We photons are the envoys of the sun. Our duty is to carry the energy that was stored in the sun during the creation of the universe to the earth. In the sun’s center, during the nuclear reaction called fusion, four hydrogen nuclei form one helium nucleus. The mass of four hydrogen nuclei is 4 x 1,6726 x 10 ^-24 grams (i.e. 6,6904 x 10 ^-24 grams); the mass of one helium nucleus is 6,6447 x 10 ^-24 grams. It is clear that the mass of one helium nucleus is a little smaller than the mass of four hydrogen nuclei. If we calculate the difference: 6,6904 x 10 ^-24 g – 6,6447 x 10 ^-24 g = 0,0457 x 10 ^-24 g. This small mass difference is transformed into great energy by order of the Creator, and in this way we and our relatives, neutrinos, are created.

Our Lord has created us as the fastest particles in the universe. We cover 300,000 kilometers in a second. Although we move so fast, the sun’s center is very dense. The density is about 150 times greater than the density of water (1 g/cm3). Thus, as soon as we move, we crash into the hydrogen and helium nucleuses around us. They swallow us, but then they immediately set us free; then yet another strike waits for us immediately. In every collision, our energy is reduced a little, and we divide into several light particles with lower energy levels. Most of our lives-perhaps 100 thousand years-is spent in these collisions.

If we left the center of the sun without any collisions, the earth would be blasted to pieces in a moment when we hit it. As a result of the collisions, we, who have a high energy level in the beginning, are converted into low energy level light particles.

So many of us are created in the sun that at every second a four-million-ton mass is converted into energy. In the sun, which is 5 billion years old, approximately a hundred times the mass of the earth has been converted into energy up to today.

While we are created in the center of the sun, we reach the outer layer of the sun, the photosphere, by passing slowly through the layers from the center to the surface of the sun. On leaving the surface, our energy decreases, our number increases, and our temperature goes down to 5,800 degrees C. You may consider this temperature very high, but you should not forget that our temperature in the beginning was 15 million degrees C.

We pass the 700,000 kilometers from the center of the sun to the photosphere layer in 100,000 years. The photosphere’s density is so low that it is only one percent of the atmosphere’s density at sea level. We leave this layer fast without any collisions. To reach the earth, there is 150 million kilometers of space ahead of us. Here we show our speed, which we did not have a chance to display earlier because of the collisions we have inside the sun. We travel the 150-million-kilometer distance in 8.5 minutes and reach the earth. There are some of us with extremely high energy levels who can cause damage on earth. The ozone layer is responsible for picking them off. The non-dangerous ones among us reach the face of the earth by traveling through the 100-kilometer-deep atmosphere in 1/10000 of a second. Finally, it is time to deliver the energy we have carried to you.

Every photon has a duty. Some of us heat the earth; some of us vaporize the water in the seas to bring the merciful rains. We have many other duties as well as these. Perhaps our most important duty is to be swallowed by the chlorophyll in plant leaves, so as to provide the energy in the food you eat and in the oxygen you breathe.

Possibly the energy that you have used while reading this essay was obtained from a bean you ate in your lunch. Do not forget that we brought from the sun’s center both the energy in the bean you ate and the energy in any plant that was food for any animal whose meat you have eaten.

We also carried the energy that was in the gas of the truck that brought these pages to you. If our brothers that came to the earth a million years ago had not brought energy to the plants at that time, could those plants have been transformed into oil or coal by decaying underground?

Our Lord gave us light particles a mission to carry the energy that is stored in substances so that the energy will be a source of life for you. We fulfill our duties without any error so that you might think and learn a lesson from these facts.

In your next meal, consider looking at the blessings on your plate from the following perspective: “I am about to eat energy that was heated approximately 100,000 years ago at 15 million degrees C in an oven in the sun’s center and later cooled and made appropriate for the bodies of human beings.”

All methods of estimating “time” use the same principle: measuring the velocity of natural processes that show continuity over time. One of the most advanced methods of chronometry today is to use the velocity of quartz crystal vibrations when exposed to an electric field. The wristwatches we wear in our daily life are well-known applications of this method. Another method of measuring time is to measure the rate of decay of radioactive elements.

However, having a process with which to measure is not sufficient. To measure the time that has passed correctly there are three requirements that need to be satisfied. First of all, it is essential that the process is stable and immutable, even during the period before we were able to observe it. Secondly, the beginning state should be known. For example, the length of a candle before being lighted or the amount of water in a cup before being boiled should be known. Thirdly, the process should not be influenced by any outer effects.

Today, all these three factors have been applied in studies of measuring time. But, when the question comes down to Geochronometry (Measurement of geologic time, as through isotopic radioactive decay), they are somehow more difficult to apply. Since the selected process starts before the beginning of history, we do not have methods to observe the process directly or to make sure that these three requirements were met then as today. And this is where the problem starts.

For instance, we can use the salinity of the oceans as a means of measuring the age of the Earth (This method was developed in 1898 by Irish geologist John Joly). This is a promising method, because it is assumed that the amount of salt in the water of the ocean was originally zero, and that salt was propelled by rainwater and rivers from the soil. The encouraging fact about this method is that the amount of salt brought to the oceans by rainwater and rivers is constant (approximately 540 million tons of salt annually). Today, the average density of salt in oceans is nearly 32 grams per liter. By using this ratio, we can calculate the total amount of salt in the oceans as being approximately 50 quadrillion tons. When we divide this number by the amount of salt propelled annually, we can find the age of the Earth in years.

Joly calculated this as being 100 million years using this method. However, considering the study in light of the three requirements mentioned above, the shortcomings of this method are obvious. Firstly, we cannot really be sure that the amount of salt propelled was static in the geological past. There is good reason to think that the climate and annual rainfall might have been significantly different in the past. Ice ages, great droughts, excessive rains, and the undeterminable effects of these factors may have all played a part. Secondly, it is impossible to be sure that the oceans were salt-free at the beginning. They may have contained some salt (recent research carried out in the Atlantic demonstrates the possibility that salt could have penetrated through to the oceans from the magma layer). Thirdly, some external influences may have affected this so-called stable process. There is a large and self-replicating circulation of salt in the atmosphere. New clues lead us to think that the amount of salt in oceans today is stable. As soon as the salt propelled by rivers accumulates, it evaporates at the same speed. While a huge amount of salt evaporates in biological processes, a greater amount penetrates to the depths of the seas.

The Uranium-Lead Method

All the methods that estimate the age of the Earth suffer from the same shortcomings to some degree. The radiometric age estimation method, which can estimate age up to 4.5 million years, consists of measuring radioactive elements that have a long half-life and that maintain their radioactivity over a long period. These elements are uranium and thorium, which decay into helium and lead, rubidium, which decays into strontium, and potassium, which decays into argon. However, as we will see, the Uranium-Lead method has been given great importance, in particular by evolutionists.

The basic principle involved is that radioactive uranium 238, uranium 235, and thorium 232 atoms eventually decay into miscellaneous lead atoms, without any trigger (in addition, uranium 238 decays into helium gas).

Interestingly, the decay rate of each element is definite. Uranium and thorium atoms periodically radiate alpha particles. However, it is unpredictable which atom will decay when. But in any substantial mass of the mineral there will be many billions of atom, and with very large numbers of events the “law of large numbers” operates to produce a statistically predictable result.

The significant part of this theory is that radiogenic lead 206, which is not radioactive and which is decayed from radioactive uranium 238, is found in rocks. However, it differs chemically from lead 204, which is neither radioactive nor radiogenic. To estimate the age of a rock, it is split and the amounts of radioactive uranium and radiogenic lead found are measured. Since the decay rate is known, it is possible to calculate the age of the rock.

The half-life of uranium 238 – one of the isotopes used – is calculated as being 4.5 million years. This means that half of any amount of uranium 238 will decay into lead 206 in 4.5 million years. For instance, if an investigation shows that half of a rock consists of uranium 238, and the other half consists of lead 206, which is the final product of uranium 238, the rock is then 4.5 million years old (although this number has not been calculated by a direct measurement, it is an average age for the crust of the Earth).

If radiogenic lead (lead 206 that has decayed from uranium 238, lead 207 that has decayed from uranium 235, and lead 208 that has decayed from thorium 232) are truly the products of radioactive decay then it is assumed that these rocks contained no radiogenic lead at the very start of the process of rock formation. This is a reliable starting point for calculations. Simi-larly, it is assumed that radiogenic lead cannot penetrate rocks in any other way, and conse-quently there is no process that can affect the decay process. However, when examined carefully, we can see that this is not really the case. A new process in which “natural” lead transforms into a form that cannot be distinguished from radiogenic lead was discovered by experimentation (Cook, 1966). This transformation occurs by natural lead taking hold of free neutrons. These neutrons are atoms that have the energy to transform natural lead into radiogenic lead. Then what is the source of the free neutrons?

The Origin of Lead 208

The source of lead 208 lies in a radioactive mine bed where natural fission (the division of the nucleus of uranium) has taken place. (A uranium bed were such natural fission occurs has been found in The Gabon.) In this uranium bed, while some uranium 238 atoms decay into lead 206, others divide by natural fission and produce neutrons. These neutrons simultaneously transform natural lead (lead 204) and radiogenic lead (lead 206) to lead 208 isotopes in a gradual process. This isotope cannot be distinguished experimentally from lead 208, a product of the alpha decay of thorium 232. Therefore, the lead 208 isotope emerges from two different sources. However, Darwinists state that all lead 208 isotopes detected are the product of thorium 232, which would mean that there is a large amount of radiogenic lead, and subsequently that the process continues for a long time. Significantly, this is a mechanism that would tip our measurements in favor of an “old” Earth.

In the neutron capture process, the isotopic values of lead would be systematically changed: lead 206 would be converted into lead 207, and lead 207 into lead 208 by taking on a single neutron. What is interesting is that lead 208 makes up more than half of the lead in the bed. According to Darwinists, this means that there was a large amount of naturally occurring thorium 232 in that bed, which later changed into lead 208. However, Melvin Cook, who carried out research in uranium beds in Zaire and Canada (the largest uranium beds in the world) states that, although the beds do not contain thorium 232, they do contain a large amount of lead 208. This can only mean that lead 208 results from lead 207 taking hold of a neutron. He also states that all radiogenic lead can be accounted for in this way.

Other people have tried to denigrate Cook, a man who believed in “creation”, and his studies. Among these is the geologist Brent Dalrymple from the U.S. Geological Survey. Neither Dalrymple, who argued that the level of free neutrons were too low to make any significant difference in the number of lead 208 as lead isotopes in the beds, nor could anyone else provide a satisfactory explanation to why, although there was no thorium 232 in the beds, lead 208 was found in huge amounts. Uranium decay not only degrades the most important criteria of a reliable geocronometry method, but it also degrades the criteria of the process, i.e that it is stable, immutable, and not intervened with. Uranium, which naturally emerges as an oxide rather than a metal, and which shows a very high capacity of dissolving in water because of this property, ekes out of its original bed with water. Its effect in age estimation is unpredictable, as while some parts of the bed are poor in uranium, other parts are rich.

The Helium Problem

Beside lead, one of the final products produced in the decay of uranium 238 is radiogenic helium, the atomic weight of which is 4. It is thought that a significant proportion of helium in the atmosphere is radiogenic helium that emerges in the decay process that has continued throughout history. If the uranium-lead age estimation method is reliable, then the amount of helium in the atmosphere must suggest an age in agreement to the age provided by radiogenic lead estimation. However, the ages acquired from the two methods are significantly different. If the Earth were 4.6 billion years old, then there would be roughly 100 trillion tons of radiogenic helium 4 in the atmosphere. Actually, there are only around 3.5 billion tons present – several thousand times less than there should be (0.035 % to be precise).

Writing in Nature on the “mystery” of the Earth’s missing radiogenic helium, Melvin Cook says: “…Hence more than 1,020 grams of helium should have passed into the atmosphere since the ‘beginning.’ Because the atmosphere contains only 3.5×1,015 grams of helium 4, it must also have passed out through the exosphere, and that the present rate of loss through the atmosphere balances the rate of exudation from the lithosphere.”

Cook says that uniformitarian geologists have attempted to explain this discrepancy by assuming that the other 99.96 percent has escaped from Earth’s gravitational field into space – but this process has not been observed. In 1984, Dalrymple argued a mechanism that can explain this difference and that provides a reply to Cook’s proposal: “Banks and Holzer have shown that the polar wind can account for an escape of 2 to 4 million ions/cm2 per second of helium 4, which is nearly identical to the estimated production flux of 2.51.5 million atoms/cm2 per second.”

There are two things that make Banks and Holzer’s findings unsuitable for the purposes to which Dalrymple tries to fit them. First of all, if the Earth really is 4.5 billion years old, then its atmosphere would have to lose helium at a rate somewhere around 1,016 atoms/cm2 per second, or some ten orders of magnitude faster than Dalrymple’s figure, to account for the missing helium.

Secondly, the numbers Dalrymple used were calculated 30 years ago. In that period, most scientists believed that the Earth moved in empty space (i.e., that nothing encapsulated the Earth but emptiness), and that hydrogen and helium atoms escaped to emptiness. New studies have shown that, rather than losing helium, the atmosphere gains a significant amount of helium. Since the Earth rotates around the Sun, it does not move in empty space, it moves in the atmosphere of the Sun, which is made up of mainly helium and hydrogen that have emerged from the nuclear processes that occur on the Sun. According to research, the Earth gains helium in this way as well.

In his book (1987) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, space scientist James Lovelock writes: “The outermost layer of the air, so thin as to contain only a few hundred atoms per cubic centimeter, the exosphere, can be thought of as merging into the equally thin outer atmosphere of the Sun. It used to be assumed that the escape of hydrogen atoms from the exosphere gave the Earth its oxygen atmosphere. Not only do we now doubt that this process is on a sufficient scale to account for oxygen, but we rather suspect that the loss of hydrogen atoms is offset or even counterbalanced by the flux of hydrogen from the Sun.”

Lovelock mentions hydrogen, not helium. Helium is four times heavier than hydrogen and exists in abundance in the Sun’s atmosphere, since it is the main product of the nuclear fusion process on the Sun. If hydrogen were gained instead of being lost, it would be reasonable to expect this to occur for helium as well. Cook says: “If we take the amount of helium 4 measured in the atmosphere and then apply the radioactive age estimation technique, we will find that the age of the Earth is approximately 175,000 years. This invalidates our reliability criteria; the possible flow of helium from external sources interrupts this process.”

Cook is not alone in his thoughts. In articles published in influential journals, similar suspicions have been stated. Funkhouser and Naughton from the Hawaiian Geophysics Institute calculated the ages of volcanic rocks that had emerged from Mount Kilauea by using the potassium-argon method and calculated them to be nearly 3 million years old. However, it is know that these rocks were formed during a volcanic eruption in 1801. McDougall from the Australian National University calculated the age of lava in New Zealand to be up to 465,000 years old, even though it was known to be less than 1,000 years old (Milton 1997).

As a result, the reliability of radioactive age estimation is doubtful. What is being measured is the amount of products that have decayed, not the rate of decay. It is also difficult to discuss the origin of these products. Subsequently, all radioactive geocronometry methods can be said to be highly flawed and to lack reliability. The only reliable result that emerges from the incompatibility between uranium-lead age and uranium-helium age is the conclusion that radioactive age estimation is totally unreliable. The methods based on the decay of potassium into argon and rubidium into strontium suffer from the above mentioned shortcomings, in addition to others. However, some scientists try hard to advocate one single idea: evolution. The evolution lobby dampens the volume of courageous scientists, such as Milton and Cook, damages their prestige and frightens others by the overwhelming atmosphere they have created. All methods developed to estimate the age of the Earth are full of inconsistencies. Only one among them (based on the radioactive decay of elements, such as uranium) provided an age of millions of years for the Earth. While that single technique was supported enthusiastically by Darwinists, all others were ignored. This was because according to Darwinist theory, evolution required a long geological past in order to display its results in the long term. This propaganda program by the Darwinists was so successful that almost everyone, including scientists from different fields, have come to believe that radioactive age estimation is the only unquestionable and valid method for age estimation. Yet, as we have discussed above, all of these widely accepted beliefs lack sufficient support.

References

• Milton, R., Shattering the Myths of Darwinism. Park Street Press. Vermont, 1997.
• Lovelock, J. E., Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Cosmology is the study of how the universe we live in came into being, why it looks and behaves as it does, and what its ultimate fate is. Building on the work of Albert Einstein, cosmologists have come up with a new account of the origin of the universe, the so-called big-bang cosmology. Over the past three decades a series of observational developments and refinements to the theory have led to its wider acceptance. For the present, there are no fundamental challenges to the big bang theory, although there are certainly unresolved issues with the theory itself. Astronomers are not sure, for example, how the galaxies were formed, but it is questionable whether there is a reason not to think the process did not occur within the framework of the big bang. Indeed, the predictions of the theory have survived all tests to date.

Nevertheless, we should always bear in mind that present-day science is not the last word, and perhaps Einstein’s theories, and the big-bang cosmology, will in turn be superseded.

Our present knowledge of the universe is restricted to a handful of observational facts. The expansion of the universe, indicated by the law relating the red shift in light from astronomical objects to their distance, was dis¬covered by Edwin Hubble in the early part of this century. The existence of the microwave background radiation corresponding to a temperature of 2.7K, and the cosmological abundance of helium are more recent discoveries. Together, these three observations suggest that the universe was born in a hot fireball from a very dense state-the big bang. Not just matter was created in the big bang, but space-time as well. There was nothing outside for the big bang to explode into-and this nothing means not even empty space.

Cosmologists today do not claim to know exactly what made the universe explode into existence from a state of zero volume and infinite density-a space-time singularity-but they do claim to be able to describe in great detail how a hot fireball of matter and radiation has evolved from a fraction of a second after the instant of creation over about 15 billion years to produce the cool, dark spread of empty space, dotted with galaxies made up of stars, gas, dust and planets, that we see about us now.

The laws of nature as we currently understand them allow us to trace the observed expansion of the universe back billions of years to what would be a true beginning, a moment when the universe was infinitely hot and dense. Although, theorists are now pushing back their speculations about what happened in the first 10-35 seconds after the big bang, with less confidence, the modern cosmological world view begins at a time when the universe had cooled to only 1012K, about 10-5 seconds after the instant creation. At these extreme conditions, the laws of physics as deduced here on earth can be applied to produce the story of everything that ha happened since. At a temperature of 1012K, particles and radiation would be interchangeable, as the mass equivalent of energy in the radiation would be ample to produce particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons, not out of thin air but out of thick radiation, in line with the rules E=mc2 for a particle of mass m and E=hv for radiation with frequency v (h is Planck’s constant). Here higher black body temperature of radiation corresponds to bigger v, that is bigger energy E, and therefore to more massive particle equivalents.

So, one-hundred-thousandth of a second after it began, the universe would have been a seething mass of particles and radiation, a swirling soup in which particle/antiparticle pairs were constantly being created out of energetic photons, and constantly annihilating with one another to produce other energetic photons. Overall though, the total mass/energy of the whole system was constant. For every E/c2 of mass created or destroyed an exactly equivalent E/h of radiation is destroyed or created.

Things began to get more orderly at 1011, still within the first 0.1 seconds after the big bang, as the universe expanded so that the density of radiation at any point was no longer enough to produce the more exotic particles. Only electron/positron pairs, and the massless photons and neutrino/antineutrino pairs, were light enough to have a continuing involvement in the matter/radiation balance.

About 14 seconds after the big bang, the temperature of the universe had dropped to around 3xl09K, and even electrons and positrons needed too much energy for the weakening radiation to create them. As the universe con¬tinued to expand and cool, creation became slower than annihilation, and almost all the particles and antiparticles disappeared. But for some unknown reason, a small proportion of electrons, protons and neutrons were left over. It is this early excess of matter over an¬timatter that survived to form light atomic nuclei a few minutes later, then (after about a million years) to form atoms and, still later, to be cooked to heavier elements in stars, ultimately to provide the material out of which life would arise. The reason for this predominance of matter over antimatter remains a mystery and has been a source of concern to modern cosmology. It is, nevertheless, one of the key initial conditions that determined the future development of the universe.

As the temperature dropped to 109K-about 70 times the temperature in the heart of the sun today-many protons and neutrons fused into helium nuclei, and by the end of first four minutes no free neutrons were left. Some 75% of the mass of the visible universe had been processed into protons plus electrons (ultimately to be bound into hydrogen atoms) while rather more than 25% mass of the universe had been processed into helium. The abundance of these elements in the universe is detectable today, and provides a constraint on the range of allowable models.

Another 700,000 years later, the expanding universe cooled to the point where electrons can bind to helium and hydrogen nuclei to make atoms, at a temperature of around 5000K. This signalled the end of the last remaining links between matter and radiation on a cosmic scale. Although free electrons and atomic nuclei, being electrically charged, interact strongly with radiation, electrically neutral atoms do not. From then on, the background radiation had nothing left to do but spread thinner in the expanding and cooling universe, to become the faint hiss we now detect at temperature equivalent of 2.7K. The very high degree of uniformity of the microwave background today is a strong indication that uniform, isotropic models provide a good description of the universe.

After the first thousand million years or so, with matter firmly established and radiation playing only a minor and decreasing role, the story of the universe can be taken up in terms of gravity, left as the dominating force because of its long range and its independence of electric charge. Gravitational forces then shaped the galaxies by holding stars and planets together.

However, our grasp of the conditions that prevailed in the early universe does not translate into a full understanding of how galaxies formed. Many scientists believe that the hydrogen and helium gases that filled the universe must have been pulled into concentrations by gravity. But there are problems with this explanation: for, what could cause large, diffuse gas clouds to collapse, even with the aid of gravity, while the universe as a whole is expanding?

Having established that the universe began in a hot big bang, and being tolerably happy with a rough understanding of how galaxies formed, the truly cosmological question remaining for astronomers to puzzle over is whether the universe is open (will it expand forever) or closed (will it one day collapse into a new fireball)?

The answer lies in its density. The symbol used for the mass density of the universe is Omega. If Omega, is less than 1, the universe will expand forever, so that, eventually, all the galaxies and stars will grow dark and cold. The alternative to this ‘big chill’ is a ‘big crunch.’ If Omega is more than 1, gravity will eventually reverse the expansion, and all matter and energy will be reunited. For the present, since we are not sure how galaxies formed, the value of Omega is uncertain-most astronomers put it somewhere between 0.1 and 1.

While eternal expansion is the generally favoured hypothesis; there may be enough of the unseen matter in the universe to produce a gravitational pull capable of halting the expansion and eventually producing a recollapse. Though the case is not yet proven, one current idea is that neutrinos, once believed to be massless particles, may have a rest mass less than 1/10000 of an electron. As neutrinos are thought to be as numerous as photons, their aggregate mass could suffice to close the universe. The fact that we cannot see enough matter to close the universe does not mean that it is not there.

During the next decade, as techniques for measuring the mass of the universe improve, we may learn whether the present expansion is headed toward a big chill or a big crunch. What happens then? Just as we do not know how everything could appear from nothing in the big bang if space-time did not exist, we do not know what happens to the universe at this stage; the laws of physics are inadequate to describe such extreme conditions. If there is ever to be a solution to the mystery of the origin and end of the universe, it must await a substantial increase in our understanding of the quantum nature of gravity-the big bang account of creation has forged an unlikely marriage between cosmology, the science of the very large, and particle physics, the science of the very small.

In any event, the universe we inhabit seems to be very improbable. Random processes and statistical fluctuations on cosmological time scales could easily have made it quite inhospitable to life. Are we just lucky? Or is there some deep significance to the fact that we live in a universe just right for us?

For all its violence-including the possibility of a black hole resident at the centre of our own galaxy-the universe seems to be an ideal place for man. Everywhere we look in the universe, from far flung galaxies to the deepest recesses of the atom, we encounter order. The laws of physics can explain beautifully the analytic structure of nature, the behaviour of individual particles and fields, but tell us nothing about the collective, collaborative organization of matter: that is, how the world is put together.

Why is the world the way it is and not otherwise? This is not the type of question scientists normally ask. The customary approach to scientific inquiry is to discuss what we see, not what we might see. Nevertheless, the universe is such a remarkable place, and we, as observers, are perhaps the most remarkable feature, it seems worth while ascertaining just how probable or improbable the present arrangement is.

For example, we do not understand why the fundamental constants of nature have the values they do. Einstein captured its essence when he said: ‘What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.’ Very slight changes in the physical constants of nature could have made the universe unfold in a completely different manner.

Most of the features of the everyday world and the astronomical scene are determined by a few basic physical laws and constants, such as the masses of the elementary particles and the relative strengths of the basic forces that operate between them. In many cases, a rather delicate balance seems to prevail. For example, if the nuclear forces were slightly stronger then they actually are, compared with electromagnetism, the di-proton-an atomic nucleus containing just two protons and no other particle-would be stable; ordinary hydrogen would not exist, and stars would evolve very differently. If nuclear forces were slightly weaker, no chemical elements other than hydrogen would be stable, and chemistry would be dull indeed. In either case, we would not be here to ponder such matters.

Or suppose the constant of gravity were stronger and the gravitational force were, say 1030 times weaker than the electromagnetic force instead of a factor of 1040 weaker. Then we would have a small-scale, speeded-up universe, in which stars-gravitationally bound fusion redactors-had only 10-15 times the sun’s mass, and lived for about a year. This might not allow time for complex systems-such as life forms-to evolve. The question-Was the relative strength of electromagnetic force over the gravitational force there from the beginning of time or is it an accident of today? -remains intractable.

These mysteries are heightened when we reflect how surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any of several physical quantities had slightly different values. The best known of these quantities is the energy of one of the excited states of the carbon-12 nucleus. There is an essential step in the chain of nuclear reactions that build up heavy elements in stars. In this step, two helium nuclei join together to form the unstable nucleus of beryllium-8, which sometimes before fissioning absorbs another helium nucleus, forming carbon-12 in this excited state. The carbon-12 nucleus then emits a photon and decays into the stable state of lowest energy. In subsequent nuclear reactions carbon is built up into oxygen and nitrogen and the other heavy elements necessary for life. If the energy of the excited state of carbon-12 were just a little higher, the rate of its formation would be much less, so that almost all the beryllium-8 nuclei would fission into helium nuclei before carbon could be formed. The universe would then consist almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, without the ingredients for life.

Moreover, if the proton and neutron masses were equal, then neutrons and protons could not bind to form deuterium and heavy nuclei, and nuclear burning in stars and, consequently, life would be impossible.

The most ubiquitous examples of orderliness in the universe are the stars. They represent an extreme departure from thermodynamic equilibrium because they burn brightly in a cold, dark space. The source of starlight is the nuclear furnace at the core of the star, where the chief nuclear reaction is the fusion of hydrogen to helium. This is a downhill process, leading to nuclei of greater stability, and the cost paid for achieving it is the redistribution of nuclear energy into the surrounding space in the form of heat and light. This particular orderliness, and with it most familiar examples of terrestrial organization, leads to the question: Is the present structure of the universe-which is made mainly of hydrogen and not helium or heavier elements-just luck, a coincidence? Because, if the universe were made of, say, iron (the most stable element) there would be no stars like the sun.

Also, the structure of our world depends vitally not only on the availability of free hydrogen, but also on the reasonably smooth distribution of the primeval matter. If the big bang had only coughed out black holes-the ultimate triumph of gravity-in which everything is completely obliterated and disappears, no life would have been possible.

Can all these peculiar ‘coincidences’ be understood in terms of some self-evolutionary mechanism?

In its standard form, the big bang theory assumes that all parts of the universe began expanding simultaneously. Observations confirmed this assumption and showed that the expansion is remarkably uniform in all directions. This would seem to imply a collaboration between widely separated regions of the cosmos to expand at the same rate everywhere. Such highly organized behaviour leads us to ask how all the different parts of the universe could synchronize the beginning of their expansion?

Where does the energy that makes the universe expand come from? What could be a permanent, decidedly nonzero source of energy in the universe, with cosmic consequences? Could it be vacuum-as the source of everything yet itself nothing? This is one of the hottest topics in contemporary physics and lies at the heart of perhaps the most important new concept in cosmology of the past decade. If it is correct, could the creation of being out of nothingness occur without the mediation of a Creator?

There are many such peculiar ‘coincidences’ in the universe. Is it just our luck that they have worked out that way, or is there a deeper explanation? One understanding would be that the world is the way it is because it is the creation of a Creator who wills it to be capable of fruitful process: His command, when He desires a thing, is to say to it ‘Be!’, and it is (Ya Sin, 36.82). Without an Organizer, chaos can never be transformed into cosmos. This explanation is not a temporary sop to satisfy our curiosity about phenomena for which we cannot yet work out a satisfactory physical explanation; rather, it is a step guiding us towards a better understanding of the real world.

That does not mean that these mysteries constitute a barrier beyond which science cannot pass. As in the past, we may reasonably expect that, in the future, deeper understanding will be achieved and a more profound pattern discerned at the basis of physical reality, in a new, perhaps new kind, of explanatory theory. It may be some version of supergravity or it may be the novel theory of ‘superstrings’. Or some other theory that we have not yet thought of.

However, we should bear in mind that both our growing knowledge about the universe, and the need, alongside it, to revise it continually, is clear evidence for the inconclusiveness of science and the limitation of its methods.

In addition, the finititude of man’s existence (in this very small part of a vast universe) and the limitations of his senses mean that all our efforts must be considered ‘relative.’ The results of pure and experimental sciences are a limited portion of reality as man can grasp it from his location in the universe and within the very limited time allotted to him, and not the truth itself. There is of course, a great difference between being aware of things and knowing their actual truth. The former is limited to sensible events only, while the latter lies beyond the capacity of our senses.

No inquiry into the nature of creation or any part of it can be closed and concluded. The patterns of God in creation are infinite: there will always be more of them to discover. As we strive to do so, understand more and more about nature, the scientist’s sense of wonder will not diminish but become sharper, more narrowly focused on the mysteries that still remain. The worth of science lies in its commitment to understanding the Divine handiwork. The comprehensibility of the reality around us is among the greatest of God’s favours to us. Einstein remarked this: ‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.’

The Qur’an contains many scientifically accurate statements, some of them still relevant to cosmology; it does not contain any statements which are in conflict with the findings of man’s scientific research nor open to criticism from modern science. Many of its verses allude to, and urge, reflection upon the reality around us as a form of worship, as a way to draw nearer to the Creator. I shall conclude by citing (in translation) a verse which draws our attention to the fact that, in a general sense, the future will be the age of knowledge and information, and that as a natural consequence of this, it will be an age of faith and belief:

Soon We shall show them Our signs on the furthest horizons, and in their own souls, until it becomes manifest to them that this is truth. Is it not enough that your Lord witnesses all things? (Fussilat, 41.53)

USEFUL READING

• GRIBBIN, J. (1982) Cosmology today: A New Scientist Guide
• JAMES, P. et al. (1994) ‘The Evolution of the Universe’, Scientific American, October
• SIMSEK, U. (1986) Big Bang-Kainatin Dogusu, Yeni Asya, Istanbul
• NURBAKI, H. (1989) Verses from the Glorious Qur’an and the Facts of Science, Turkish Foundation for Religion Publications

Surely every person at some time looks up at the sun and moon and the brilliant stars and asks, who positioned all these so perfectly on the face of the sky’?

People have always marvelled at the stars and planets. But they have not always realized that there is a harmony in their positions and movements, a law and order, as indeed in the whole universe. For example, seen from the perspective of the ancient Greek astronomers, celestial bodies in the universe are aimless objects. That seems to be the implication of the term ‘planet’ which means ‘wandering’. The Greeks may have thought the ‘wandering stars’ or ‘planets’ moved in unstable orbits, more or less randomly.

The ancient astronomers’ judgement was not founded upon the Oneness of the Creator Who orders everything in the universe. Inevitably they did not have a clear grasp of the orderliness of the macro-cosmos and did not seek it.

The Qur’an revealed many centuries ago that it is Allah who created the heavenly bodies and put them into their peculiar orbits. There is nothing in the Islamic teachings that argues the view that phenomena or events are random.

Do they not look at the sky above them, how We have built it and adorned , and there are no flaws in it. (50.6)

We have built above you seven strong (heavens) and placed therein a blazing lamp. (78.12)

The ‘blazing lamp’ referred to is the sun.

People have always been fascinated by the thousands of gleaming lights sprinkled across the night sky. Today many enjoy looking into the heavens and learning about the patterns and positions of the stars, and discovering what stars can tell us about our universe as a whole. From our planet, if very high buildings and city lights permit, we can see about 6,000 stars with the naked eye. They change in colour, size, and brilliance.

We are near enough to one particular star, the sun, to find out many details about what these celestial bodies are made of and how they function. A star is composed of gases and other substances compressed together under the force of gravity. The pressure at the core of a forming star is sufficiently intense to initiate nuclear reactions that begin generating energy. During this process, matter is converted into energy, releasing large quantities of heat and light.

The sun may not catch up the moon, nor may the night outstrip the day. Each one is moving smoothly in its own orbit ( 36.40). Here an essential fact is clearly stated, namely the existence of the solar and lunar orbits. At the time of the Revelation, it was generally believed that the sun orbited a motionless earth. This, the geocentric system, had held sway from the early second century (the time of Ptolemy). It continued to do so until the sixteenth century. Fourteen centuries ago, the Qur’an directed the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and, through them, all of mankind, towards the truth. The demonstration of the existence and details of the solar and lunar orbits is one of the recent achievements of modern astronomy.

Those who do not believe in One Creator maintain that everything comes about by chance. They do not realize that every creature in motion, from minute particles to the planets, displays on itself the stamp of the Eternal and of His Unity. Also, by reason of its movement, each of them, in some sense, takes possession of all the places in which it travels in the name of Unity, thus including them in the property of its Owner. As for those creatures not in motion, each of them, from plants to the fixed stars, is like a seal of Unity that shows the place in which it is situated to be the letter of its Maker. That is to say, each flower and fruit is a stamp and seal of unity that demonstrates, in the name of Unity, that its habitat and native place is the letter of its Maker. What all that inter-connectednes means is that one who does not have all the stars within his command does not have command over a single small particle either.

There are two other verses in the Qur’an about the sun and the moon and their usefulness to human beings, not only as light, but also as points of reference for space and time:

Allah subjected the night and the day for you, the sun and the moon. The stars are in subjection to His Command. Verily in this are signs for people who are wise. (16.12)

Allah is the One Who made the sun a lamp and the moon a light and ordained for it mansions, so that you might know the number of years and the reckoning (of the time).

Allah created this in truth. He explains the signs in detail for people who know (10.5)

The solar system comprises the sun and the nine planets that orbit it. The closest to the sun is the planet Mercury, at an average distance of 58 million km; the farthest, Pluto, is 5,900 million km from the sun. The closer a planet is to the sun, the shorter the time taken to complete its orbit. Thus, Mercury takes only 88 earth days to go round it, while Pluto orbits the sun only once in 248 earth years. Absolute time and distance are nowadays both measured in terms of light speed–a metre, for example, can be defined as the distance the light travels in a certain ‘space’ of time, in fact, 0.000000003335640952 seconds.

It is hard to think of the sun as a passing event. Nevertheless, its ‘term’ is fixed–the Qur’an is explicit on this point: And the sun runs its course for a period fixed for it (36.38). So, how long has the sun left to run? Astronomers nowadays calculate about 4.5 billion more years in its present state. It will still have nearly the same surface temperature (6.000 °C) and yellowish colour that it has now but it will appear about twice as bright because it will be about 60 percent bigger. Its next 4.5 billion years will have begun to take their toll on the sun’s nuclear fuel supply. What then? We don’t really know. Any calculations we make can only be made on the basis of theory.

The sun is full of gases composed of two thousand trillion tons (2×103 kg) of matter,

with the remains of other elements. For every million atoms of hydrogen there are about 85,000 helium atoms and only about 1,000 of any other kind. Pressure from all that mass compressing into the centre of the sun is high enough for the hydrogen atoms to fuse in the core to form helium. This simultaneously creates new energy which keeps the sun from collapsing further and provides the energy that allows it to (or makes it) shine. A series of nuclear fusion reactions, whose end result is the conversion of hydrogen to helium, happen on a vast scale and release very great amounts of energy in the form of heat, light, X-rays and so on. A part of this reaction must be the release of so-called neutrinos. Neutrinos are particles that interact so little with other matter that they can probably float through entire galaxies without being affected. They exist but have no mass nor any other physical property, which is like saying that they simultaneously exist and do not exist: we know they must be around by the way the movement of other (‘real’) particles is affected. If the theory about the way that the sun shines is correct, the sun should be producing about 180×1036 neutrinos each second. Obviously, only a small portion of these neutrinos will come in the earth’s direction.

The sun generates magnetic fields deep in its interior. Through mechanisms not yet fully understood, some of these fields erupt periodically through the sun’s surface, the photosphere. The high temperature and structure of the corona are produced by energy pumped from the photosphere up into the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere along these magnetic fields.

The sun has been fusing hydrogen into helium throughout its present lifetime of 4.5 billion years, using up less than half of the available hydrogen in its core. By another 4.5 billion years, 90 percent of the available hydrogen in the core will have been converted into helium. Serious questions about the fusion rate in the sun still remain, but according to one theory, the humans of the future will face a sun that is running out of core hydrogen.

When that happens, the gas temperature and pressure will drop and the interior of the sun will collapse under the weight of the surrounding mass. The pressure in the collapsing gas will build up sufficiently for a rind of hydrogen to start burning around the core, now helium. This fusion will provide an outward force on the outermost layers of the sun, pushing them farther out than they are now. The surface of the sun will expand outward until it reaches the orbit of Venus.

Finally, this hydrogen outside the core will run out. The core of the sun will continue to contract, trying to replace the heat no longer generated by hydrogen burning. When the internal temperatures reach 100 million Kelvins, the helium (generated by the hydrogen burning) will itself start to burn. This will happen quickly, forming a carbon-rich core. Around this burned-out core, helium burning will start, and then the rind of hydrogen also will start to burn. The vast energy released by both rinds will push the sun’s outer layers further out until they reach the orbit of Jupiter. Earth will then be ‘inside’ the sun. The temperature on the surface of earth, around 6.5 billion years from now, will be around 30,000 Kelvins, and everything organic will be burned to a crisp.

Intelligent beings on earth 5 or 6 billion years from now, if any, would face the pressure to leave earth and, indeed, the solar system. They would need to have colonized planets around younger (therefore more stable) stars in order to survive. It is likely that humans in the near future will move off the earth in search of mineralogical and economic gain, whereas the future beings of our speculation will move off in order to save the species. The ageing sun will give future life a focus and a goal. And then, if we may be permitted to use the expression, a sort of Doomsday will have happened: certainly, the sun will have run to the end of its appointed (muslaqarr) time.

SOURCES

• ASIMOV, I. (1993) Explorig the Earth and the Cosmos, Allen Lane.
• Astronomy January 1992: March 1993.
• BUCAILLE,M.(1987) TheBible, The Qur’an and Science. Taj Company, Delhi.
• GRIBBIN, M. & Gribbin J. (1992) Too Hot to Handle? Corgi, UK.
• JONES, B. (1991) Planets, Brian Trodd Publishing House Ltd.
• JONES, B. (1992) The Night Sky, Salamander Books Ltd.
• MATTHEWS, R. (1993) The Mind of God, Virgin Books.
• NURSI, S. (1987) The Thirty-Second Word from the Risale-Nur Collection.
• NURBAKI, H. (1989) Verses from the Glorious Qur’an and the Facts of Science T.D.V.. Ankara