THE SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY OF EVERYTHING

Stephen Hawking in 1988 wrote A Brief History of Time.  There is only one equation,  E = mc², for this is a popular book on cosmology for the non-specialist.

National Geographic published Science of Everything, answering all the questions about how things work.  But it costs $40 and only goes into technology.

In 2016 came God, Cosmology & Nothingness by Garrison Gibson.  Those three publications pretty much includes everything I will crystalize just into this one posting.

In the beginning begins with a conflict.  Scientists say there was a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and most religions turn to a Supreme Being as the creator.  In the Western world there is a general awareness of the Christian Genesis, while the Koran has fragmented passages of how it all started.  Did you know that in Hindu texts Brahma emerged from an egg and created the world?  There are variations.  As best as I can determine, there is no beginning in Buddhism, and that evolution might well be okay.  Depending on who you believe, the Biblical start was around 4,000 years ago, although The Bible seems to imply something on the order from 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

No one knows what happened before the Big Bang or God, although a case is made that He has always been here.  Scientist just don't know.  That's the best they can do.  I could end here, but let me start with the prodigious and move on to the teensy-weensy.




It is said that our observable Universe has a diameter of 93 billion light years.  This number keeps changing, but there are 10 billion galaxies in that space, each averaging 100 billion stars, or one billion trillion stars in the observable universe.  Just with those numbers, you know this is all a big guess.  Oh, and there could be other universes.

You would think that if you calculate the distance light travels for 13.8 billion years, you could determine the size of the ball that should be our Universe.  Ah, but not necessarily so, for here are some "theories":

There still are various flat earth societies.  Incredibly enough, there are some serious astrophysicists who believe that our Universe is flat.



So let's get a lot smaller by only considering our Milky Way Galaxy.  Even in this tiny portion of space, light takes 100,000 years to pass from one end to the other (from left to right in the bottom diagram):

How long is 100,000 years?  At this point in our history, Homo sapiens that left Africa just made it to the Middle East.  The first cities began forming 8,800 years ago.  The wheel and writing came 5,500 years ago.  100,000 years is a long time, and light travels very quickly--186,000 miles/second--so you can only barely imagine how vast is just our little ole Milky Way.

How small do things get?  In 1897 Sir J.J. Thomson discovered the electron, something 2 trillion times smaller than a grain of sand.  The photo to the right is an electron!  Scientists from Sweden's Lund University used intense attosecond light pulses to accomplish this feat.

In 1911, Ernest  Rutherford determined that the atom is mostly empty space.  Using the size of an atom and that of the sun, an electron is almost twice the distance from the nucleus than former planet Pluto is from the Sun.

The Sun and atom's nucleus are proportioned in such a manner so you can appreciate how empty empty is.  Actually, that graphic is not quite correct, for neutrons and protons in the nucleus are the same size, but 2000 times the mass of an electron.  By the way, see that purple dot in the middle?  This photo of this single strontium atom was taken by an Oxford PhD candidate, David Nadlinger, using an ordinary camera.

Here is a hydrogen atom to the right.  But Protons and Neutrons are not elementary particles, for bombardment of them in a super collider indicated that they are made of something called Quarks, which are about the same size as an Electron.  But Q's and E's actually have no dimension and are more like an imaginary dot in space. Plus, there are different kinds of Quarks:

I won't even try to explain the above.  But what exactly is the Higg's Boson, also called the God Particle?  To the left, Peter Higgs, not God.  Good luck on determining what a boson is:

Examples of bosons include fundamental particles such as photons, gluons, and W and Z bosons (the four force-carrying gauge bosons of the Standard Model), the recently discovered Higgs boson, and the hypothetical graviton of quantum gravity. Some composite particles are also bosons, such as mesons and stable nuclei of even mass number such as deuterium (with one proton and one neutron, atomic mass number = 2), helium-4, or lead-208;^[a] as well as some quasiparticles (e.g. Cooper pairs, plasmons, and phonons).^[9]:130

So there is matter...but what is light?  Photons make up light, but there is no mass.

Here is what The Bible says about light.  Note, of course, that whoever created original writings was not a physicist, but something like a humanist or philosopher or shepherd.  Yet the field of physics certainly began before the birth of Christ.  However, recent advancements are such that you can expect all religions to be less physical and more spiritual when it comes to light and gravity, which is one of the four known fundamental forces of nature, the others being weak nuclear, electromagnetic and strong nuclear forces.  Amazingly enough, scientists still can't explain gravity, and are confused by dark energy and dark matter.   Religion  ignores or obfuscates these matters.

Let's see now, what else have I not covered?  What about life on other worlds?  Like Hawking, my three more recent books only included one equation:


or

Details you can better understand?  Go to the Drake Equation.

What does religion say about extraterrestrial intelligence?  Billy Graham commented that The Bible says nothing about life on other planets.  Other Christians mostly feel the same.  But Moslems believe that God created several planets like Earth throughout the Universe.  Buddhism seems to leave the window ajar to this possibility, but the language is so abstruse, that you can read almost anything to Buddha's sayings, including the sensibility of evolution.  Hindus believe life is everywhere.

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