Horoscopes … Ah, the Joys of Not Thinking

Introduction

There isn’t any introduction to this post other than to say I am still not going to directly address astrology yet, but I just watched something that deserves to be quoted.

Cybill

Do any of you remember that short-lived, 4-season series from the mid 1990s called Cybill? I do … I used to watch it with my mom, and recently I discovered that it has come out on DVD. My favorite character was not the title character, but her best friend, Maryanne, played by Christine Baranski. I’ve been going through the series and just started season 2 episode 22, “Pal Zoey.”

In it, Cybill’s cousin from Arkansas comes to town to be in The Price is Right show. Why? Well …

Cousin: Last week, my horoscope said, “Libra, the time is right.

Maryanne: So, you plan your life around a line in the newspaper. Bravo. [Cousin nods.] Relieves you of all that pesky thinking.

Cousin: I’ll say.

Final Thoughts

Well, that about wraps it up.

Astrologer Arrested in Sri Lanka for Predicting President’s Ejection

Introduction

This is what blogging is all about – responding to current news, and offering my own never-humble opinion about said news. But, this is really only one out of a half dozen or so posts on current news items. Alas.

Anyway, this post is about this BBC News article, “Sri Lanka Astrologer Is Arrested.”

I have so far avoided writing any posts – save my 2009 predictions – about astrology, since that’s a whole different can of worms than what I’ve addressed so far and would require significant background research on my part that I have not already done. But, I can still respond to current news on the subject.

News Article

Sri Lanka is a relatively small country in the Indian Ocean, just off the eastern coast of India. It boasts a population of about 20.2 million people. The country’s government is a “Democratic Socialist Republic,” meaning that it is fairly democratic, but the politics lean towards socialism. The current president is Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Of interest to this blog, the country is one of several in the world where the pseudoscience of astrology – the belief that the stars and planets can and do govern our personalities and world and local events – is taken very seriously on the national stage. It is taken so seriously that many of Sri Lanka’s politicians have their own personal astrologers to tell them when to do anything important (does this ring a bell for anyone regarding Nancy Reagan?). This includes the president. And that’s what got Chandrasiri Bandara arrested.

Bandara “announced last week that the government would flounder in September and October because of political and economic problems. … [He] told an opposition meeting that the prime minister would take over as president on 9 September and the opposition leader would become prime minister.” This is despite the president’s high approval ratings and the president’s victory against the Tamil Tigers, which brought an end to almost 26 years of civil war.

As a result, he was arrested on Wednesday, June 24, to “investigate the basis of his prediction,” according to police.

One may ask what the basis is of his prediction. The answer: He “predicted that a planetary change on 8 October will be inauspicious for parliament and the government may not be able to contain rising living costs – a forecast which correspondents say has already been made by private economists.”

What’s Wrong with This Picture

I have three basic problems with this. The first is that this guy got arrested for saying something that everyone else already says. I don’t think the government arrested every economist who made the same forecast.

The second problem I have with this is – even if astrology were true – this is a basic freedom of speech issue where, at least in most Western countries, would be covered fully.

The third is that astrology is not a science. There is no physical reason for any of its fundamental ideas to hold true (how can a random collection of stars that looks one way only from a certain vantage point in the universe have any sway over someone’s personality?). It has never made predictions about things at above-chance level that could not have been predicted by looking at real trends (such as in the case with Mr. Bandara). And yet, a man was arrested for it because he has predicted the downthrow of a government. If every person in America who predicted the downthrow of its government were arrested, our prison system would likely hold well over a quarter of the country’s population.

Final Thoughts

In my opinion, this guy should have been ignored. If nothing else, perhaps ridiculed. Or, if nothing better, perhaps it should have been pointed out that this guy is following what the economists are saying and is probably going for a fairly likely “hit” while adding his own political bias.

Oh, and I guess I’ll take the really low-hanging fruit: If he’s an astrologer and predict all this stuff, he really should’ve seen this coming.

The Apollo Moon Hoax: Why Haven’t Any Pictures Been Taken of the Landing Sites?

The Claim

Before I start to really explore the main claims of the Apollo Moon Hoax proponents, I thought I would give an overview of one of their only lines of “evidence” that isn’t anomaly hunting: When claim after claim is refuted, many of the Hoax proponents will ask the apparent stumper – “If the landings really happened, then why hasn’t NASA or anyone else taken pictures of the landing sites? Hubble can see to the edge of the visible Universe, but it hasn’t even been used to photograph Apollo?”

All posts in this series:

• The Apollo Moon Hoax: An Overview
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: Why Haven’t Any Pictures Been Taken of the Landing Sites?
• The Apollo Moon Hoax – There Is a “Prop Rock” Labeled with a “C” (Updated)
• The Apollo Moon Hoax – Huge, Deadly Temperature Variation Claims
• The Apollo Moon Hoax – “No Stars” Claim and an Explanation of Dynamic Range
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: How Could the Astronauts Take So Many Photographs?

Basic Optics

The reason that, as of the time of this writing, the sites have not been imaged is that there simply has not been a telescope that can image them from that telescope’s location.

Very basic optical theory says that the best angular resolution – the smallest angle that a telescope can resolve – is θ = sin^-1(1.220*λ/D). In this equation, θ is the angle in radians, λ is the wavelength of light, and D is the diameter of the telescope’s primary light-gathering optic (either the front lens or the primary mirror).

(I didn’t make this equation up, it can be found in any optics or even basic physics text, but I am not going to derive it here.)

How Big Are the Apollo Relics?

In physics, we like round numbers. We have some rovers up there, some instrumentation, a few flags (that would now be destroyed because of the sun’s UV radiation), and some lunar module feet. Let’s actually round up and say that the largest object we left has about a 1 square-meter footprint.

The moon is 384,400,000 meters away, on average. This sets up a right triangle with one leg the distance to the moon, and the other leg being half the size of our Apollo relic. The angle that relic makes is then θ = tan^-1((relic)/(distance)) = 7.453*10^-8°. That’s really small.

Let’s convert this to something astronomers use a little more often, arcseconds. 1° = 60 arcminutes = 3600 arcseconds. So, our relic now subtends (extends over) 2.68*10^-4 arcseconds from Earth. That’s really small.

For reference, the full moon subtends ~30 arcminutes, while Venus at its smallest is a little under 10 arcseconds.

What Can Telescopes Resolve?

Now let’s use Hubble and see what the smallest thing is that it can see. Hubble has a 2.4-meter primary mirror, and it looks in the UV, visible, and near-IR light. Let’s pick a green wavelength, a nice, round 500 nm (5000 Å). Hubble is basically at Earth, so we don’t need to re-calculate the angle the Apollo relic would cover.

At 500 nm, Hubble has a resolving power of 0.05 arcseconds, and the pixels on Hubble’s detector are actually 0.1 arcsecond across. This corresponds to a spot size about 370 meters across.

The largest optical telescope on Earth – the Keck 10-m telescope, can theoretically resolve an object at the 0.013 arcsecond level, but this still is 100 orders of magnitude too large to resolve any Apollo relic on the moon.

Future Plans

As of the time of writing this, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has just entered orbit of the moon. Its final orbit will place it very close to the surface, only about 50 km away during the nominal mission. The LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera) has both a wide and narrow camera to it, and it will have a resolution of better than 1 meter. And, it WILL be photographing the Apollo landing sites, hopefully laying to rest these claims.

Pragmatically, however, I expect that true hoax believers will simply say that NASA has “Photoshopped” the images. As one poster on the “Above Top Secret” conspiracy site stated, “Haha, yeah… with photoshopped objects being inserted into the pictures. I couldn’t trust any NASA image to be a true representation of what is or isn’t there.”

And this is another example of a “true believer” mentality: Even after a claim is made out, it is answered, and then even further work is done to actually gather the evidence, it is dismissed out of hand as a simply more deceit.

The Apollo Moon Hoax: An Overview

Introduction

Yes, it’s been a long time since I’ve done a post … sorry folks, I’ve been busy with work and vacations and other stuff. But enough with excuses! In commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landing by the lunar module “Eagle” piloted by Neil Armstrong and also manned by Buzz Aldrin, I am going to devote the next month of postings to a series that debunks the Apollo Moon Hoax.

In other words, the direct goal of these postings is NOT to prove we went to the moon, landing 12 men on the surface and bringing them successfully back (along with a load of lunar science). Rather, I will pick through the main hoax claims and show why each of them, in turn, is flawed.

The specific purpose of this introductory post is to discuss the hoax in general and why I will be debunking it as I state above.

All posts in this series:

• The Apollo Moon Hoax: An Overview
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: Why Haven’t Any Pictures Been Taken of the Landing Sites?
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: There Is a “Prop Rock” Labeled with a “C” (Updated)
• The Apollo Moon Hoax – Huge, Deadly Temperature Variation Claims
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: “No Stars” Claim and an Explanation of Dynamic Range
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: How Could the Astronauts Take So Many Photographs?

Why the Hoax?

There is a small group of people who have made propagating the idea that the US government hoaxed the moon landings a significant part of their life’s work. In name, the four main people with whom I am familiar are Bill Kaysing (now deceased), David Percy (along with Mary Bennett), Ralph Rene, and Bart Sibrel. The two most active people in the “field” today are Rene and Sibrel, with Sibrel being the most visible.

One may ask, “Why do you think this was a hoax?” I cannot read these peoples’ minds, and I do not want to be accused of libel, so I am stating up-front that I do not attribute any of these reasons directly to any of those people. That said, in general, people like conspiracies and mysteries. It almost may seem anti-climactic to those Generation X and Y folks who were born over a decade after the landings that, “Yeah, we went to the moon.” It’s much more interesting to think that there is something else behind it. In addition, there is almost always an inherent distrust of “the Official story” and especially if that Official story comes from the government – a body that almost no one really trusts anymore.

But besides my attempt to psychoanalyze the conspiracy theorist mindset, there is a more direct, more visual reason: Anomalies. Anomalies are the conspiracy theorist’s bread and butter, the sustenance upon which they build their upside-down pyramid of cards.

Anomaly Hunting Defined

So that we’re all on the same page, I will define “anomaly hunting” for purposes of conspiracy theories: Anomaly hunting is searching for something – anything – that does not make sense to you within the context of the broader picture.

An example from the 9/11 Conspiracy is that when the Towers 1 and 2 collapsed, the debris/rubble only reached a few stories high, despite the skyscrapers originally reaching 110 stories high. How could they possibly have so little debris? There must have been something else going on – right?

Another example, this time from the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, is that the 6.5 x 52 mm Italian Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle that was used to shoot the president could NOT have been fired 3 times in the supposed 5.6 seconds that it was fired in (even though the Warren Commission found that it could have been up to 8 seconds). So there must have been a second shooter – right?

Well, to answer both of these … NO. These are apparent anomalies. They seem to make perfect sense when you present them at face-value because they appeal to general common sense. But there are really mundane explanations. First, for the Trade Towers, the explanation is that when one owns a building, they make money off of the empty space inside the building that people can then use for businesses (or living). The Trade Towers were up to 95% empty space by volume, and so when they collapsed, only the structure was what remained.

As for the speed of firing the rifle, it was only the first attempted reenactment by the Warren Commission that failed to duplicate the speed of firing. Since then – including CBS’s 11 volunteers in 1967 – many people have shown that it is a relatively easy task to shoot the rifle 3+ times in the time allotted, even if the minimum of 5.6 seconds is that time. A visual example of this was shown on Penn & Teller’s ‘Bullsh-t’ show, season 3 episode 3, where Penn successfully fired it 3 times in the space of 3.45 seconds.

Why Conspiracies Rely Upon Anomaly Hunting

So one may legitimately ask, “Why are conspiracies built upon anomalies?” The answer is because apparent “common sense” does not always apply. It is a very simple thing for me to look at a picture, hear about someone’s observation, or examine a video and see something that seems to defy what I expect to happen during a circumstance.

This is especially true when one talks about the environment of space, off Earth’s surface. Our every-day experience does not prepare us in any way for what to expect if we are in near-Earth orbit, on the moon, or elsewhere. The lack of air, the different gravity, lack of water, and other environmental factors change how things act and interact, giving rise to apparent anomalies.

Almost every single Moon Hoax claim deals with an apparent anomaly. From a lack of stars, to the C rock, to radiation belts, to the computer technology at the time, hoax proponents have come up with dozens of different anomalies within the Apollo program footage, photographs, statements, mission profile, and pretty much everything else that surrounds the program.

Final Thoughts

The next logical question may be, “Do conspiracy theorists have a coherent story, then, of what actually happened?” The answer may surprise you: No.

In general, the Moon Hoax evidences are almost all anomaly pointing-out from the Apollo program. Beyond that, each conspiracist has their own idea of what really happened. And not all of their anomalies actually fit into their view of what happened, with many anomalies pointed out by other “researchers” contradicting their own ideas.

This is why my approach to debunking the Moon Hoax is to go through, claim by claim, and show why they are as they are. Once that is through, the conspiracists have nothing left to stand on because all observations can be explained by the “official” NASA story that we actually went to the moon.

Jupiter: Further Confounding Those Darn Evolutionists

Introduction

Today I had a happy occurrence – Phil Plait mentioned me in his “Bad Astronomy” blog in the context of my previous post on this subject. As a consequence, my blog received over a 5-fold increase in hits. Thanks, Phil, and thanks to all of you who came here from the BA blog.

The purpose of this particular post is a follow-up on that first one. In the first one, I wrote that the video sample on the CreationAstronomy.com blog is approximately 13 minutes long. However, I was only able to view about 4 minutes of it for free from the website. Well, one of the readers of my post sent me a link to download the full section of the video.

So, without further ado, let’s examine the claims in the next 9 minutes of the video.

The Rest of Psarris’ Claims

1. “The more we study Jupiter, the more evolutionists have realized it doesn’t fit into their models.” He then shows another quote from Richard Kerr (the same author he quoted from out of context in my first post on the subject) stating, “… no one has a satisfying explanation of how they were made.” Psarris then states that, no, that’s not true, “the Bible has a very satisfying explanation of how they were made.” (3 min 50 sec)

2. “Jupiter has over 60 moons; they pose problems for evolution, too.”

2.a. “Ganymede has one of the most bizarre surfaces in the entire solar system. … Evolutionary models predicted that Ganymede couldn’t have a magnetic field. But when our space probes arrived and started taking measurements, we found that it does have a magnetic field.” (4 min 30 sec)

2.b. “Then there’s Callisto. This moon is the most heavily cratered object in the solar system. Evolutionists believe that it has one of the oldest surfaces of any object, about 4 billion years old. It was a real surprise, then, when our space probes took some close-up pictures.” It was expected that there would be many small craters, but there was a lack of them. Also, “some of the pictures show what appears to be fresh ice on Callisto’s surface, … [but] evolutionary models say Callisto is old, cold, and dead.” (5 min 30 sec)

2.c. “Next, there is Europa. … Europa is the smoothest [object in the solar system]. … [The ice on Europa] is several miles thick, but some scientists think there might be liquid water beneath it. And where there’s water, there has to be life, right?” Apparently in a previous video section he addressed “how ridiculous that idea is,” but Psarris goes on to say, “you still hear it in the news a lot: Somebody finds a new crack on Europa, and thinks, ‘Ooo! Look! Water might ooze into the crack, and there could be life evolving in the water!’ Then some reporter runs a story about it saying we’re on the verge of finding life elsewhere in the solar system even though all we found was a crack in a moon.” (6 min 30 sec)

2.d. This claim deals with craters on Europa, about which he makes a claim straight from the Institute for Creation Research (I know this because I already debunked this claim before): “Because Europa has only a few craters, we’ve been able to study them closely. One recent study has shown the evolutionary model for cratering is all wrong.” He goes on to explain that it’s apparently wrong because a single crater forming can create up to a million or so smaller, secondary craters (formed by debris from the primary crater event). Because of this, he makes the claim that you need fewer impactors to make all the craters we see, which then implies a younger age than “all these billions of years.” Psarris then extrapolates this to Venus and the moon. (I’m not going into significant detail here since I’ve addressed it extensively before, and I’ll talk about it in my next section where I address these claims.) (7 min 10 sec)

2.e. For the last of Jupiter’s large moons, Io, Psarris makes light of the massive volcanism on Io’s surface. Psarris’ main claim is simply that Jupiter’s tidal heating of Io is not enough to account for all the heat, so some of it must be left-over from its formation which means it formed recently. (9 min 15 sec)

2.f. The second of the Io claims is that, given the amount of lava that is erupting, Io must have completely recycled itself 30 times in the ~4.5-billion year history of the solar system. (10 min 30 sec)

2.g. We get a third claim out of Io: Apparently, astronomers were “flabbergasted” to learn that the temperatures of the lava on Io reaches 3000°, when it only reaches 2000° on Earth. Also, the lava is dense when it should be formed of low-density material by this point due to simple differentiation (heavy stuff sinks). (11 min 20 sec)

The rest of the video (post-12 min 15 sec) is a review of all the points that Psarris makes. But, there are some typical statements at the end:

• “Evolutionary models fail utterly to explain Jupiter.”
• “Building Jupiter has long been a problem for theorists.” (Wetherill, 1995)
• “I don’t think the existence of Jupiter would be predicted if it weren’t observed.” (Wetherill, 2001)
• “Why do they still cling to a broken model? Because when you reject the Truth, you have to accept a lie.”
• “Pity the poor evolutionist, who is so committed to a bankrupt theory that he can’t see the hand of his creator in this majestic planet.”

Addressing the Remaining Claims

1. No Models Explain How Jupiter Formed

This is simply not true, and at its nicest level is taking statements out of context and sorely downplaying the status of solar system formation modeling. I address this quite a bit in my first post in this 2-part series.

The other aspect of this claim that deserves to be addressed is the very common “god of the gaps” logical fallacy: “We don’t know how this happened, therefore God did it.” Among the skeptical community, this often is compressed into the single word, “goddidit,” because we hear it so often from Creationists. The basic fallacy here is that you confuse something that we don’t currently know with something that we can’t possibly know, and therefore it is only explainable through the miracles that a divine creator can make.

2.a. Ganymede

Ganymede’s magnetic field is interesting. But, as I stated in my first post about this CreationAstronomy.com site, that’s what makes astronomers happy! We like it when we find something that we can’t immediately explain. If nothing else, that means Job Security! But on a more explanatory level, the theory for the formation of a magnetic field on a planetary scale is that it requires a molten interior, but Ganymede shouldn’t have one by this point in its life because it should have cooled. On that point, Psarris is correct. But, what does this mean, then, for an explanation?

It means that we need to explain how Ganymede’s core could have either remained warm until at least 1 billion years ago or was heated up until about 1 billion years ago (since a remnant field can still exist for ~1 billion years even without something actively driving it). What modelers have come up with is that the main jovian satellites were not always in their current orbits, but that they slowly migrated into them. This migration passed through resonances until it got to its current resonance of 1:2:4 (Io, Europa, Ganymede … Callisto isn’t really in a resonance (yet)). Getting into this resonance caused enough tidal heating to create a dynamo in Ganymede’s core. In other words, there’s a perfectly reasonable dynamical model that explains this without resorting to goddidit.

2.b. Callisto’s Lack of Small Craters

This is another (almost) true observation about Callisto: It does lack as many small craters as were predicted from simple cratering models. Note here that “small” is ~1 km sized craters and smaller. Before I get into possible explanations, though, I have to pose the likely rhetorical question: How does a lack of small craters prove the solar system is young? I honestly don’t see how it has any relevance to it, other than under the quite childish false dichotomy notion that, “if I can show you’re wrong, then I must be right!”

What this implies, however, are a few different things. One idea is that the main impactor population of Callisto – possibly comets – simply lacks a small size population (impactors a few 10s to 100s of meters). Personally, I don’t find that explanation incredibly convincing from my own research in craters, however. Another possible explanation (Bierhaus et al. (2000) “Small Crater Populations on Callisto”) is that it is simply a resolution issue, and that when viewed under higher resolution, previously indiscernible small craters become evident.

There are also other possible explanations here, but my main point is one that I’ve been stressing when dealing with this CreationAstronomy.com website: A lack of conforming to known, simpler models is something that astronomers – and scientists in general – like, because it means that they then get to go and figure out a new model to explain the new results.

2.c. Europa -> Liquid Water -> Life?

This claim is one that I’ve addressed before, namely in my post, NASA’s “Follow the Water,” Ice Detected by Phoenix on Mars, and Noah’s Flood. It’s one of my older posts so not as well organized, but the basic idea is that all life that we know of needs liquid water to live. Therefore, the first step in attempting to find life is to find places where liquid water is. It’s that simple.

2.d. Europa and Secondary Cratering

This is another claim that I have addressed, in-depth, before. The post is, Dating Planetary Surfaces with Craters – Why There Is No “Crisis in Crater Count Dating”. Psarris’ claim really is identical to this ICR article. The basic response boils down to: Astronomers know of the issue. And we take it into account. It’s another of the classic creationist tactics where they will give you a problem with “evolutionary” science and then say it invalidates everything about science, but they don’t tell you that we already know about the issue and take it into account.

2.e. Io Is Too Hot

Says who? I have not heard nor seen this claim before, and I took a graduate class from the guy who literally wrote the book on Jupiter’s moons. If Psarris would like to show his calculations, I will gladly look over them and get back to this claim.

2.f. Io Is Erupting Too Much

While the basic idea behind this claim is not new, I have never seen it before raised as an issue. Planetary crust is recycled. Stuff coming out of volcanoes on Earth now used to be buried miles beneath the surface which used to be on the surface. I’m sorry, but I honestly don’t see the issue here with this claim.

2.g. Io’s Lava is Too Hot and Too Dense

First, I just love it when articles say that scientists are “flabbergasted,” “surprised,” “shocked,” “astounded,” “puzzled,” “clueless,” “can’t understand,” “unbelieving,” “amazed,” “bewildered,” “baffled,” and other such phrases. (Okay, more honestly, I really don’t like it.) Seriously, we’re apparently the people who are supposed to know everything and so it’s like a “gotcha” game when there’s a discovery that “surprises” us. Need I repeat it? THAT’S THE POINT OF SCIENCE — TO FIND OUT NEW THINGS!

Alright, deep breath … now, what about the temperatures of Io’s volcanoes. Again, I do not know of why this is particularly an issue. If Psarris would like to show his math – or show someone else’s as to why magma cannot be heated to 3000° on Io, I will take a look at it. But this is another case where I do not particularly want to do his work for him to then add more work to my own plate.

Final Thoughts

I’ll start off by saying that I threw this post together rather quickly (if “quickly” can mean an hour of writing and looking things up and watching the video segment), so I apologize if I seem a little flippant at the end, brushing off his claims.

However, my point really is the same: If he is going to make the claim, he needs to back it up. You can’t just state something and leave it at that and expect people to bend over backwards to flesh out your own claim and then go to the trouble of pointing out why it’s wrong (if it actually is). And at least with the few physics things that Psarris addresses (basic thermodynamics), he needs to show the math. Otherwise, it holds as much weight as me saying that my oven can’t possibly heat up past 500° by itself therefore it contains heat left over from its formation which means it’s young.

Otherwise, I hope that at the very least this post will lead you to question the validity of Psarris’ claims. And if you’re already a firm critic of young-Earth creationism, then I hope that I have armed you with more information to stop the spread of bad pseudo astronomy.

Jupiter: Confounding Evolutionary Models of the Solar System

Introduction

Making the rounds on the blogs and skeptical websites – including PZ Myers’ Pharyngula blog – is an up-and-coming young-Earth creationist, Spike Psarris and his CreationAstronomy.com website. Now, when I was made aware of this site, I tried to go to it but kept getting 505 errors meaning that they had exceeded the bandwidth they paid for.

I’m guessing this was due to PZ’s blog post about it. Well, a few hours later, it was back up and I got to see what the hooplah is about. It’s a guy selling a YEC DVD. He has a free preview on his site – at least at the time of writing this blog – that shows the intro to the DVD and the “chapter” on Jupiter.

The title of this blog post is what he claims within the first minute of the Jupiter video segment. The rest of this post will be correcting the errors, half-truths, and misstatements throughout the rest of the 13-minute video.

Update: I have posted a follow-up analysis of the Jupiter segment claims that are not addressed in this post here: “Jupiter: Further Confounding Those Darn Evolutionists.”

Psarris’ Claims

There are many claims made in this segment. The main points are the following:

1. “Evolution says Jupiter can’t be spinning as fast as it is … [because] evolutionary model make certain predictions about how fast a planet should spin.” He then quotes a “recent” article to back this up, where “recent” is 1992. He then makes the argument that evolutionary models cannot supply the energy to spin up Jupiter such that its day is only 10 Earth hours long. (1 min)

2. “Evolutionary models predicted that Jupiter would lack certain elements, Ar, Kr, Xe, N, and others. But it turns out that Jupiter has lots of these elements. … [An overview of the article of the results said] ‘Jupiter is the largest of all the planets, but results in Nature now reveal the embarrassing fact that we know next to nothing about how – or where – it formed.’” (2 min)

3. “The evolutionary model requires Jupiter to have a large core inside of it [at least 10 times the mass of Earth]. This would have been necessary for Jupiter to form from the solar nebula billions of years ago. Unfortunately for evolution, a recent space probe measured the mass of Jupiter’s core. … We now know that, at most, the core can only be 3 times the mass of Earth. … Jupiter does not match evolution’s predictions.” (2 min 30 sec)

4. The next claim is that models require 10-100 million years for a planet like Jupiter to form, but that the solar nebula would have dissipated around the sun within 5 million years. “So, according to evolution, Jupiter shouldn’t exist at all.” (3 min 15 sec)

This is where the video stops for me. Even though my player lists the video as being 13 min 28 seconds long, it keeps stopping after 3 min 54 seconds. But, that’s really enough to get a flavor of the video, so let’s get to what’s really going on.

The First Big Clue

Okay, even if you’re a young-Earth creationist, please please PLEASE stop talking about astronomy in terms of “evolution,” “evolutionists,” and “darwinism.” The Theory of Evolution has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with astronomy (unless you are talking about really far down the line things). Natural selection says nothing about how planets form. Punctuated equilibrium has nothing to do with the gases in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Now that I’ve gotten that out … the first big clue as to an alternative agenda (as if that weren’t obvious from the get-go) is relating evolution to astronomy. As if somehow showing that Jupiter’s rotation rate cannot be explained by an outdated model has something to do with the validity of common descent of species. And this is quite telling in this clip because in practically every single sentence, Psarris claims that this has to do with evolution, evolutionary models, or evolutionists.

With that said, I will not address the non sequitur “evolution” references in each and every claim when I address them in the next section.

Addressing the Four Main Claims

1. Jupiter’s Rotation Rate

First off, I should note that we have known what Jupiter’s rotation rate was as far back as 1835 (since that’s the first paper that I can find on the subject) but I would guess that Galileo was able to estimate its rotation period, as well. For those interested, here is the article from 1835.

With that out of the way – we know how fast it’s spinning on its axis – how does it spin so quickly? The preliminary question would be, why does it spin in the first place? This webpage has a pretty good simplified explanation for why objects in the solar system spin, and why they mostly spin in the same counter-clockwise direction (when viewed from the North Pole). The basic one-liner is that the protoplanetary disk was orbiting the protosun in the same direction, and due to the differential rotation within the disk, a net spin was imparted onto any condensing objects.

And now we get to the part where the objects spin quickly. This is the classic ice skater analogy: If your spinning on the ice and you have your arms extended, you will spin slowly. If you bring your arms closer to your body, you will spin faster. That is because of the conservation of angular momentum. Now let’s say you put 20-lb lead weights in your hands. If you now bring your arms close to your body, you will spin even faster than before. In other words, the more mass you bring close to the center, the faster you will spin.

Jupiter has a lot of mass – the most mass of any object other than the sun in the solar system. It also has the fastest rotation rate. Saturn, the second-most massive planet, has the second-fastest rotation rate. Neptune, which has the third-largest mass, has the third-fastest rotation rate. See a pattern?

Now, I’m not sure what “evolutionary model” he’s talking about that predicts a slower rate. He doesn’t cite his source. Regardless, he has not presented any case that anyone should take seriously as to why Jupiter “can’t” spin quickly under an “evolutionary model,” so at best this is an unsupported claim where the burden of proof is solely upon him to at least present reasoning rather than a simple claim.

Update since original post: I have now obtained a copy of the paper that Psarris quotes from (Kerr, (1992), “Theoreticians are putting a new spin on the planets,” Science, 258: 5082, p. 548.). This is a very obvious example of a fairly common YEC tactic, quote-mining. This is where they search for a line or two in pretty much any scientific paper/book/press release and use it completely out of context.

In this case, the quote is, “The simulated bombardment leaves a growing planet spinning once a week at most, not once a day.” The main problem is that, just as I point out in the rest of my blog, this isn’t a “naked” announcement — the two teams that this paper cites have modified current models in order to explain how the planets spin faster than once a week. In fact, that quote comes from the fourth paragraph. The second paragraph states: “Neither group claims to know exactly what actually set the planets spinning so furiously. But both groups–Stony Brook’s Jack J. Lissauer and David Kary and Toronto’s Luke Dones and Scott Tremaine–are ready with alternative scenarios. Lissauer and Kary favor a modified version of the small-collisions scenario, but Tremaine and Dones lean toward a more catastrophic mechanism, in which planets acquired their spins from a few giant impacts, or even one, late in their evolution.”

I can’t go on to quote the paper verbatim because that is not the purpose of this blog post and it is not completely legal (and the paper requires a subscription to the journal in order to read it). But the upshot is that this paper simply describes, in short, two small modifications to the main planetary formation models that can better account for a preferred direction once you consider even more of the real, physical dynamics that occur in a protoplanetary disk.

2. Elemental Composition

This second claim is at best misleading, at worst just an outright lie. The main composition of Jupiter is H₂ (molecular hydrogen) at 89.8% (±2.0%). The secondary element is He at 10.2% (±2.0%). Notice that those two add up to 100%. Now, there is a very little bit of other stuff, but it is what we call “trace,” meaning that there is very very little of it there.

The main trace constituents are methane (0.3±0.1%), ammonia (0.026±0.004%), hydrogen dueteride (.0028±0.001%), ethane (0.00058±0.00015%), and water (0.0004% (varies with pressure)). This is data from NASA’s Jupiter Factsheet.

Looking at a recent paper, the amount of argon in Jupiter is about 2.5x the sun’s or ~0.0009% of the total composition. Krypton is 2.7x the sun’s, or ~0.0004% the total composition. Xenon is 2.6x the sun’s, or ~0.0004% the total composition. And nitrogen is 3x that of the sun’s abundance, or ~0.0003%. It’s noted in the paper that the nitrogen amount is likely off, that the probe landed in a “hotspot.”

Now why are these tiny tiny numbers cause for mention? Well, they do show a relatively significant enhancement over the solar abundance, and Jupiter is supposed to be reasonably like the sun in its composition. But not totally. What I have noticed that creationists commonly fail to realize is that scientists want to make observations that disagree with their theories. But rather than throwing away their theories, they modify them in order to improve the theories so they can explain all of the evidence. That is what has happened since the determinations of the jovian atmospheric composition: It has placed constraints on models of Jupiter’s formation. Rather than make assumptions, we now have legitimate constraints upon parameters, like where in the solar nebula Jupiter may have formed, or where the smaller pieces that combined to form Jupiter may have formed themselves.

That is what real science is: Making a model from current observations and then making predictions from that model. If future observations do not match those predictions, then the model must be altered or replaced in order to be able to account for the new observations. We can still build Jupiters in planetary formation models (as opposed to evolution models). We just now have more constraints upon how, where, and from what they form.

3. The Core of Jupiter

This claim is fairly silly at this point in time. Before the Galileo probe reached Jupiter in the 1990s, estimates of the size of the core of Jupiter were around 5-15 Earth masses, though the actual value varied considerably based upon what model you used and what you assumed (think back to section 2 above on how science is done).

Once Galileo reached Jupiter, it was able to take various measurements and it being in orbit allowed various tracking stations on Earth to record its position — allowing us to create a model of Jupiter’s gravity field. This, along with Jupiter’s moments of inertia, are needed to really constrain models of how big Jupiter’s rocky, solid core may be — or if it even has one.

The current state of the science, however, is inconclusive. The measurements from a decade ago were not good enough to conclusively state whether or not Jupiter has a core, and how large it may be. The data generally indicate that the core can be no larger than ~12 Earth masses — a far cry from whatever source Psarris used that said the core can be a maximum of only 3 Earth masses. But, the results from Galileo provide few limits towards the size of the core, and so it is still not well-constrained. One example reference is: Guillot, Gautier, & Hubbard, (1997), “New constraints on the composition of Jupiter from Galileo measurements and interior models” Icarus.

Another recent paper (where I use “recent” as meaning 2008) models what Jupiter’s core will be from first principles of physics and comes up with 14-18 ±6 Earth masses, within the range of what Galileo results show.

4. Formation Timescale

The next claim is that the solar nebula would disappear within 5 million years, but Jupiter takes 10-100 million to form. Obviously a problem!

But that’s what happens when you take the extreme numbers on the one hand with the opposite extreme numbers on the other, along with outdated models.

Let’s look at the 2004 publication, “Formation of the giant planets,” from 2004. The author clearly states that the protoplanetary disk will dissipate within 1-10 million years. So, yes, the “5 million years” number Psarris quoted is reasonably accurate and jives with the latest science.

However, this isn’t a “gotcha” moment for the YECs. It’s not as though they caught us astronomers with our proverbial pants down, that we didn’t realize there’s a contradiction here. We do. And yet again, this simply serves to place further constraints on how planets can form. And new models have come out of it.

The main model of forming planets is referred to as the “core instability model,” and it takes 6-8 million years to form a nice-sized gas giant. A possible problem. Then there’s the “disk instability model,” which is at-present poorly modeled but promises to form planets somewhat faster. This is still a very active area of research, and the state-of-the-art can change over the course of a grad student’s tenure. (Case-in-point: There was a grad student in my program who was 4 years ahead of me who, when I took the “Planetary Formation” class my third semester, sat in on the class. I asked him why, and he said that it’s changed so much in the 4 years since he took the class that he wanted to see what people were discussing now.)

One example is this model which proposes a diffusive redistribution of water as one of the primary mechanisms for forming Jupiter, and they can form Jupiter’s core within 100,000-1,000,000 years. Or there’s this paper, which forms the gas giants by concurrently accreting both solids and gas (generally thought to accrete separately). It can form Jupiter and Saturn in 1-10 million years.

Of particular interest in planet formation, to be honest, is how Uranus and Neptune form. All models require significantly longer timescales for them because they are farther from the sun. The fastest I’ve seen still requires ~2x as much time to form. them as Jupiter and Saturn, but they have to form while there’s still enough of the solar nebula left.

The very first line of a 2002 paper by Thommes, Duncan, and Levison states, “The outer giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, pose a challenge to theories of planet formation.” Even though this was written over 8 years ago, it still holds true today. They do pose challenges. But astronomers welcome those challenges as opportunities to learn more about the universe around us rather than throw up our hands and turn to a young-Earth creationist model, which is ultimately what Psarris wants you to do.

Final Thoughts

In general, Psarris is not presenting new arguments. I’ve heard of the last two before, though not the first two. And I can almost guarantee that he uses some of the classic arguments that I’ve addressed before in other sections of his DVD.

What’s the bottom-line? He points out apparent observational evidence that seems to conflict with the “evolutionary” picture of Jupiter. The problem with that is astronomers know about these problems – if they are problems at all – and we actually use them rather than ignore them in order to refine models of how Jupiter formed and has changed through time. All because it has 3x more nitrogen than the sun does not mean that astronomers will suddenly throw up their hands in despair and change their views to reflect that of young-Earth creationism.

But, for $19, that’s what Psarris is going to try to convince you of.

Update: I have posted a follow-up analysis of the Jupiter segment claims that are not addressed in this post here: “Jupiter: Further Confounding Those Darn Evolutionists.”

Is Saturn a Young System? Apparently, According to the Institute for Creation Research

Introduction

In the last few days, I’ve seen a few blog posts about Saturn being a young system on the usual creationist sites or those responding to the creationist sites, and being a bit behind in my blog, I thought I’d check out the usual suspects. Predictably, I found the article posted yesterday, May 7, 2009, on the Institute for Creation Research by my own favorite, Brian Thomas (who I picked apart in this blog post.

The article in question now is entitled, “Planetary Quandaries Solved: Saturn Is Young.” Okay, I admit I needed to take a deep breath with this one before reading it. After all, you’d think that if scientists had really discovered that Saturn had been created/formed recently, it would be all over the news, right? So right off the bat, the title is misleading, but understandable for a creationist website.

Then I picked through some of the references. Why? Because I actually do research on Saturn’s rings. I will be submitting revisions to a 50-page manuscript to the journal Icarus in the next 3 days that should be published in a special edition of the journal at some point this summer, and the conclusions from my simulations are that the ring system is at least 2 times as massive as before, likely more, and the implications are that the system can then easily be a corresponding amount older (e.g., at least 2 times older).

And, lo!, one of the references in the article directly cites my work — a ScienceNews article from September 2008. (Check out paragraph 4 of the article.) So now, it’s personal — Brian Thomas is using MY research (in part) to advance his creationist agenda, and I will not be silent about it. Hence this blog post.

What Is the Evidence the Saturnian System Is Old?

Let’s ignore all of the outside evidence that it’s old. Let’s ignore solar system formation models. Let’s ignore standard conventional wisdom. Let’s ignore the scientific problems about biblical creation. What is the evidence that the system is old, or at least not young.

Well, being a crater counter when I’m not running simulations of Saturn’s rings, I point to craters. Craters are used throughout the solar system as the only cross-planetary method of relative dating methods. In other words, how many craters a solid object has is the only thing that we can measure, at present, that gives us the relative ages of two solid surfaces.

Crater ages have been calibrated via Apollo lunar sample returns, and so – at least for our moon – we know that a certain number of craters per unit area corresponds with one age, and a different number corresponds with a different age — and we know what those ages are to reasonable accuracy for the moon.

Much work has been done and is being done to try to extrapolate what we know from our moon to other solid bodies, including Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the giant planets’ satellites. While the work isn’t perfect and uncertainties remain, the state of the research is that we can tell the difference between an object that is 6000 years old or 4 billion years old.

The surface of Titan? The last number I saw is that there are around 150 impact structures that have been observed, so the present-day surface age of Titan is reasonably young. Yes, I admit that — I’m not hiding it.

What about the surface of the other moons, such as, say, Iapetus? Well, take a look at the image to the right. There are A LOT of craters there, and the surface age of Iapetus is likely on the order of a few billion years (I say “likely” because I haven’t actually done the crater counts there). Now, unless you’re going to engage in some very special pleading, this is pretty good independent evidence that at least some parts of the Saturnian system is old.

Enter the Argument for Youth: Saturn’s Rings

I grew up reading that Saturn’s rings were young – probably formed only 100 million years ago after the breakup of a medium-sized moon, about the size of Saturn’s moon Mimas (shown on the right). That was based on a few things, including estimates of its mass from Voyager data as well as spectroscopic observations showing that the rings are fairly “fresh,” showing relatively little contamination by, basically, space dust.

This was still the predominant idea in 2002, when Jeff Cuzzi made his quite that Brian Thomas uses in the second paragraph of this article:

A history of mystery surrounds the youthful features of Saturn’s rings. Jeff Cuzzi, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, said in 2002, “After all this time we’re still not sure about the origin of Saturn’s rings….There’s a growing awareness that Saturn’s rings can’t be so old.” Cuzzi said, “There are two reasons to believe the rings are young: First, they are bright and shiny like something new. It’s no joke.” Indeed, after millions of years, the icy rings should have collected so much space dust that they should be charcoal-colored by now. Second, after only a few million years, the little moons embedded among the rings should have “flung away. This is a young dynamical system.”

And, this was still an issue in 2006, when I was just starting my simulations. The third paragraph of this article cites Josh Colwell in a presentation he gave. He was listing some of the current problems in a few-billion-year-old rings system, but the problems were still based on old data estimates for both the mass of the ring system and the viscosity of the particles (viscosity can be thought of as how well particles can transfer energy from one to another or how well they flow — water is not very viscous but molasses is).

Enter the simulations. I use Mark Lewis’ code for these simulations, and I make a point of that because Mark is quoted in the fourth paragraph of the ICR article:

Mark Lewis of Trinity University in San Antonio cautioned that it is still not known how they really clump. “It isn’t as straightforward as saying that high-density particles would lead to more clumping.”

This is true. There are many different parameters that go into these simulations to model the physics involved. Even though I explored a huge range of parameter space in my simulations, performing over 150 different N-body simulations that took over 27,000 CPU hours to run, I still did not explore the whole range of space, and a few of those parameters do affect how ring particles clump together.

Clumping is important because it directly affects how we estimate the mass of the rings. If the rings do not clump at all, then for every particle it will block an equal amount of light. Kinda like if you spread a lot of sand on a sheet of paper and you spread that sand evenly around, you will only see a little of the paper through the sand. But, if you use the same amount of sand and start to make little sand piles, you will see more and more of the paper.

That’s how we estimate the mass of the rings – by how much paper (how much light) can be seen through the rings. And, if the ring particles are clumped together, then you need many more ring particles to get the same amount of light blocked. What my simulations show is that clumping plays a much larger role than previously thought, and so we need more material in the rings to match the observed light-blockage.

Why do more massive rings mean that the ring system is older – or can be older? Because more massive rings means the viscosity is higher and so they spread out more slowly (one of the arguments they were young is that they would spread out too quickly). Also, it means they can be older because the same amount of pollution will get spread out over a larger area, and hence they won’t be as “dirty.” So, arguments that they are young because they don’t show a large amount of pollution can be answered that the pollution is just better hidden than we thought because there is more material within the rings to get polluted.

What was the connection to me here? Well, they’re my simulations. And that fourth paragraph has a quote from an article that talked about my results. Hence why I take this a little personally.

Moving On to Enceladus

In paragraph 5 of his article, Brian Thomas says that Saturn’s moon Enceladus “shows no hint of being 4.5 billion years old, but instead appears remarkably young.” I’m not going to harp on Brian’s grammar mistake here because I’m sure I have made my fair share of mistakes in this article grammar-wise, but I will say that it’s a poor journalist who doesn’t know what a sentence fragment is.

Anyway … this statement is simply wrong. It is true that the geysers that were discovered coming from Enceladus’ south polar region were a surprise, and they have made many people in the planetary community excited to find out why they are there. (Note – yes, new discoveries that challenge old models make scientists happy, not upset, as creationists would have you believe.) And a lot of Enceladus’ surface does appear to be young. However, a fair portion of the surface also appears to be very old, as shown in the picture on the right. Yes — I’m talking about all those craters.

Final Thoughts

That’s really the point of this article. So, no, the planetary quandary has not been “solved” to say that Saturn is young. Rather, the ring system can still easily be old based on the latest (and if I do say so myself, the greatest) simulations, and even though some features of Enceladus appear young and active, there are other parts of the moon that tell the tale of being ancient.

Defending the Big Bang: Young-Earth Creationist Claims

Introduction

After a long, work-related hiatus, I’m getting back to my 4-part series on the Big Bang. The purpose of this post is to look at the problems that Young-Earth Creationists (YECs) have with it, and the ways they try to get around it. I’ll give a quick hint as to the main reason: It’s not what the Bible literally says happened.

What Does the Bible Say?

In the Christian Bible, in Genesis 1, there is a clear progression of how we were formed:

1. God created heaven and earth.
2. God created light.
3. God separated water from land
4. God created plants.
5. God created stars.
6. God created the sun and moon.
7. God created ocean life, then birds. God continued to make animals.
8. God created humans. Well, he created man first, then woman. Then awhile later on in the bible they make more humans.

This all happened in the first 6 literal 24-hr days of existence. So yes, I am referring to biblical literalists for this post — it is my understanding that most who are not biblical literalists are more able to are generally able to reconcile more easily with the science.

Now, to be fair, Genesis 2 does imply a slightly different progression. However, my understanding is that most YECs tend to ignore that part, and so I will, too, for purposes of explaining their problems with the Big Bang.

What Do the Big Bang Theory … and Star-Formation Theory … and Solar System Formation Theory … and Evolutionary Theory Say?

The reason I didn’t leave this section heading at just the “Big Bang Theory” is because there is no one massive THEORY that explains how we get from the formation of the cosmos to people. However, for purposes of laying out a similar progression as elucidated in the bible, I will provide a synthesis to cover the comparable points:

1. After the universe began, atomic nuclei were the first thing to form that most people would recognize. This happened in the first few minutes.
2. Light was not able to stream freely until the universe had cooled sufficiently, about 370,000 years after the Big Bang.
3. Possibly as early as several tens to hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the first stars formed from gravitationally collapsed clouds of hydrogen and helium.
4. It took to at least the second generation of stars before planets could form because heavier atoms did not exist (they are formed in the violent supernovae events that massive stars undergo when they run out of fuel).
5. Planets formed much like stars, by collapsing clouds of atoms and molecules. Moons either formed around them just as planets formed around stars, or they were captured.
7. After the planet formed, life formed.
8. The first life on Earth can be traced back nearly to its formation, with about a 400 million-year gap (to about 4.1 billion years ago).
10. The first life was single-celled and they were the only form for about 2 billion years.
11. After multi-cellular life arose, it was able to become more complex more quickly because of the amount of variation that could arise.
12. Sea animals were likely the first, then land, then air.
13. Sometime around 1-4 million years ago, the first human-like ancestors evolved from a common ancestor of modern chips.

Now, you can see that this progression is quite different from that presented in the bible. Besides just the timescales involved, the progression is completely different from a literal reading of Genesis. For example, Genesis states that the sun and moon were (a) made at the same time, and (b) made well after Earth. The scientific consensus says something very different.

An Example of YEC Problems with the Big Bang Theory

There are so many places on the internet that I could draw material for this section of quotes or articles where YECs espouse their problems with the Big Bang. Answers in Genesis is an obvious one, as is the Institute for Creation Research.

For my examples, I will be using an episode of ICR’s radio show, narrated by Chris O’Brian, that originally aired on June 7, 2003, entitled, “Progressive Creationism #2 – The Big Bang.” I’m addressing this one instead of their, “Myth that the Big Bang Has Been Proven” episode because I have already addressed it in my post last year, “What Does it Mean to “Prove” the Big Bang? – De-Mything the “Myth” that It Has Not Been “Proven.”“

1. Ross Humphreys: (4:30 into episode) ~ “There’s absolutely no biblical case for the big bang. The order of events is all wrong. For example, you have in Genesis ch. 1 v. 1 you have ‘darkness,’ the Big Bang starts off with light. The first element that’s formed in the Big Bang is hydrogen, the first material that’s mentioned in Genesis 1:2 is water. … So the order is all wrong, not to mention the time scale.”

2. Henry Morris: (6:00 into episode) ~ “Cosmologists don’t all hold to the Big Bang theory. … Maybe the most prominent cosmologists and astronomers don’t believe it; not only Fred Hoyle, who’s well known, but many many others. I listed, if I recall, about 15 prominent astronomers who rejected the Big Bang theory.”

3. Morris: (7:00 into the episode) ~ “Most [astronomers] go to the evolution of something out of nothing – a quantum fluctuation of nothing into something. Alan Guth who invented that theory of inflation and the big Bang theory just ‘happened.’ In fact, a couple of authors have written something to the effect that you don’t have to have a cause to have the big bang, it just ‘happened.’ Nothing caused it at all.”

4. Humphreys: (9:00 into the episode) ~ “One of the things wrong with the big bang is that the Hubble Space Telescope is showing lots of facts that are discordant with it. And one of those facts is the fact that the Hubble Space Telescope is showing evidence of elements, atoms, of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen – such things like that – very far out, and the problem is that the Big Bang cannot explain those elements that far away. And that’s only one of many problems. In other words, as we’re finding out more and more data, we’re finding the Big Bang theory is not capable of explaining these data.”

5. Humphreys: (11:30 into the episode) ~ “Scripture’s quite clear about the fact that the universe has a center and we’re fairly close to it on a cosmological scale of things is good evidence that the Big Bang is wrong.”

6. John Morris: (12:00 into the episode) ~ “We can’t see this thing [the Big Bang] happenin’, we didn’t see it happen in the past — we’re trying to explain the past with what we see in the present. This whole idea is all mathematics, the Big Bang is really a mathematical solution to Einstein’s equations and … that’s what evolutionists have come up with.”

Responding to those YEC Claims

1. This illustrates one of the main lines of attack of YECs – it doesn’t agree with the bible. This is a simple argument from authority, where the authority is a book that was compiled over decades to hundreds of years, by many different people, and has many internal inconsistencies. It is also a book that refuses to be updated based upon new information — very different from science.

2. This is another argument from authority. “15 prominent astronomers” a consensus does not make. This is very similar to what the Discovery Institute does with their “Dissent from Darwin” list. They claim to have over 500 names on a list of Ph.D. scientists who supposedly “dissent from Darwin.” (I say “supposedly” because I watched a video recently where a person actually examined the list – only a small percentage actually worked in the relevant field of biology, and most of those people had no idea they were on the list or had asked Discovery Institute to take them off.) This is contrasted with the National Center for Science Education and their “Steve” list of over 1000 Ph.D. biologists who “support” Darwinian evolution … and are only allowed on the list if their name is Steve (or Stephanie). There is a big difference between a scientific consensus and being able to claim authority from a few dissenters.

In addition, the name Fred Hoyle is thrown out frequently by ICR. You can read about him here. In particular, Hoyle did reject the notion of the Big Bang. However, he was not in favor of what the YECs propagate … though the YECs leave that part out. Hoyle believed in the “steady-state” cosmology, which holds that the universe has always existed, and forces conspire to always make it look the same throughout time.

3. This is possible. However, it’s unsatisfactory to many, and there are various people working on models to explain how the universe may have been birthed. However, as I point out in another post, the Big Bang does not claim nor try to claim to describe how the universe formed. It just describes what happened AFTER it formed. So this is a straw man.

4. This is wrong. Yes, we find elements and molecules “very far away,” but none farther back than a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This is entirely consistent with the Big Bang theory, for – as I said earlier in this post – it took the first generation of stars to produce the heavier elements.

5. This is also not correct. There is no “center” to the universe, but that also has nothing to do with the Big Bang. The overall geometry of the universe is a completely separate issue from Big Bang theory. So, this claim is a combination of both incorrect information AND a non sequitur.

6. It always amazes me when YECs make this claim, in the generic form of: “Scientists say this happened, but no one was there to see it or we can’t observe it, therefore it didn’t happen.” Absolutely amazes me. Why? Because no one was there to see God do what they claim he did. But, anyway …

It’s true that we try to discern the past from the present. That’s what science is. Plain and simple in this case. Also, the whole idea may have started with solving Einstein’s equations, but as I explained in the second part of this 3-part series, there is actual observational evidence that backs it up, that fits with the Big Bang theory, and is currently best-explained by the Big Bang Theory over any other model – including Fred Hoyle’s steady-state.

Final Thoughts

I know I haven’t addressed every YEC issue with the Big Bang. That’s because it’s simply not possible. Even if I could address every single one that’s presently out there, they would come up with more, or simply refer back to biblical authority and its infallibility. At that point, it is simply not possible to argue any further. And I don’t try to.

What I try to address – and I have stated this numerous times when dealing with religious matters here – is not any religious faith-based aspect. It’s when the religion makes specific scientific claims that are NOT supported by real science, are distortions of real science, or are just plain wrong based on the science that I will address them.

Defending the Big Bang: The Four Pillars of the Modern Big Bang Theory

Introduction

This is the second post in my series on “Defending the Big Bang.” The focus of this one is to explain the four main pieces of evidence that support the modern Big Bang theory. You will notice that I am using the prefix, “modern,” to describe this theory, and that is because – like almost any scientific theory – it has been modified over time to address new information. However, the core essence of the idea – the universe started as an infinitesimal point/plane/field/brane of energy that grew to become our universe – has remained the same since it was first proposed.

Other posts in this series:

• Defending the Big Bang: An Introduction

Pillar #1 – Everybody Hates Us

Okay, not really, but that’s a good way to think about the first piece of evidence that supports the Big Bang – most far-away objects are moving away from us in every direction that we look. Unless we inhabit a very special place in the universe (which modern scientific thought does not allow unless all other explanations are ruled out), then this implies not that everything is moving away from us, but that everything is moving away from everything else.

This supports a Big Bang model because it fits very well with the idea the universe is expanding. The very hackneyed thought experiment is to picture a loaf of raisin bread rising in the oven. The bread is the fabric of space and the raisins are different observers (such as us on Earth in our galaxy). As the bread rises and expands, each raisin will move away from every other raisin. Raisins that are farther away will appear to move away faster. And this is precisely what is observed.

This phenomena was first discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929, and hence we have termed the expansion rate of the universe the “Hubble Constant,” H₀.

So if we’re now at a point where the universe is expanding, then logically if you run time backwards, it would be shrinking. And if you follow it back, say, 13.7 billion years, then the entire universe would be compacted into an infinitesimally small “object.”

Pillar #2 – The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation

The CMB was discovered in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson from Bell Labs (who later received a Nobel Prize for their discovery). In every direction they pointed their microwave receiver, they “heard” a noise. This noise came from the first photons that could stream freely through the universe that have become so stretched out over time (due to the universe’s expansion) that they now exist in the microwave range.

These photons are an “echo” left over from when the universe was approximately 380,000 years old. Before this time, the universe was completely opaque to light. This is because the electrons that existed at the time were too energetic – too hot – to be bound to atomic nuclei, and therefore were able to roam freely about. This means that photons could not move about freely because they kept being absorbed and re-emitted by the electrons.

After the universe had aged to around 380,000 years, it had cooled to approximately 3000 K. Electrons no longer had enough energy to overcome the attractive force of atomic nuclei, and they became bound. Light could now stream forth unimpeded. This process is called “recombination,” and this “first light” is what we now see as the CMB Radiation.

Pillar #3 – Abundance of Light Elements

Before the CMB, when the universe had only been in existence for about 1 second, individual protons and neutrons had already been created (along with all the quarks and leptons and other subatomic particles). It was no longer hot nor dense enough to create protons nor neutrons, and so the ratio of the number of protons to neutrons was frozen in (at about 0.223).

After the universe was a few minutes old, the temperature had dropped more and the era of nucleosynthesis could begin. This is when the light atomic nuclei of deuterium, tritium, and helium could form. But, after about 4 minutes, the universe had again cooled to a point where neutrons and protons could not combine, and so the primordial ratios of these elements were frozen.

Despite the universe having been around for another 13.7 billion years (minus 4 minutes), very little of the primordial material has been used to create stars. So astronomers can go to telescopes and measure these abundances. The Big Bang predicts about 72% of the material out there is hydrogen, and 28% is helium. Astronomers have found that about 24% is helium and 76% is hydrogen, and with error bars, this is in good agreement with the theory.

Pillar #4 – Growth of Structure

The nitty gritty parts of this one require a lot of computer modeling and telescope observations, but the basic idea that the Big Bang – the expansion of the universe from something that was smaller – and the way that it unfolded is the only scientific theory that explains how the large-scale structure that we observe today on the scale of gigantic super clusters of galaxies and the voids between them.

Final Thoughts

Any theory has to explain the available data. If it doesn’t, then it must be modified to account for the data, or it must be abandoned for one that can. I don’t and won’t pretend that the Big Bang theory that exists today has been the exact same one that existed decades ago. That’s not how science works, and that’s not how the history of the theory has played out. But, the Big Bang theory is the only scientific theory that explains all available observations, and propping it up are four fundamental observations.

Defending the Big Bang: An Introduction

Introduction

I’ve been trying to think of another series of posts to do after my fairly successful one on Planet X and 2012. And then it struck me – why not start at the beginning, or, perhaps more precisely, just after the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang.

There are a few main types of arguments (non-scientific) against the Big Bang (and yes, it should be capitalized because it is a singular noun event/theory). First, there are the young-Earth creationists who will generally argue against anything that science comes up with that goes against their sacred book. Second, there are the Intelligent Designers who out of necessity have to say that the Big Bang was put in motion by “an intelligence” because otherwise their arguments against a natural evolution fall apart. Third, there are the self-proclaimed “amateur scientists” who hold “alternatives” to Big Bang cosmology with things you may never have heard of before, like the “plasma theory” or “plasma universe.”

What I plan to do is, over the next few days, write about four posts addressing the issues raised and the scientific rebuttal. The first post will address the pillars of the modern Big Bang theory, and subsequent posts will likely reference it.

Other Posts in This Series

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