Page 226 - Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

205
CHAPTER 14 IN THE BEGINNING …
CHAPTER 14 IN THE BEGINNING … 205

dimensions of the just-born universe into its constituent sets of 6 and 4 dimen-
sions was supposed to have taken place), we will mostly speak in unspecified terms

like “moments” or “time intervals.”

According to modern cosmology, at the time of the big bang, the universe was
a soup of radiation and particles—or, in the words of Singh (2004), “The universe

contained mainly protons, neutrons and electrons, all bathed in a sea of light.”
However, the universe was opaque, “like a thick, absorbing and impenetrable fog”
(Kaku 1994, 198) since “the universe was so hot that possibly forming atoms

were continually ripped apart by radiation as soon as they were formed.” Shortly
after the big bang, the universe had undergone an era of quick inflation , when the

30
universe expanded by perhaps a factor of 10 or more. With infl ation and ever
since, the universe has been cooling down. At about 380,000 years after the big
bang, cooling down reached 3,000 degrees (Kaku 2005, 58), a phase where atoms
could be created without being destroyed by radiation. This meant that “light
could travel long distances without being scattered, and the universe suddenly
became black and transparent” (Kaku 1994, 198). Electrically charged particles,
like electrons and protons, which disrupt the motion of light beams, combined
to form electrically neutral atoms, which then allowed light to travel freely. This
light, produced in the early stages of the universe, today suffuses all of space with
microwave photons (Greene 2004, 515).
Light, as we know it today, was “created” as a result of the creation of the first

atoms, about 380,000 years after the big bang .
Remnants of this light, which were theoretically conceived to permeate the
whole universe, could one day be observed. This prediction was first proposed by

George Gamow, and his students Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, soon after
World War II (in 1948). It was finally detected, by accident, in 1964 by the Bell

Laboratory scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson—an achievement that won

them the Physics Nobel Prize in 1978. This remnant from the big bang is known
as cosmic microwave background (CMB ) radiation.

A most interesting property of CMB is its extreme uniformity. The CMB
is measured by its temperature, which is 2.73 degrees above the absolute zero
(–273.15 °C). As revealed by precision satellite measurements, the temperature of
the radiation in one part of the sky differs from that in another part by less than a
thousandth of a degree. In fact, for many years this extreme uniformity was puz-
zling to scientists. If the universe was so uniform at the big bang , as revealed by

the CMB radiation, where are those slight fluctuations in the uniformity of the
universe that could eventually lead to the creation of galaxies and stars? After all,
uniformity of the CMB radiation meant uniformity in the distribution of matter
in the universe—and, consequently, no celestial objects, as we know them today,
could have been created.