Starts With A Bang! The Big Bang (Science & Faith) – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

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1. Dear Jimmy,

   I don’t know which e-mail address is better to contact you at: here, or the Mysterious World e-mail address. In any event, I listened to your episode on the Big Bang. It was a welcome comprehensive summary of the history. A few comments:

   1. As you probably know, the International Astronomical Union voted in 2018 to rename the Hubble Constant the Hubble-LaMaitre Constant. LaMaitre’s paper came out a few years before Hubble’s, as you note, but when it was reprinted in English, one of the appendices, if I recall, was removed (by LeMaitre) because by that point Hubble’s paper had come out and made a splash and LeMaitre didn’t see any reasons to include his own red shift calculations (which were earlier than Hubble’s). At least one astronomer, Dr. Pamela Gay, was impressed by LeMaitre’s humility.

   2. The LeMaitre solution to Einstein’s equations is, in a sense, low-hanging fruit. The ten Einstein equations, which is the expanded version of the original single tensor version, is highly non-linear and almost impossible to solve for any sort of complicated circumstances without a computer. LeMaitre reduced the equations to a quasi-linear form, which greatly simplified the math, by making a number of simplifying assumptions, such as the homogeneous hypothesis in the title of his paper. I am not an expert in general relativity, but I did read his paper or a synopsis and once the equations are set up, they become accessible to almost anyone with an elementary knowledge of differential equations.

   3. It is true that the strong nuclear force attraction swamps out the electrostatic repulsion of protons in the nucleus, but as you add more protons, this does not, in itself, lead to radioactivity. It leads to a condition where protons across the nucleus can sense each other, not just ones that are close, so more and more neutrons must be added faster than the protons to keep the long- range electromagnetic repulsion in check by the strong nuclear force. As a result, the number of protons and neutrons are about even for low atomic numbers, but neutrons grow faster than protons, so that by the time one gets to uranium, the neutron/proton ratio is about 1.6 instead of 1, which would be the case if the protons and neutrons grew at the same rate. Thus, plotting neutrons vs. protons show a deviation from a 45 degree straight line, gradually sloping positive. This deviation creates regions where nuclei are unstable.

   Radioactive decay itself, however, doesn’t come from electromagnetic-strong force interactions, but from the weak nuclear force, which is a whole other topic.

   4. Kelvin temperature does not use degrees. It is an absolute scale based on the behavior of an ideal gas. The degrees used in Celsius and Fahrenheit scales refers to degrees above or below the freezing point of a real substance (water). So, 10 degrees Celsius, but 10 Kelvin.

   5. The idea that the Big Bang was lightless or dark is correct, but things were going on before light emerged after the formation of atoms allowed for electron energy-level transitions leading to visible light. In fact, “light” did not all get created at once, since gamma rays can be created in nuclear energy level transitions without the presence of electrons, so visible light occurred after gamma rays and x-rays forms of “light.”

   “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

   This could be an allegorical way of representing the period before atomic energy levels were formed generating visible light, so, while light was not created at the Big Bang, I see no real contradiction between the creation story in Genesis and modern cosmology.

   The Chicken

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