Back in the summer I wrote a little with a few to the Science and Scripture class I designed and have occasionally taught for Houghton University. This week I'd like to work a bit on Chapter 3 of a book proposal I'd soon like to submit somewhere. Chapter 3 is "Creation and the Big Bang."
Previous writings here on the blog have included:
2.1 Relationships between Science and Faith
2.2 Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth
2.3 Approaches to Scripture
8.1 Approaches to Genesis 2-3
8.2 Situating Genesis 2-3
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3.1 General and Special Relativity
In 1905, a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein submitted a paper trying to resolve one of the unresolved conundrums of physics at that time. Experiments had shown that the speed of light remained constant no matter how fast or slow the source of the light was moving. This was baffling because it was not how other waves behaved. Scientists expected the speed of light to add to or subtract from the motion of its source, like a train’s headlight shining forward or backward. Yet every test showed that light’s speed never changed.
Before Einstein, physicists expected light to behave like a projectile. If you shine a flashlight from the front of a moving train, its speed should be the train’s speed plus the speed of light. If you shine it backward, it should be the speed of light minus the train’s speed. But experiments had already shown that no matter how fast the train—or the Earth itself—was moving, the speed of light remained the same. This contradiction is what Einstein set out to resolve in 1905.
Einstein’s proposed solution was that space and time actually appeared to be longer or shorter depending on how something was moving in relation to you. If you were on the ground looking at a spaceship moving quickly in the sky, the length of the spaceship would be shorter to you than if it were sitting next to you (called “length contraction”). Similarly, a clock on the spaceship would move more slowly to you than a clock next to you (called “time dilation”). Mind you, if you were on the spaceship, space and time would appear normally. But they would appear differently to you if you were observing from a framework moving more slowly in relation to the spaceship.
This proposal came to be known as the theory of special relativity. Einstein proposed that space and time were not separate aspects of a particular context or framework. Instead, they were intimately connected to each other – later conceptualized as "spacetime." As an object approached the speed of light, its length in the direction of motion contracted from the standpoint of something moving much more slowly, and time appeared to slow down for it.
The mathematical equation for the contraction of length as something approaches the speed of light is known as the Lorentz contraction formula. Here is the formula.
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Textbox:
Where:
L = Observed length of the moving object (contracted length)
L0 = Proper length (length of the object at rest)
v = Velocity of the object relative to the observer
c = Speed of light (≈3.00×10^8 m/s)
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You can see that when something is moving much more slowly than the speed of light, there will be almost no observable difference in length. When the velocity is small, v is much smaller than c, making that part approach 0. The length equals the length proper. But as an object approaches the speed of light, the difference in length becomes very significant. The length of the object approaches zero.
In Einstein’s theory of special relativity, the speed of light becomes the universal speed limit. No object with mass can reach or exceed the speed of light, and the speed of light will be the same no matter how quickly or slowly an object is moving. This idea was counterintuitive. If you stood on top of a train and threw a rock forward, you would expect the speed of the rock from the standpoint of the ground to be the speed of the train plus the speed of the rock. In everyday life, speeds add up or subtract. But if you shine a flashlight forward or backward from the top of a train, the speed of light will measure exactly the same either way. It’s the space and time that changes relative to the ground.
In 1915, Einstein extended his theory to propose the general theory of relativity. The key new element was the impact of mass on spacetime. What Einstein proposed was that mass and energy curve spacetime. When light travels near a sun, it appears to curve because the mass is curving spacetime. This was confirmed in 1919 when Arthur Eddington observed that starlight was displaced passing near the Sun. The curvature of spacetime was altering the light coming past the Sun.
The conclusion, in effect, is that space and time are not rigid but can stretch, curve, and expand. Indeed, it would be confirmed in 1929 by Edwin Hubble that space is expanding. This is not just about the matter in the universe expanding, but the fabric of space itself is getting bigger. The current model sees the universe beginning with a point and then rapidly expanding into the vast universe we know today.
We will ponder these discoveries in relation to creation later in the chapter. It changes our view of creation from one where God puts materials into emptiness to one where God creates the emptiness itself. It may transform our sense of what a creation out of nothing (ex nihilo in Latin) might mean. Apparently, God did not create the universe out of zero but out of an empty set with no elements in it at all.
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