Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Recently religious apologists have taken to harping on the question “How can something come from nothing?” because they think that science cannot explain how the universe came into existence. Of course, their own answer that “God must have done it!” is not an answer at all since it merely shifts the problem to that of how god could come into being from nothing.
Stephen Hawking has recently published a book that says that we can indeed understand how the universe came into being without invoking god. The idea itself has been known for sometime but when Hawking says it, it generates a lot of media attention. Cosmologist Sean Carroll explains Hawking’s ideas in a three-minute video.
In short, science has not proved that there is no god (because such proofs are impossible) but has shown is there is no need for god.
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
As is often the case when I am writing about something, I get a little carried away and the series seems to go on forever. But we have actually reached the last post in this series where I want to look at the broader implications of what all these scientific advances with the Big Bang theory means, particularly for religion. I hope that those who stuck with me through to the bitter end have obtained a deeper understanding than they had before.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
As I wrote earlier, the state of play is that according to our best estimates, the Big Bang theory predicts that the universe is flat and consists of 72.1% dark energy and 23.3% dark matter, with the remaining 4.6% being all the other matter that we are familiar with and know exists.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
In the previous post, I showed that the creation of the universe does not, as is sometimes thought, violate the law of conservation of energy, otherwise known as the first law of thermodynamics.
Another supposed problem that disappears under close examination deals with entropy. Entropy is a quantity that has a precise definition in science but whose meaning has not become as familiar to the layperson as other scientific terms like energy. It can be loosely related to what we call the level of disorder or the loss of information or the amount of ‘useless’ energy (i.e., energy that cannot be utilized to perform work). So for example a system that is more disordered (a sock drawer in which the socks have been unceremoniously dumped) has a higher entropy than an ordered system (where the socks are neatly arranged in matching pairs.) Similarly a state in which information decreases or the amount of useless energy increases can be said to be a state in which entropy in increasing.
[Read more…]
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
Although the universe is mostly empty space (leaving aside for the moment dark energy and dark matter), there is quite a lot of matter in it. Some of it is in dense clumps that we call planets, stars, and galaxies. The rest is far more dilute and consists of interstellar gases and dust. And quite a lot of it is in the form of massless photons. So the question naturally arises: where did all this stuff come from? Doesn’t it require a massive input of energy right at the beginning that violates the law of conservation of energy (also known as the first law of thermodynamics), one of the bedrock principles of science? The answer is simple: No.
[Read more…]
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
We seem to be living in a runaway expanding universe. Given that we are confined to such a tiny region of what seems like an infinite space, how can we know so much about it? It is indeed a tribute to the doggedness of the scientific endeavor that we can investigate the universe so methodically and tease out answers to questions that at first glance might seem hopelessly out of reach. In this post, I want to give some further background about how we have figured out some of this information.
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
So far I have been simply describing what the Big Bang theory says without giving much of the theoretical background. But Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (like Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection) has had such a profound effect on our relationship with the rest of the universe that I feel obliged to give readers, at least for cultural purposes, a glimpse of what the theory is and why it is so powerful, even if it remains obscure in its details. So for the sake of greater completeness and for the benefit of those who want to know more, in this post and the next I will give some of the theoretical background to what I have been saying so far, and hope that even those who are averse to algebra will stick with me through it and get some of the flavor of how the theory works.
[Read more…]
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
To understand what is going on with dark energy, we need to look at something called the cosmological constant.
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, when expressed as equations in their most general form, contains a constant term (called the cosmological constant) whose value is unspecified by the theory itself but influences how the universe evolves with time. A positive value for this constant would have the effect of acting like an outward pressure trying to ‘push’ the universe apart, counteracting the gravitational attraction that is trying to pull it together. A zero value would do nothing, leaving gravity as the only (attractive) force. A negative value would be like a ‘pull’, adding to the attractive force of gravity.
[Read more…]
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
For previous posts in this series, see here.
In addition to the appearance of dark matter, another interesting development arose when observers tried to determine the curvature of the universe, an important fact in determining the ultimate fate of the universe.
To understand this consider, as an analogy, a ball thrown upwards from the surface of the planet. It will slow down as it goes up due to the gravitational attraction of the planet’s mass. But will the ball eventually fall back to the ground or will it escape from the planet and go on forever? The answer depends on both the speed of the ball and the size of the planet. For a given speed of the thrown ball, if the mass of the planet is below a certain value, its gravitational pull on the ball is not sufficient to bring it back and the ball will escape and travel out in space forever.
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