Creation of Heavens and the Universe

 

The Age and Beginning of Creation of the Universe

 

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ² 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.

³ And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

⁶ And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” ⁷ So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. ⁸ God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

⁹ And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. ¹⁰ God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

¹¹ Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. ¹² The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. ¹³ And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

¹⁴ And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, ¹⁵ and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. ¹⁶ God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. ¹⁷ God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, ¹⁸ to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. ¹⁹ And there was evening, and there was morning - the fourth day.

²⁰ And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” ²¹ So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. ²² God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” ²³ And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

²⁴ And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. ²⁵ God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,^[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

²⁷ So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

²⁸ God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

²⁹ Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. ³⁰ And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it - I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

³¹ God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning - the sixth day.

 

Evidences of Birth of Universe:

 

In the eyes of astrophysicists and cosmologists, they look at creation of the Universe differently, and into greater depths 

 

 

Two Prevailing Theories:

 

 

In cosmology there are two schools of thoughts on the origin of the Universe.


The first one has only a minority of support. It  is based on a steady state model in that, the Universe is always there, and the same whereby the density of matter in an expanding universe remains unchanged due to the continuous creation of matter.


However we now have more empirical evidences in favour of the Big Bang theory. Three major evidences are:


1.  Red-shifts Spectra:


Edward Hubble in 1927 was able to determine the distances of Cepheid variables by observing their luminosities varying with their periodicities; the more luminous the Cepheid, the slower the variations, and by using the fact that the intensity of light varies inversely as the square of its distance, he was able to establish their distances. In short, Cepheid variables serve as yardsticks to the stars.


Later he was able to demonstrate even further the distances to the galaxies by observing their spectra.  He showed the galaxies were actually receding from each other with no central point in the inflation. He observed their spectra were all red-shifted with increasing velocities with increasing distances.


This was the first clue that the Universe is actually expanding away towards a finite edge (Observable Universe) - the further away the galaxies, the faster the velocity of recession.


The rate of expansion was determined at a rate of about 21.5 km/s, small though, but over time of 13.7 billion years as the age of the Universe this is significant in terms of the distance it has expanded. This expansion can only be the result of a Big Bang.


2.  Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB):


Perhaps the best evidence that the Universe started off with a Big Bang from a super-dense singularity is the presence of an almost uniformly distributed CMB with regions of small variations here and there in the temperature spectrum.


The CMB is manifested as an afterglow which is the heat remnant of a Big Bang.  The CMB afterglow is just 2.7 Kelvin above absolute zero, and seems brightest at wavelength around 2 mm.

 

The CMB radiation discovered in 1964 provided the crucial evidence of a Big Bang model. The universe in the mini seconds after the Big Bang was hot, dense, and opaque plasma


Georges Lemaitre first noted in 1927 that an expanding universe could be traced back in time to have originated from a single point on which scientists have built a cosmic expansion based on his idea.


3. Nucleosynthesis of Elements:


The Sun and stars convert the most abundant element in the Universe - hydrogen, into helium through fusion energy. As energy is released, the higher ratio of hydrogen to helium is being shifted towards helium. 


In main sequence stars other elements heavier than iron are also being form through stellar nucleosynthesis by neutron capture.


The abundance of other elements other than hydrogen and helium seem to suggest the cooling effect after a Big Bang when  particles like protons, neutrons and electrons can come together to form elements


Looking Back into Time:

In fact if we look further away towards the edge of an Observable Universe defined by the Hubble Radius the further back we look into time.

 

This means we can see different types of galaxies in their early stages during the birth of the universe

 

 

Before Creation:

 

We have little or no knowledge what the scenario was like before the Big Bang. Perhaps the entire Universe started with one point smaller than an atom. We call it singularity. Time, space and forces of nature were all incredibly super-condensed at just one point

 

However, astrophysicists can construct the events during the one billion, billionth of one second up to 3 minutes after the Big Bang

 

Ingredients for Creation: 

 But if you were to ask me what other ingredients I would like to add during those moments in Creation, as the University of Oxford did when I was a student there in 2019 doing a course in astronomy,  I would first like to ask myself how did that single point in time, space and matter came about if we assume there was completely nothing there to start with?

 

 Assuming there was nothing there,  not even the presence of just a point of everything, presumptuous that everything we see today example galaxies, black holes, dark matter, energy, gravity... etc. etc were not even in their embryo stage.  The best we can answer again is all matter, time and space were in a singularity compacted into a size less than an atom.

 

The question I personally like to ask myself is how did these ingredients got there even before the Big Bang? I have little clue to this question

 

An Intelligent Designer:

The other question I like to ask is, why was or were they there in the first place, and who put them there so that the birth of the universe was possible? Did an Intelligent Designer beyond time, matter, dimension and all forces created them?  

 

As far as I am concerned, I really do not know despite all the theories and assumptions put forward by cosmologists and astrophysicists.

 

Once we can answer that, then I suppose putting in the ingredients like sub atomic particles, the charges and forces, whatever the form; be it  gravity, electromagnetic, nuclear forces, heat, microwave radiation, etc. etc. would  not a problem

 

Simulations: 

We can then feed them into a supercomputer and ask it to generate the scenario how they react or separate from each other from their initial symmetry when they were held together at one point.

 

We can then observe another  scenario what happened during that tiny, tiny nanosecond in time after they were torn apart during the  Big Bang after which Creation was followed by a rapid  expansion to generate the galaxies and the stars  

 

However, after the Big Bang most matter would have been formed, subsequent to the forces binding them together separating them from their symmetry.

 

This scenario may have taken a tinny-tiny fraction of a second, probably in the order of 10^-43 of one second.

 But it may take at least 5 billion years for a typical star like our Sun to be formed.  The Sun for instance is 4.603 billion years old.

 

Most stars are between 1 billion and 10 billion years old. Some stars may even be close to 13.8 billion years old—the observed age of the universe. The oldest star yet discovered, HD 140283, nicknamed Methuselah star, is an estimated 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years old.

 

We can also estimate the ages of the stars, hence the age of the Universe in another way by looking at their luminosities, and colours, their masses and the rate they use up their hydrogen nuclear fuel

 

We do this by looking at a large cluster of stars to determine their ages. This is achievable since all of the stars in a cluster are presumed to have begun their life at approximately the same time, and by looking at their positions and luminosities in what we call the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (HR diagram) we can interpolate their ages.

 

Life Span: 

After a relatively brief time of thousands to millions of years stars reach the adult phase of their life, which we call the main sequence phase. The length of time a star spends in the main sequence phase in the HR diagram depends on its mass from which we can tell their lifespan by the rate they use up their hydrogen fuel.

 

However there are also many things we do not know for sure since nobody was there to see or record the events directly before and after the birth of the universe.

 

But what we do know is inferred indirectly from the spectrum of their ancient light such as red shifts reaching us from the past.

 

Having said that, let’s now hear from others like Professor Brain Cox, Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester,  and Andrew Cohen, Professor of Physics at Boston University, a leading expert in the field of theoretical particle physics  in their book “Wonders of the Universe have to say on Creation of the Universe.

 

Here’s what they wrote:

 

“At 13.7 billion years old, 93 billion light years across and filled with 100 billion galaxies – each containing hundreds of billions of stars – the Universe as revealed by modern science is humbling in scale and dazzling in beauty. 

But, paradoxically, as our knowledge of the Universe has expanded, so the division between us and the cosmos has melted away,

The Universe may turn out to be infinite in extent and full of alien worlds beyond imagination, but current scientific thinking suggests that we need it all in order to exist. Without the stars, there would be no ingredients to build us; without the Universe’s great age, there would be no time for the stars to perform their alchemy.

The Universe cannot be old without being vast; there may be no waste or redundancy in this potentially infinite arena if there are to be observers present to graze upon its wonders

 

The story of the Universe is therefore our story; tracing our origin back beyond the formation of Earth itself; back to events – perhaps inevitable, perhaps by chance ones – that occurred less than a billionth of a second after the Universe began”  

 

 The emergence of light from darkness is central to the creation mythologies of many cultures.

The Universe began as a void; the Maori called it Te Kore, the Greek Chaos. The Egyptians saw time before as an infinite, fathomless ocean out of which the land and the gods emerged.

In some cultures, God is eternal: he created the Universe out of nothing and will outlast it.  

 

In others, such as some Hindus traditions, a vast primordial ocean predates the heavens and the Earth. Lord Vishnu floated, asleep, on the ocean, entwined in the coils of a giant cobra, and only when light appeared and darkness was banished did he awake and commanded the creation of the world.

We still do not know how the Universe began, but we do have very strong evidence that something interesting happened 13.75 billion years ago that can be interpreted as the beginning of the Universe. We call it the Big Bang.

\The interesting thing that happened corresponds to the origin of everything we can now see in the skies. All the ingredients required to build the hundreds of billions of galaxies and thousands of trillions of suns were once contained in a volume far smaller than a single atom.

Unimaginable dense and hot beyond comprehension, this tiny seed has been expanding and cooling for the last 13.75 billion years, which has been sufficient time for the laws of nature to assemble all the complexity and beauty we observe in the night skies.

These natural processes have also given rise to Earth, life, and also consciousness, which in many ways is harder to comprehend than the mere emergence of the seemingly infinite stars.

Care is in order, because the very beginning – by which we measure the events that happened during the Planck epoch – the time period before a million million million million million million millionths of a second after the Big Bang, is currently beyond our understanding.

 

This is because we lack a theory of space and time before this point, and consequently have very little to say about it. Such a theory, known as quantum gravity, is the holy grail of modern theoretical physics and is energetically searched for by hundreds of scientists across the world (Albert Einstein spent the last decades of his life searching for it in vain).

Conventional thinking holds that both time and space began at the time zero, the beginning of the Planck era.

The Big Bang can therefore be regarded as the beginning of time itself, and as such it was the beginning of the Universe.

There are alternatives, however. In one theory, what we see as the Big Bang and the beginning of the Universe was caused by the collisions of two pieces of space and time, known as ‘branes’, that had been floating forever in an infinite, pre-existing space.

What we have labeled the beginning was therefore nothing more significant than a cosmos collision of two sheets of space and time.”

 

The Big Bang:

 

“Thirteen billion years ago the Universe began in the event called the Big Bang. We don’t know why. We also don’t know why it took the initial form that it did. This is one of the unsolved mysteries that make fundamental physics so exciting.

 The first milestone we can speak of in anything resembling scientific language is known as the Planck Era, a period that occurred a mind-blowing 10^-43 second after the Big Bang. Written in full, that number has 42 decimal places (0.followed by 42 zeros). That’s not very long at all.

This number can be arrived at very simple because it is related to the strength of the gravitational force. It is so incredibly tiny ultimately because gravity is so weak – and we don’t know the reason for that, either! 

At that time the four fundamental forces of nature that we know today – gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism - were one and same force, a single “super force’.

There was no matter at this stage, only energy and the super-force. This is what a physicist would call it a very symmetric situation.

As the Universe rapidly expanded and cooled it underwent a series of symmetry-breaking events. The first, at the end of the Planck Era, saw gravity separate from the other forces of nature, and so the perfect symmetry was broken. 

Around 10^-36 (0.followed by 35 zeros) seconds after the Big Bang, another symmetry-breaking event occurred which marked the end of the Grand Unification Era.

This saw the strong nuclear forces (the force that sticks the quarks together inside the protons and neutrons) split from the other forces.

At this point the Universe underwent an astonishing violet expansion known as inflation, in which the Universe expanded in size by a factor of 10^26 (that’s 100 million million million million times) in an unimaginably small space of time – it was all over in 10^-32 seconds.

This was when sub-atomic particles entered the Universe for the first time, but they weren’t quite what we see today because none of them had any mass at all.

Up until this point this story is theoretically well- motivated but experimentally relatively untested.

The next great symmetry-breaking event, however, which occurred 10^-11 seconds after the Big Bang is absolutely within our reach because this is the era we are recreating and observing at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

It is called electroweak symmetry breaking; at this point the final two forces of nature – electromagnetism and the weak nuclear forces – are separated

 During this process the sub-atomic building blocks of everything we see today (the quarks and electrons) acquired mass. 

The most popular theory for this process is known as Higgs mechanism, and the search for the associated Higgs Particle is one of the key goals of the Large Hadron Collider project

We are now on very firm experimental and theoretical ground.

From this point on we know pretty much exactly what happened in the Universe because we can do experiments at particle accelerators to check that we understand physics.

 The emergence of the familiar particles and forces we see in the Universe today happened, we believe, as a result of a series of symmetry-breaking events which began way back at the end of the Planck Era

The concept of spontaneous symmetry-breaking events in the early Universe is exactly the same as for the transitions from water vapour to liquid water to ice.” (Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen)

We shall later look at age Earth and how it was created both from the biblical and scientific point of view

We shall reserve this part of the story in my next article yet to be written