From the extremely large and now we go to the infinitely small.
The very small is just as unfathomable as a limitless universe. You would think that looking at something up close, right under our noses, would be much easier to study and draw conclusions from. Far from it. In fact, the limits of how small is small would be almost philosophically equidistant from knowing for sure the limits of the very large if the center point is that of what we know today. But don't pay attention to that. Suffice it to say that we are far from knowing everything about what's going in the world smaller than atoms as the ones larger than our solar system.
At some point, no instrument will let us see all the way to the limits of the universe nor would the most powerful microscope enable us to see the very, very small. But, what we may lack in measuring tools is more than made up for with our limitless imagination.
What is amazing though is that more often than not, what begun as imaginary conjectures, even guesses, were proven true later with physical measurements. Not all, but even in failing to prove some of the theories, it sometimes led us to ones that gave us more knowledge that otherwise we would not have found.
400 B.C. in Greece, the ancient philosopher Democritus, was first to define the smallest of the small he could think of. He declared that 'atomos' - the uncuttable - was the smallest component of matter. You see, people then wondered what made up a grain of sand. Surely, one grain was made up of even much finer things. So 'Atomos', the atom had to be the smallest particle and nothing else can be smaller. That was true for centuries that followed. There was not much debate because there was nothing to see, except from the point of view of that Greek philosopher.
For centuries since after Democritus, and Greece was past its glory days, and Rome's grandeur ended in the rubble of two extinct empires, the atom was still "uncuttable" and indivisible. Then the microscope was invented. We had our first glimpse of what the protozoa and amoeba look like. Those and the bacteria became the smallest living things. Still no atom sighting. It was a few more centuries later when the first electron tunneling microscope was invented when an atom or a group of atoms were viewed for the first time. It was not as everybody, including scientists, imagined.
In case you haven't noticed, electron was mentioned two sentences ago. Suddenly, the atom is no longer that small and it can be 'cut' into smaller parts. 'Cut' is not really how to describe it. Let's just say that now the atom has smaller components still. But we can't see them. But we can now imagine that the atom has a center called a nucleus and inside it are protons and neutrons. Just outside the nucleus are electrons spinning around. We're simplifying everything here but let's leave it at that. First, how small are we talking about. Well, let's shrink ourselves down in size while magnifying the atom like blowing up a balloon. We're now sitting next to a basketball that is the nucleus of the atom. Inside the nucleus is, say, a proton the size of a tennis ball. An electron would be a grain of sand but it's farther out almost 10 miles away. That's about as well as we can imagine how small is small. And how far distant the electron is from its nucleus. And the thing is, there are yet smaller things that make up the electron.
As described, an atom with one proton and one electron, is what we now know as a single element of hydrogen. It is the most elementary and the most abundant, by as much as a quintillion fold, of all elements in the universe. And, from that single element, we have just identified the building block of the physical world. But the hydrogen atom can still be 'broken down' into far smaller units. If the atom was an orange, we can now break it further down to its seeds, pulp and the outer rind. Furthermore, the electron is in fact made of even finer little parts. What? You may ask.
How did scientists know what these parts were? What they do can only be explained in an analogy. Imagine two high powered race cars on the Indy Race track, running at full speeds exceeding 250 mph in opposite direction and colliding head on. After the smash up the parts from the debris, are identified individually. If there was combustion, the energy expended can be measured, including what can be attributed to the loss of the parts as the source of the energy (as when firewood is reduced to ember, the material loss contributed to the production of fire and smoke). That's what happens at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. It collides heavy protons traveling opposite each other at near the speed of light and the collision is recorded with special cameras and radiation detectors.
Here's the thing though. The debris, known as sub-atomic particles, at the LHC don't linger for very long. Actually, they exist only for the briefest of an instant. Whatever or however you can imagine as the briefest moment of time, these sub-atomic particles live as if they never existed. Nothing can be briefer than that. Don't give yourself a headache. What the scientists see in those detectors are akin to ghostly apparitions. And that's what they are. They appear quickly and they make a quick transition into something else.
If you think that is strange, let's try this analogy. Boil a pot of water until every drop had evaporated. First they turn into steam and then as water vapor that we could no longer see. They're all over your kitchen. If we let the temperature cool down, and assuming your kitchen is hermetically sealed, soon you will see water droplets or condensation all over. The heat put out by the stove energized the water, turning it into steam and water vapor became invisible. The moment the water vapor loses energy, it turned itself into water again. And with that, you've just understood the law of conservation of energy - the energy from the stove to the water, and to steam, dissipated to the entire area of the kitchen. Keep this in mind because a few paragraphs down, you will see what this means.
Everything we can see and touch and feel (a cool breeze or a waft of warm moist air) and taste and smell - in other words, the entire universe - was all at one time in one infinitely small bundle of pure energy and infinitely hot. Do not be too alarmed by this radical view. It was not too alarming when we first encountered the same description from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis:
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.
The sudden explosion that modern cosmology describes as The Big Bang is similarly noted in Genesis with the same instantaneity. It is almost the same description for both except for the divine command from a Creator who willed it, "Let there be light". Even those who take the Genesis verses as allegories, they do believe that the universe was created from out of nothing. How different is the Big Bang Theory - the sudden explosion from a single point - from "let there be light'? If one were to rewrite the Genesis verses, one might as well change the order and make verse 3, the very first verse. Let there be light is as instantaneous as the theoretical beginning of the universe, as explained by modern cosmology. The only difference is that in Genesis, the Creator willed the explosion of light to happen; whereas, in cosmology, the whole thing just happened - scientists not worrying at all as to why. We can never know or read the mind of God, as Stephen Hawking wishfully longed, but let's be satisfied that we were given the mind to get to a feeble understanding of God's creation.
Arguably, scientists and theologians actually do have available to them a common ground from which their views are not so much different as they are parallel to each other, that is, where the origin of the universe is concerned. The Big Bang theory occurred as instantly as "Let there be Light". Having said that, what Genesis lacked in details, cosmology had filled in the minute step-by-step incremental moments. As a side note, the theory of the sudden explosion from which the universe came from was vehemently opposed by scientists when it first came out. The very idea of a sudden origin was looked upon as supporting the creation as described in Genesis. Fred Hoyle, a prominent British astronomer in the 60's, so maligned the whole idea that he jokingly called the theory the big bang. The phrase stuck and so it is what scientists call it even today, although with much more scholarly respect and acknowledgement that their predecessors were wrong.
As simply as we can put it, matter, as we know it today, is nothing more than condensed energy. We are not too far off. It was part of what condensed from that explosive bright light in an instant of creation. But in one hundred thousandth of a second after the explosion, protons, neutrons and other sub-atomic particles formed. Don't bother about nomenclature here because they're not that important. However, since I mentioned earlier that electrons are made up of still smaller stuff, then let's introduce the made-up word that scientists use to call them - quarks! And because there are several types, scientists this time used common words to described each one, i.e., strange, charm, up, down, top and bottom quarks. No reason for those names, except as a sort of ID and that each name has nothing to do with how they behave. There are other terms but suffice it to say that there are smaller stuff that make up the smallest stuff we can think of.
Present day cosmologists believe that one hundred seconds after the big bang, hydrogen and helium and other lighter elements formed. For three hundred thousand years after that, the condensed matter filled the entire space* that was there and the growing cosmos became dark. That's what scientists believe. Let's go back to Genesis 1 verse 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. ( *It is critical to mention here that space was simultaneously being created as the universe was expanding).
Soon after 300,000 years as space kept expanding, as the elements kept spreading as well, the universe became transparent, which could mean, "Let there be light", as well. It was a billion years later when stars and galaxies formed.
In a nutshell, the universe we know today came from the smallest of the small that we can ever imagine, and everything we touched today is made up of rally small stuff.
We all should be in awe of the vastness of the universe and if we ever have any doubt that the creation occurred, think of the small ghostly particles that make up everything, because they could very well be what the Book of Genesis referred to as, "The Spirit of God".
At some point, no instrument will let us see all the way to the limits of the universe nor would the most powerful microscope enable us to see the very, very small. But, what we may lack in measuring tools is more than made up for with our limitless imagination.
What is amazing though is that more often than not, what begun as imaginary conjectures, even guesses, were proven true later with physical measurements. Not all, but even in failing to prove some of the theories, it sometimes led us to ones that gave us more knowledge that otherwise we would not have found.
400 B.C. in Greece, the ancient philosopher Democritus, was first to define the smallest of the small he could think of. He declared that 'atomos' - the uncuttable - was the smallest component of matter. You see, people then wondered what made up a grain of sand. Surely, one grain was made up of even much finer things. So 'Atomos', the atom had to be the smallest particle and nothing else can be smaller. That was true for centuries that followed. There was not much debate because there was nothing to see, except from the point of view of that Greek philosopher.
For centuries since after Democritus, and Greece was past its glory days, and Rome's grandeur ended in the rubble of two extinct empires, the atom was still "uncuttable" and indivisible. Then the microscope was invented. We had our first glimpse of what the protozoa and amoeba look like. Those and the bacteria became the smallest living things. Still no atom sighting. It was a few more centuries later when the first electron tunneling microscope was invented when an atom or a group of atoms were viewed for the first time. It was not as everybody, including scientists, imagined.
In case you haven't noticed, electron was mentioned two sentences ago. Suddenly, the atom is no longer that small and it can be 'cut' into smaller parts. 'Cut' is not really how to describe it. Let's just say that now the atom has smaller components still. But we can't see them. But we can now imagine that the atom has a center called a nucleus and inside it are protons and neutrons. Just outside the nucleus are electrons spinning around. We're simplifying everything here but let's leave it at that. First, how small are we talking about. Well, let's shrink ourselves down in size while magnifying the atom like blowing up a balloon. We're now sitting next to a basketball that is the nucleus of the atom. Inside the nucleus is, say, a proton the size of a tennis ball. An electron would be a grain of sand but it's farther out almost 10 miles away. That's about as well as we can imagine how small is small. And how far distant the electron is from its nucleus. And the thing is, there are yet smaller things that make up the electron.
As described, an atom with one proton and one electron, is what we now know as a single element of hydrogen. It is the most elementary and the most abundant, by as much as a quintillion fold, of all elements in the universe. And, from that single element, we have just identified the building block of the physical world. But the hydrogen atom can still be 'broken down' into far smaller units. If the atom was an orange, we can now break it further down to its seeds, pulp and the outer rind. Furthermore, the electron is in fact made of even finer little parts. What? You may ask.
How did scientists know what these parts were? What they do can only be explained in an analogy. Imagine two high powered race cars on the Indy Race track, running at full speeds exceeding 250 mph in opposite direction and colliding head on. After the smash up the parts from the debris, are identified individually. If there was combustion, the energy expended can be measured, including what can be attributed to the loss of the parts as the source of the energy (as when firewood is reduced to ember, the material loss contributed to the production of fire and smoke). That's what happens at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. It collides heavy protons traveling opposite each other at near the speed of light and the collision is recorded with special cameras and radiation detectors.
Here's the thing though. The debris, known as sub-atomic particles, at the LHC don't linger for very long. Actually, they exist only for the briefest of an instant. Whatever or however you can imagine as the briefest moment of time, these sub-atomic particles live as if they never existed. Nothing can be briefer than that. Don't give yourself a headache. What the scientists see in those detectors are akin to ghostly apparitions. And that's what they are. They appear quickly and they make a quick transition into something else.
If you think that is strange, let's try this analogy. Boil a pot of water until every drop had evaporated. First they turn into steam and then as water vapor that we could no longer see. They're all over your kitchen. If we let the temperature cool down, and assuming your kitchen is hermetically sealed, soon you will see water droplets or condensation all over. The heat put out by the stove energized the water, turning it into steam and water vapor became invisible. The moment the water vapor loses energy, it turned itself into water again. And with that, you've just understood the law of conservation of energy - the energy from the stove to the water, and to steam, dissipated to the entire area of the kitchen. Keep this in mind because a few paragraphs down, you will see what this means.
Everything we can see and touch and feel (a cool breeze or a waft of warm moist air) and taste and smell - in other words, the entire universe - was all at one time in one infinitely small bundle of pure energy and infinitely hot. Do not be too alarmed by this radical view. It was not too alarming when we first encountered the same description from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis:
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.
The sudden explosion that modern cosmology describes as The Big Bang is similarly noted in Genesis with the same instantaneity. It is almost the same description for both except for the divine command from a Creator who willed it, "Let there be light". Even those who take the Genesis verses as allegories, they do believe that the universe was created from out of nothing. How different is the Big Bang Theory - the sudden explosion from a single point - from "let there be light'? If one were to rewrite the Genesis verses, one might as well change the order and make verse 3, the very first verse. Let there be light is as instantaneous as the theoretical beginning of the universe, as explained by modern cosmology. The only difference is that in Genesis, the Creator willed the explosion of light to happen; whereas, in cosmology, the whole thing just happened - scientists not worrying at all as to why. We can never know or read the mind of God, as Stephen Hawking wishfully longed, but let's be satisfied that we were given the mind to get to a feeble understanding of God's creation.
Arguably, scientists and theologians actually do have available to them a common ground from which their views are not so much different as they are parallel to each other, that is, where the origin of the universe is concerned. The Big Bang theory occurred as instantly as "Let there be Light". Having said that, what Genesis lacked in details, cosmology had filled in the minute step-by-step incremental moments. As a side note, the theory of the sudden explosion from which the universe came from was vehemently opposed by scientists when it first came out. The very idea of a sudden origin was looked upon as supporting the creation as described in Genesis. Fred Hoyle, a prominent British astronomer in the 60's, so maligned the whole idea that he jokingly called the theory the big bang. The phrase stuck and so it is what scientists call it even today, although with much more scholarly respect and acknowledgement that their predecessors were wrong.
As simply as we can put it, matter, as we know it today, is nothing more than condensed energy. We are not too far off. It was part of what condensed from that explosive bright light in an instant of creation. But in one hundred thousandth of a second after the explosion, protons, neutrons and other sub-atomic particles formed. Don't bother about nomenclature here because they're not that important. However, since I mentioned earlier that electrons are made up of still smaller stuff, then let's introduce the made-up word that scientists use to call them - quarks! And because there are several types, scientists this time used common words to described each one, i.e., strange, charm, up, down, top and bottom quarks. No reason for those names, except as a sort of ID and that each name has nothing to do with how they behave. There are other terms but suffice it to say that there are smaller stuff that make up the smallest stuff we can think of.
Present day cosmologists believe that one hundred seconds after the big bang, hydrogen and helium and other lighter elements formed. For three hundred thousand years after that, the condensed matter filled the entire space* that was there and the growing cosmos became dark. That's what scientists believe. Let's go back to Genesis 1 verse 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. ( *It is critical to mention here that space was simultaneously being created as the universe was expanding).
Soon after 300,000 years as space kept expanding, as the elements kept spreading as well, the universe became transparent, which could mean, "Let there be light", as well. It was a billion years later when stars and galaxies formed.
In a nutshell, the universe we know today came from the smallest of the small that we can ever imagine, and everything we touched today is made up of rally small stuff.
We all should be in awe of the vastness of the universe and if we ever have any doubt that the creation occurred, think of the small ghostly particles that make up everything, because they could very well be what the Book of Genesis referred to as, "The Spirit of God".
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