein’s day we’ve discovered more mass in the universe, but not quite enough to make us a black hole given the universe’s size. We’ve discovered neutron stars and black holes, dark concentrated masses, but not enough of them. We’ve discovered neutrinos, tiny neutral particles that fill space, and we’ve shown that they have rest-mass enough that neutrinos are now thought to make up most of the mass of the universe. But even with these dark-ish matter, we still have not found enough for the universe to be non-infinite, a black hole. Worse yet, we’ve discovered dark energy, something that keeps the universe expanding at nearly the speed of light when you’d think it should have slowed by now; this fast expansion makes it ever harder to find enough mass to close the universe (why we’d want to close it is an aesthetic issue discussed below).

Still, there is evidence for another, smaller mass item floating in space, the axion. This particle, and it’s yet-smaller companion, the axiono, may be the source of both the missing dark matter and the dark energy, see figure below. Axions should have masses about 10-7 eV, and should interact enough with matter to explain why there is more matter than antimatter while leaving the properties of matter otherwise unchanged. From normal physics, you’d expect an equal amount of matter and antimatter as antimatter is just matter moving backwards in time. Further, the light mass and weak interactions could allow axions to provide a halo around galaxies (helpful for galactic stability).

Mass of the Universe with Axions, no axions. Here is a plot from a recent SUSY talk (2010) http://susy10.uni-bonn.de/data/KimJEpreSUSY.pdf

Mass of the Universe with Axions, no axions. Here is a plot from a recent SUSY talk (2010) http://susy10.uni-bonn.de/data/KimJEpreSUSY.pdf

The reason you’d want the universe to be closed is aesthetic. The universe is nearly closed, if you think in terms of scientific numbers, and it’s hard to see why the universe should not then be closed. We appear to have an awful lot of mass, in terms of grams or kg, but appear to have only 20% of the required mass for a black hole. In terms of orders of magnitudes we are so close that you’d think we’d have 100% of the required mass. If axions are found to exist, and the evidence now is about 50-50, they will interact with strong magnetic fields so that they change into photons and photons change into axions. It is possible that the mass this represents will be the missing dark matter allowing our universe to be closed, and will be the missing dark energy.

As a final thought I’ve always wondered why religious leaders have been so against mention of “the big bang.” You’d think that the biggest boost to religion would be knowledge that everything appeared from nothing one bright and sunny morning, but they don’t seem to like the idea at all. If anyone who can explain that to me, I’d appreciate it. Thanks, Robert E. B.