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Thursday, May 21, 2015

Entropy And The Big Bang


Science today is faced with challenges in all areas but perhaps the area with the most challenge is Cosmology.  Just exactly how did the universe come to be?  Just how did life begin?  What was the first cause?   These are difficult questions and the reality is that how everything we see every day came to be is actually inexplicable even though scientists and atheists try to make it otherwise.  Mathematically it is impossible for DNA to occur randomly and DNA is necessary for life – any life.  This means that even the humble pond scum from which we are all descended according to science, could not have been a random creation.  But this is only part of the problem faced by scientists who are seeking an answer without accepting even the possibility of God’s existence or intelligent design.  The concept of the Big Bang has been a popular answer to the question of how everything started but even that theory ignores the question of “First Cause”.  
 
Still if we accept the Big Bang as a starting point, ignoring the obvious questions about space itself and the origin of that primordial spec of energy and accept that at some point there was a sudden expansion of heat and energy we are immediately faced with some interesting questions based on science or at least what scientists think is true.  The first question is “heat” because science tells us that this expansion of energy created enormous heat, many times the heat of the sun plus light. 

 Heat is generated by the movement of particles, but particles didn’t yet exist because they must have mass to exist and there was only a release of energy.  Now we know – at least technically – that subatomic particles do exist and these appear to be pure energy so perhaps it was these particles that generated that incredible heat.  But that brings us to the second problem and that is Entropy.  We find that Entropy is defined thus:

Entropy is a law of nature in which everything slowly goes into disorder.

The actual law of Entropy is more complicated and deals with atoms and uncertainty but at the Big Bang these things didn’t exist.  But some how all of this sudden energy began to divide and subdivide into the various forms of energy, take on mass and began to coalesce into electrons, protons, and neutrons meaning that chaos became organized.  Exactly how this chaos organized itself is a little unclear.  Of course light itself is a little strange since it acts as a wave and / or a particle but current thinking is that light has no mass when at rest but assumes mass when in motion   So perhaps that is how the energetic particles that make up the universe acquired the mass necessary for gravity and the other forces to act on them leading to the reverse entropy

But as we know observe the universe in its current state we do not see new suns and planets being formed, what we see is Entropy in action as stars and everything else in the universe slowly changing, eroding, and moving back into chaos.  But this isn’t the only strange thing about the Big Bang, which we are told created space itself and that raises the question of where did that primordial spec of energy come from in the first place?   Modern science is postulating many theories regarding this question but on close inspection these theories really beg the question and don’t actually answer it.

This brings us to the question of Mass.  Our universe is Mass oriented and Einstein demonstrated that Mass is constrained by the speed of light.  So where did the mass come from?  All of the particles that make up our existence have mass but were created after the Big Bang  At the instant of creation all of this energy and subsequent particles were limited by the speed of light.  We know that some forms of energy operate at light speed but not all particles and certainly not those mass oriented things we can observe every day.  We can then conclude that at some point all of the energy generated at the Big Bang slowed and coalesced into mass and our observable universe.

Where we are at this point is that no one really knows the first cause but apparently there was a sudden expansion of energy but why or how is a mystery.  Contrary to the Law of Entropy this energy organized itself into our known universe, which is now following the Law of Entropy and slowly declining into chaos.  It is known that everything in the universe is composed of identical electrons, protons, and neutrons, but why and how some organized themselves into living things is unknown.  How life came to be is unknown but what is known is that it requires DNA and that cannot be formed randomly.  But scientists are convinced that God does not exist and our universe was a random event whose beginning they can only hypothesize.

2 comments:

New Mexican said...

Because a person cannot explain or understand something is not proof that a god or gods exist. That is the reasoning believers have always used to defend their beliefs.

Another thought on the belief of supernatural beginnings for anything, why is it that there is always "a" god as compared to gods?

Both the believers and nonbelievers have their reasons and arguments. The nonbelievers have lots of gaps in their attempts to explain natural phenomena and the believers always fall back on "god" or "intelligent design".

I will remain a nonbeliever.

Royce said...

Of course everyone has the right to believe ion God or not but that doesn't prove anything. Science has never been able to prove or explain the beginning of life or the creation of the universe. They postulate but these are not proofs and have no more validity than those who postulate intelligent design. No one, including you , can explain why some collections of atoms think and move while others do not. You choose to not believe in the "supernatural" while believing in what? Science? On the important questions regarding life and the universe science is simply another belief system no different from what you see as supernatural.