Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
1. What does it mean to stretch out the heavens like a tent or tent curtain? First, imagine what it would be like transporting a large, heavy tent or tent curtain on a long trip, setting it up each afternoon and tearing it down the next morning—an experience familiar to Abraham’s descendants. In preparation for each day’s travel, you would fold the tent in even, accordion-like folds, so at your destination a few strong men could grab the top-most fold and, with one long, continuous, running pull, completely stretch the tent out on the ground. The momentum of the men and the moving portions of the tent would help pull out subsequent tent folds.
Notice, the folded tent occupies a small but finite volume, and it is then stretched from without, not pushed from within. The folded tent would look like the springs in Figure 225 on page 453. Each fold of the tent would be of equal width and would lie horizontally on top the fold below.
What would the stretching speed would be for each fold as the tent or curtain was stretched out. The top-most fold would move the farthest and fastest. The bottom-most fold would be stretched the least. Each fold would be stretched out sequentially. Likewise, as we look out—and back in time—at the stretched out heavens, we see stars and galaxies receding at a velocity proportional to their distance from us. This is succinctly expressed as Hubble’s law. As explained on page 456, Hubble’s law is a consequence of God stretching out the universe.
The stretching explanation visualizes the expansion of the universe as the stretching out of a tent or curtain. As space expands, matter and light waves are carried along. A frequent analogy of this is that of raisin-bread being baked. The dough (representing space) expands, and the imbedded raisins (representing matter and light waves) are carried outward by the dough, but do not move relative to the dough.
2. Neither the stretching nor inflation events were observed by man; neither can be reproduced. In that sense, neither is scientific. However, as you will see, the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the creation explanation.
The inflationary big bang was proposed by Alan H. Guth in a paper titled “A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problem” in Physical Review, D, Vol. 23, 15 January 1981, pp. 348–356. Inflation allegedly reached speeds trillions of billions of times faster than the speed of light. Supposedly, after 10-32 of a second, inflation arbitrarily stopped. As explained in "Dark Thoughts" on page 34, dark matter and dark energy are simply non-scientific fudge factors that should be ignored.
If inflation happened, it had to shut off at precisely the right time and speed. If, when inflation stopped, the expansion had been going too fast (by only one part in 1059) matter would never have come together to form stars and galaxies. If, when inflation stopped, it had been going too slowly by only one part in 1059, all matter would have collapsed into one big black hole after 13.7-billion years, and we would not be here to think about it. Keep in mind, that all this inflation happened by an unknown, untestable phenomenon—not by a blast.
3. Andrei Linde, “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, Vol. 271, November 1994, p. 48.
4. Both the big bang theory and the stretching explanation agree that in the beginning, energy and matter appeared out of nothing, and then the universe suddenly expanded greatly. Those profound ideas were written by five different authors (in Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, and the Psalms) thousands of years before the big bang theory was proposed. Since then, man’s scientific ideas about the universe have changed many times—and are recognized, in hind sight, as quite fallible. Forcing a secular theory into the Bible will eventually discredit that biblical interpretation—and unfortunately—the Bible.
Some have taken a secular theory and tried to sell it to Christian audiences by claiming that the Bible supports it. Later, when that scientific idea is disproved, many blame the Bible rather than the secular theory or its salesman. Readers of this book have already seen examples of this unfortunate practice. (Check Table 28 and then the index for details.)
5. “Using the Hubble Space telescope, astronomers have detected light from the most distant object yet found—a fledgling galaxy that existed when the Universe was just over 420 million years old.” Phillip Campbell, “A Galaxy Far, Far Away,” Nature, Vol. 493, 10 January 2013, p. 137.
6. For examples, see "Molten Earth?" on page 30.
7. “According to inflationary cosmology, the universe [began] growing from a patch as small as 10-26 m, one hundred billion times smaller than a proton, ...” Alan H. Guth and David I. Kaiser, “Inflationary Cosmology: Exploring the Universe from the Smallest to the Largest Scales,” Science, Vol. 307, 11 February 2005, p. 885.
8. Robert Jastrow, Red Giants and White Dwarfs (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967), p. 63.
9. Kaitlin M. Kratter, “Sibling Rivalry Begins at Birth,” Nature, Vol. 518, 12 February 2015, p. 173.
10. “... the quadruple stellar system itself is bound but unstable on timescales of 500,000 years...[and therefore, young—less than 500,000 years old].” Jaime E. Pineda et al., “The Formation of a Quadruple Star System with Wide Separation,” Nature, Vol. 518, 12 February 2015, pp. 213–215.
11. Dan Falk, “Planet Formation,” Nature, Vol. 422, 17 April 2003, p. ix.
12. “... we now know that planets can form in binaries, ...” Kratter, p. 173.
13. William E. Welsh and Laurance R. Doyle, “Worlds with Two Suns,” Scientific American, Vol. 309, November 2013, p. 42.
14. Leslie Sage, “Nature Insight: Exoplanets,” Nature, Vol. 513, 18 September 2014, p. 327.
15. “These ‘hot Jupiters’ could not have formed in situ, given the large stellar tidal gravity and radiation fields close to their host stars. Instead they are thought to have formed beyond a few astronomical units (AU) and migrated inward. However, the physical mechanisms of the migration remain unclear.” Natalia I. Storch et al., “Chaotic Dynamics of Stellar Spin in Binaries and the Production of Misaligned Hot Jupiters,” Science, Vol. 345, 12 September 2014, p. 1317.
16. “Indeed, isolated ‘hot Jupiters’ are often misaligned and even orbiting retrograde.” Roberto Sanchis-Ojeda et al., “Alignment of the Stellar Spin with the Orbits of a Three-Planet System,” Nature, Vol. 487, 26 July 2012, p. 449.
17. “Many of these ‘hot Jupiters’ are strongly misaligned with the equators of their stars. The fact that some planetary orbits can be neatly aligned with the plane of their star’s equator, whereas others are wildly misaligned, shows that we have much still to learn about the formation and orbital evolution of planets.” Drake Deming, “Planets on the Spot,” Nature, Vol. 487, 26 July 2012, p. 434.
u “The discovery of spin-orbit misalignment in close-in exoplanetary systems in the past few years was a major surprise in planetary astrophysics.” Ibid., p. 1321.
18. “...reionization is poorly understood.” Eilat Glikman, “A Beacon at the Dawn of the Universe,” Nature, Vol. 553, 25 January 2018, p. 411.
19. “[Astronomer Richard S.] Ellis notes that the new findings also hint at a puzzle. His team estimates that the distant galaxies, which are too tiny to be clearly resolved by Hubble, are making stars at a puny rate. In some cases, that rate is as low as the mass equivalent of 0.0025 suns per year. According to current models, that rate couldn’t have generated enough ultraviolet starlight for a critical milestone in the evolution of the universe—the wrenching apart of neutral hydrogen into their subatomic constituents.” Ron Cowen, “Hubble’s New Finds Go the Distance,” Science News, Vol. 176, 10 October 2009, p. 8.
20. “These supermassive black holes pose major puzzles: Why are they so common in galaxies? Which came first—the galaxy or the hole? And how did they form in the first place?” Jenny E. Greene, “Goldilocks Black Holes,” Scientific American, Vol. 306, January 2012, p. 42.
21. “Theorists predict that stellar-mass black holes are abundant. If this is so, we should find them all over the Milky Way. ... There are probably tens of millions of massive stars in the Milky Way that could potentially collapse into black holes, but there are only about 50 stellar-mass black holes known with good confidence.” M. Virginia McSwain, “Black Hole Found Orbiting a Fast Rotator,” Nature, Vol. 505, 16 January 2014, p. 297.
22. “The galaxy, named EGSY8p7, is more than 13.2 billion light-years (4 billion parsecs) away.” Philip Campbell, “The Farthest Galaxy So Far,” Nature, Vol. 525, 17 September 2015, p. 293.
23. “Astronomers struggle to explain how some supermassive black holes could have formed in about 1 billion years out of only smaller black holes merging. ‘There’s just not enough time to do that.’ Smith says.” Christopher Crockett, “Black Hole Born Without Stellar Parent,” Science News, Vol. 190, 6 August 2016, p. 7.
u “The masses of these early black holes are inferred from their [quasar] luminosities to be >109 solar masses, which is a difficult theoretical challenge [for the big bang theory] to explain.” Rennan Barkana and Abraham Loeb, “Spectral Signature of Cosmological Infall of Gas Around the First Quasars,” Nature, Vol. 421, 23 January 2003, p. 341.
u “The daunting problem for theories of structure formation in the Universe is to understand how such huge black holes [3 billion solar masses] and the vast reservoirs of gaseous fuel were assembled so soon after the Big Bang ...” Edwin L. Turner, “Through a Lens Brightly,” Nature, 27 June 2002, p. 905.
u “Astronomers are puzzled about how the oldest supermassive black holes could have grown so big so early in cosmic history.” Priyamvada Natarajan, “The First Monster black Holes,” Scientific American, Vol. 318, February 2018, p. 24.
24. Robert Antonucci, “Quasars Still Defy Explanation,” Nature, Vol. 495, 14 March 2013, p. 165.
25. See Endnote 6 on page 471.
26. Chris Willott, “A Monster in the Early Universe,” Nature, Vol. 474, 30 June 2011, p. 583.
27. “Some supermassive black holes spin at more than 90% of the speed of light, which suggests that they gained their mass through major galactic mergers.” Eugenie Samuel Reich, “Spin Rate of Black Holes Pinned Down,” Nature, Vol. 500, 8 August 2013, p. 135.
u Christopher S. Reynolds, “Black Holes in a Spin,” Nature, Vol. 494, 28 February 2013, p. 433.
28. One might claim that the algebraic sum of the angular momenta of all matter in the universe might be zero. A study examined 15,158 galaxies with redshifts <0.085 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The net angular momentum of all those galaxies was so far from zero that the probability that the sample of 15,158 galaxies was drawn from an infinite population with a net angular momentum of zero was about one in a million. [See Michael J. Longo, “Detection of a Dipole in the Handedness of Spiral Galaxies with Redshifts Z ª 0.04, Physics Letter s B, Vol. 699, 16 May 2011, pp. 224–229.]
29. Adrian Cho, “Triumph for Gravitational Wave Hunt,” Nature, Vol. 351, 12 February 2016, pp.645–646.
30. “To merge within the age of the Universe, the black holes responsible for GW170104 must have once been separated by a distance no greater than one-fifth that of Earth from the Sun.” Ilya Mandel and Alison Farmer, “Stellar Palaeontology,” Nature, Vol. 547, 20 July 2017, p. 284.
31. Evolutionists cannot imagine how those two black holes could have formed and been so close together, so soon after a big bang. Clearly, they could not have formed from:
i. the collapse of two spinning gas and dust clouds. Clouds that close together would have interfered with each other, merged, and produced one black hole, not two.
ii. two massive stars that ran out of fuel, collapsed, became supernova and left two black holes. The first to become a supernova would have destroyed and scattered the second. Besides, the centers of two massive stars would be farther apart than 0.2 AU.
iii. two massive stars so far apart that they didn’t interfere with each other before they each produced a black hole. Then, chance interactions with other black holes brought them into orbit around each other. However, that would be highly improbable, would have required more time, so those black holes would had to have begun orbiting each at and even closer separation than 0.2 AU.
As normally happens when evolutionists are faced with problems their theory produces is to state the need for more research.
Researchers now hope to find out how such pairings came to be. [See Davide Castelvecchi, “Here Come the Waves,” Nature, Vol. 556, 12 April 2018, p. 165]
Obviously, there was no (i) big bang-to-spinning cloud stage, and no (ii) big-bang-to star stage. The matter began in a very compact universe, that was later stretched out. Yes, expansion happened, but not by a made-up phenomena (inflation) in a hot big bang.
32. “But the standard model [the big bang theory] still can’t easily account for a large number of mature or massive galaxies in the early universe.” Ron Cowen, “Mature Before Their Time,” Science News, Vol. 163, 1 March 2003, p. 139.
u “Extremely massive galaxies are seen in the young universe, but their presence is puzzling because we do not yet understand how they became so massive so quickly. How do they get enough fuel to form stars so rapidly?” Nina Hatch, “Galaxy Formation Through Cosmic Recycling,” Science, Vol. 354, 2 December 2016, p. 1102.
u “But this uniformity [in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation] is difficult to reconcile with the obvious clumping of matter into galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and even larger features extending across vast regions of the universe, such as ‘walls’ and ‘bubbles’.” Ivars Peterson, “Seeding the Universe,” Science News, Vol. 137, 24 March 1990, p. 184.
u “Gravity can’t, over the age of the universe, amplify these irregularities enough [to form huge clusters of galaxies].” Margaret Geller, as quoted by John Travis, “Cosmic Structures Fill Southern Sky,” Science, Vol. 263, 25 March 1994, p. 1684.
u “Yet how could the universe have gone from homogeneous plasma to pancakes to galaxies so quickly? Gravity alone was simply not strong enough to do it.” M. Mitchell Waldrop, “The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe,” Science, Vol. 219, 4 March 1983, p. 1051.
u Robert Irion, “Early Galaxies Baffle Observers, but Theorists Shrug,” Science, Vol. 303, 23 January 2004, p. 460.
33. Michael Lemonick, “The Great Cosmic Census,” Discover, March 2009, p. 64.
34. “More embarrassing to astrophysicists is our lack of understanding of black hole jets—phenomena in which the forces near a supermassive black hole somehow conspire to spew out material at ultrarelativistic speeds (up to 99.98 percent of light speed). These amazing outflows traverse distances larger than galaxies, ...” Avery E. Broderick and Abraham Loeb, “Portrait of a Black Hole,” Scientific American, Vol. 301, December 2009, p. 44.
35. “... merging two spiral galaxies to make an elliptical [galaxy] is statistically improbable [in today’s vast universe].” James E. Gunn, as quoted by Karen Hartley, “Mixing It Up in Space,” Science News, Vol. 135, 8 April 1989, p. 219.
36. Dozens of colliding galaxies can be seen in Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph. See James, Renée, “Hubble Deep Field,” Discover, Vol. 37, July-August 2016, p. 81.
37. R. P. Deane et al., “A Close-Pair Binary in a Distant Triple Supermassive Black Hole System,” Nature, Vol. 511, 3 July 2014, pp. 57–60.
38. “Other studies of elliptical galaxies have found additional signs of recent merging. In some ellipticals, for example, the central region rotates in one direction, while the outer parts spin the other way. Such a countervailing rotation pattern would be difficult to explain if these galaxies formed all of one piece but could come about quite naturally from a merger.” [emphasis added] Barnes et al., p. 41.
39. Charles Petit, “Ultra Massive: As Big As It Gets,” Science News, Vol. 174, 25 October 2008, p. 20.
40. “These black holes at the centers of galaxies are big (as black holes go). But compared with a galaxy, they’re really small. So they don’t have that much of an effect; we have nothing to fear. They only affect the very closest stars to them. But recently it was observed that the mass of a central black hole correlates with the mass of the galaxy around it! Before that observation, we didn’t know if the black hole formed first and then the galaxy formed around it, or if the galaxy formed first and then the black hole formed from the galaxy. The correlation means that the black hole and galaxy had to form together. They couldn’t be separate events because a black hole can’t affect an object as big as a galaxy. [emphasis added] Andrea Ghez, “Frontiers of Astronomy,” Discover, May 2009, p. 44.
41. Rychard Bouwens, “Quasars Signpost Massive Galaxies,” Nature, Vol. 545, 25 May 2017, p. 418.
u Decarli, R et. al., “Rapidly Star-Forming Galaxies Adjacent to Quasars at Redshifts Exceeding 6,” Nature, Vol. 545, 25 May 2017, p. 457–461.
42. “How and why the bulge formed is still something of a mystery.” Alexandra Witze, “At Home in the Universe,” Science News, Vol. 181, 15 June 2012, p. 24.
43. “[A massive black hole, 21,000,000 times more massive than the Sun, lies at the center of a small galaxy.] It cries out for an understanding that we don’t have.” John Kormendy as quoted by Christopher Crockett, “Tiny Galaxy Is Home to Huge Black Hole,” Science News, Vol. 186, 1 November 2014, p. 9.
u Anil C. Seth et al. “A Supermassive Black Hole in an Ultra-Compact Dwarf Galaxy,” Nature, Vol. 513, 18 September 2014, pp. 398–400.
44. Remco C. E. van den Bosch et al., “An Over-Massive Black Hole in the Compact Lenticular Galaxy NGC 1277,” Nature, Vol. 491, 29 November 2012, pp. 729–731.
45. “Violent encounters between galaxies appear surprisingly common.” Joshua Barnes et al., “Colliding Galaxies,” Scientific American, Vol. 265, August 1991, p. 40.
46. “The black hole’s inactivity [today] suggests that the central few light years doesn’t contain enough raw material to make stars. And the enormous gravitational tidal forces around the black hole would seem to prohibit stars from forming even if the material were there: it’s hard for a cloud of gas to contract into a star under its own gravity when something that weighs as much as four million stars is sitting next door.” Jeff Kanipe, “A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Not So Far Away,” Nature, Vol. 446, 5 April 2007, p. 601.
u “... the stars we studied to prove that there was a black hole turned out to be very young. Young stars have absolutely no right to be next to a black hole because [the tidal forces of] a black hole should shear them apart [if they evolved]. We have no idea how these stars formed.” Ghez, p. 43.
47. Kanipe, p. 602.
48. “Astrophysicists can model the accreting material to some extent, but it is unclear how gas in the accretion flow migrates from an orbit at a large radius to one near the [event] horizon ...” Avery E. Broderick and Abraham Loeb, p. 44.
49. Adrian Cho, “The Galaxy Builders,” Science, Vol. 360, p. 955.
50. “Thirty-seven of the brightest galaxies were detected, including a quasar, but thousands of galaxies were probably in the string, according to astronomer Dr. Paul Francis who heads the team. But none of the existing computer simulation models were able to reproduce galaxy strings as large as the one the team found. ‘We are looking back four-fifths of the way to the beginning of the universe and the existence of this galaxy string will send astrophysicists around the world back to the drawing board to re-examine [big bang] theories of the formation of the universe,’ Francis said. The simulations tell us that you cannot take the matter in the early universe and line it up in strings this large. There simply hasn’t been enough time since the Big Bang for it to form structures this colossal.” Science & Space, “Galaxy Find Stirs Big Bang Debate” on 8 January 2004 at:
www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/08/galaxies.find.
u Paul J. Francis et al., “An 80 Mpc Filament of Galaxies at Redshift Z=2.38,” Proceedings, The American Astronomical Society (Atlanta, Georgia), 7 January 2004.
[80 Mpc = 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles
= 2,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers
= 261,000,000 light-years]
u M. Mitchell Waldrop, “The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe Gets Larger—Maybe,” Science, Vol.38, 13 November 1987, p. 894.
u M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Astronomers Go Up Against the Great Wall,” Science, Vol. 246, 17 November 1989, p. 885.
51. “If anything, the Planck data disfavored the simplest inflation [big bang] models and exacerbated long-standing foundational problems with the theory, providing new reasons to consider competing ideas about the origin and evolution of the universe. ...For the first time in more than 30 years, the simplest inflationary models, including those described in standard textbooks, are strongly disfavored by observations.” Anna Ijjas et al., “Pop Goes the Universe: The latest Astrophysical Measurements, combined with Theoretical Problems, Cast Doubt on the Long-Cherished [big bang] Inflationary Theory of the Early Cosmos and Suggest We Need New Ideas.” Scientific American, Vol. 316, February 2017, pp. 34, 36.
Is the “Big Stretch,” described here, that new idea?
52. “... primordial black holes could also explain the uneven distribution of infrared light in the cosmic background.” Jeff Hecht, “What’s the Matter?” Nature, Vol. 537, 29 September 2016, p. S194.
53. “No one knows where they come from.” “Steve Nadis, “As the Mighty Quasars Flow,” Discover, June 2018, p. 70.
54. Robert Irion, “The Hunt for Stealth Galaxies,” Science, Vol. 308, 20 May 2005, pp. 1104–1106.
u “The existence of quiescent, extended gaseous disks around a handful of dwarf irregular galaxies is puzzling.” Liese van Zee, “A Large Gas Disk Around a Small Galaxy,” National Radio Astronomy Observatory Newsletter, Issue 103, April 2005, p. 13.
55. “The discovery of massive, evolved galaxies at much greater distances than expected—and hence at earlier times in the history of the Universe—is a challenge to our understanding of how galaxies form.” Gregory D. Wirth, “Old Before Their Time,” Nature, Vol. 430, 8 July 2004, p. 149.
u A. Cimatti et al., “Old Galaxies in the Young Universe,” Nature, Vol. 430, 8 July 2004, p. 184.
u David Shiga, “Nursery Pictures,” Science News, Vol. 167, 5 March 2005, pp. 148–149.
u “Until now, we wouldn’t think that you could make galaxies emerge that early in the universe.” George Helou, as quoted by Alex Hutchinson, “New and Old Galaxies Show Up in All the Wrong Places,” Discover, January 2006, p. 61.
u “Galaxy-formation theory is in peril.” Ron Cowen, “Crisis in the Cosmos?” Science News, Vol. 168, 8 October 2005, pp. 235-236.
56. See “How Old Do Evolutionists Say the Universe Is?” on pages 470-472.
57. “During the past decade, researchers have learned that these high-redshift starbursts reside in exceptionally massive haloes of dark matter (with masses equivalent to 10 trillion Suns).” Desika Narayanan and Chris Carilli, “A Cosmic Growth Spurt in an Infant Galaxy,” Nature, Vol. 496, 18 April 2013, p. 303.
58. William R. Corliss, Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos: A Catalog of Astronomical Anomalies (Glen Arm, Maryland: The Sourcebook Project, 1987), p. 177.
59. David B. Cline, “The Search for Dark Matter,” Scientific American, Vol. 288, March 2003, p. 52.
60. “Jenny Hogan, “Welcome to the Dark Side,” Nature, Vol. 448, 19 July 2007, p. 241.
u “In addition to the lack of antimatter, every list of the biggest mysteries in physics includes the natures of three things: dark energy, dark matter, and cosmic inflation. These three all posited as ad hoc solutions to problems posed by cosmological observations that do not fit predictions arising from the general theory of relativity. Dark energy is needed to explain why the cosmic expansion in not slowing down; dark matter is invoked to resolve why galaxies are rotating too fast to be bound by gravity due to visible matter; and cosmic inflation is needed to explain [the horizon problem—See Figure 225 on page 453.] how all parts of the Universe are the same temperature when the Big Bang occurred too quickly for everything to be causally connected (that is, regions of the visible Universe separated before light, and therefore temperature information, from one region could reach all other regions.)” Thomas J. Phillips, “Antimatter May Matter,” Nature, Vol. 529, 21 January 2016, pp. 294–295.
61. “We do not understand how the Universe works at a deeper and more profound level than most of us care to admit.” Astrophysicist, Stacy McGaugh, as quoted by Elizabeth Gibney, “Dark-Matter Hunt Comes Up Empty,” Nature, Vol. 551, 9 November 2017, p. 153.
62. “Hotter stars are not predicted by normal stellar evolution, so the presence of the He II nebulas is a bit of a mystery.” Donald R. Garnett, as quoted by Ron Cowen, “Gorgeous Gas,” Science News, Vol. 163, 24 May 2003, p. 328.
63. Big bang advocates make the following two key assumptions, which few realize—including most authors and professors:
a. all matter—and space—came from a point one quadrillionth the size of an atom, and
b. The universe’s current expansion rate can be extrapolated back to a mathematical point.
If both were true, the age of the universe would be
1/H
where H is the Hubble constant—the current expansion rate. H= 71.2 kilometers/sec per megaparsec. (A megaparsec = 3.26 × 106 light-years.) If these key assumptions were true, the age of the universe would be 13.7-billion years.
But both the big bang and stretching advocates agree that today’s expansion rate has not always been the same: (1) the expansion rate is accelerating, and (2) when time began, there was a brief period of unbelievably rapid expansion. There has been no scientific explanation for either.
Unfortunately, scientists unaware, or unwilling to acknowledge, that science can’t explain the expansion, and lay people, impressed with that mind-boggling age when they hear it from the media or some authority, never ask the question, “How was that age determined and what assumptions were made.”
64. “The early universe must have had a density even closer to the critical density [rc], departing from it by one part in 1062 or less.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatness_problem, last accessed: 13 December 2016.
By having the density be the critical density, the sum of the kinetic and potential energies would be exactly zero. The wikipedia reference above explains how the energy density of the universe was almost exactly equal to the critical density during the entire expansion and departed from it by less than one part in 1062. Amazing—and “very good”! (Genesis 1:31)
The “flatness problem” is also called the “Oldness” Problem.” Billion-year ages for the universe, Earth, and life generate a fatal problem for the big bang and evolution that few realize.
u Those unfamiliar with orbital mechanics frequently ask a good question: “How can the sum of two energies (kinetic plus potential) be zero?” Kinetic energy is always positive, because it is proportional to the square of a velocity. (Squaring any real number, positive or negative, always produces a positive number.)
However, potential energy is measured relative to some arbitrary horizontal plane. For example, the potential energy of a pound weight you hold a foot above the floor would be 1 foot-pound, if you have chosen that floor as your reference plane. But if your reference plane is the basement floor, 10 feet below the weight, its potential energy would be 10 foot-pounds. We can pick the reference plane that best simplifies all our calculations. For orbital calculations, that turns out to be a reference plane at infinity. Potential energies at lower elevations than infinity (which, of course, is everything) are always negative numbers. When a mass is lifted, it gains potential energy. Mathematically, its potential energy becomes less negative. Therefore, the sum of potential energy (always a negative number) and kinetic energy (always a positive number) could be zero.
Each particle in an expanding universe has an energy equal to its kinetic plus potential energy. The algebraic sum of the energies of every particle in the universe must be close to zero if two important requirements are satisfied: (a) it is not expanding so fast that it will fly apart, and (b) it is expanding fast enough to prevent the universe from eventually collapsing on itself in a “big crunch.” As each particle approaches infinity, its potential energy approaches zero and its velocity steadily decreases and approaches zero.
65. This raises what may be one of the most natural questions of all time. “If the universe is finite and has a boundary, what lies just beyond that boundary?” Possibly nothing, just as no time or space existed before the creation.
66. Paul Steinhardt, “Big Bang Blunder Bursts the Multiverse Bubble,” Nature, Vol. 510, 5 June 2014, p. 9.
67. Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1978), pp. 3–4.
68. Robert Jastrow, as quoted by B. Durbin, “A Scientist Caught Between Two Faiths: Interview with Robert Jastrow,” Christianity Today, Vol. 26, 6 August 1982, p. 15.
69. Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, pp. 105–106