Au-some!

This past month there have been numerous stories about how all the gold in the universe was created.  Just google "gold neutron star", and you'll see what I mean. So being me, I wanted to read the original research: An R-Process Kilonova Associated with the Short-Hard GRB 130603B, E. Berger, W. Fong, and R. Chornock of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (1)

I first gave it a cursory read. I couldn't find a mention of the creation of gold anywhere, so I took advantage of technology and used the Find command in my browser. Nothing there, but then I realized why. Someone at Harvard must have written a press release, and in order to get the media interested in the research - which is legitimately important - they  made it sexy and what is sexier than gold.

So I sat down to read the kilonova paper carefully. I didn't have to read far before I read the phrase r-process and Justin Huang's graduate level nuclear physics class came to mind. [Although r-process is in the title, my mind didn't click in until later.]

First some background for those of you not nuclear or astrophysicists. After a microsecond, protons and neutrons formed and couple of minutes or so later, the universe had cooled enough for primordial deuterium, and helium nuclei to form.  Many years later, 379,000 actually, electrons combined with these nuclei to form atoms. It wasn't until a hundred or so million years that stars began to shine.

CREDIT: Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA 304)
of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)

Fred Hoyle and his colleagues in a classic paper (2) showed how the elements other than hydrogen and the primordial helium were created. I won't go into a long explanation of stellar evolution, but the elements up to iron were created by nuclear fusion. The Sun is fusing two hydrogen nuclei into a helium nucleus and this process releases a lot of energy (we call it sunshine). I'm oversimplifying here, but when the hydrogen in our Sun is depleted in about 5 billion years, it will start to fuse helium. When the helium is gone, our star will be a very hot ball of carbon and oxygen. The Sun will be a white dwarf - basically a very large and very hot diamond in the sky. 

Stars more massive than the Sun will keep fusing and shining up to the point where iron is formed. The process stops there because to fuse iron and elements heavier than it requires an input of energy.

If you now look at a periodic table, you should wonder where did all the other elements like gold come from. There are two processes that are responsible for these heavy elements: the r (rapid) and s (slow) processes. The s-process cannot create elements heavier than lead and this method occurs in old giant stars. 

The Periodic Table of the Elements with hydrogen, helium, iron, and gold highlighted.

Hoyle et al. suggested that the r-process occurred in type II supernovae. This sort of supernova comes about when the thermal motion of the nuclei is not enough to counteract the effect of the star's self-gravity. The core of the star collapses and the outer layers are violently ejected. Depending on the initial mass of the star, the result of the core collapse is either a neutron star or a black hole.

The problem with this hypothesis is that given the abundance of the elements either most supernovae did not expel much matter or that supernovae ejects only a small amount of the material. Given the intensity of a type II supernova, either possibility seems unlikely.

The Crab Nebula, the aftermath of a supernova.
CREDIT: NASA/ESA

One possibility was the collision of neutron stars (3), and here we're back to the kilonova paper. Berger and his co-workers present evidence of "the presence of excess near-IR emission matching the expected brightness and color of an r-process powered transient (a kilonova)" and the inferred mass ejected during the collision "matches the expectations from numerical [neutron star] merger simulations."

My head exploding.
CREDIT: Gil Thorpe

Look at that ring on your finger or the chain around your neck. Then imagine two neutron stars colliding. 

References:

(1) An R-Process Kilonova Associated with the Short-Hard GRB 130603B, E. Berger, W. Fong, and R. Chornock, http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3960v2.

(2) Synthesis of the Elements in Stars, E.M. Burbridge, G.R. Burbidge, W.A. Fowler, and F. Hoyle, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 547 - 650 (1957).

(3) R-Process in Neutron Star Mergers, C. Freiburghaus, S. Rosswog, and F.K. Thielemann, The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 525, No. 2, pp. L121-L124 (1999)

The United States Bullion Depository, Fort Knox, KY, shown here in a scene from the James Bond movie Goldfinger.
CREDIT: United Artists/Eon Productions

Wingnut Thermodynamics

Bryan Fischer, part-time nuclear physicist, now lectures on thermodynamics.*

Remember that the second law of thermodynamics - one of powerful evidences for creation - is that neither energy nor matter can be either created or destroyed.

Um… Bryan? That's the first law of thermodynamics, also known as the conservation of energy. The second law states that the entropy of a closed system never decreases.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kZtoVc1gQw

A brief digression. Did you notice how he emphasizes the word law? That is a sure sign that the speaker doesn't understand what a scientific law is or how it differs from a basic principle and from a theory.

Now he makes a claim about the origin of the universe.

There is nothing in inside the observable universe that can explain the origin of matter or energy.

Why is it that people like Bryan Fischer make statements like this as though they are undisputed facts? The origin of energy (mass is just one form of energy) is an open scientific question. Lawrence Krauss and Brian Greene are just two physicists who have written popular accounts on the nature of matter and energy.

So what is the logical conclusion? Someone outside the universe put it there.

Logical conclusion? Fischer must never have taken a course in logic. First he assumes the truth of his premise. Then he creates a false dilemma - either there is no one or there is someone. Notice the lack of something. Of course, the someone he has in mind is his version of the christian deity.

The universe is headed toward a heat death.

Now Fischer gets the 2nd law essentially correct. The universe will according to current models keep expanding, increase in entropy, and grow very cold.

This is a scientific law predated by the psalmist back in 900 B.C.

Wait for it.

Of old you laid the foundation of earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain.

Psalm 102, verses 25 and half of 26.  Then he makes a statement as though it were a fact.

Matter and energy are not eternal. It had a beginning and it's got an end. 

Earlier he calls the eventual state of the universe a heat death. I think he does this so his listeners can conjure in their minds the biological meaning of death, but in physics, this term first coined by Lord Kelvin means that the universe has cooled to such a point that the universe's entropy is maximized and the energy in the universe has been uniformly distributed.

My question about Fischer and others like him is 

Are you deliberately misleading your followers about science 

or do you really believe this crap?"

If you'd like to hear Fischer discuss geology and paleontology, chick here. You will be entertained when he claims only eyewitness accounts can be trusted.

*Thanks to Right Wing Watch for "monitoring and exposing the activities of the right-wing movement."

Baby Pictures

A baby picture of the universe!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/planck/multimedia/pia16873.html

This is a map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the leftover radiation of the Big Bang, made by the Planck mission of the European Space Agency.    This light was emitted when the universe was 380,000 years old. 

There's a number of AWESOME results here.

1. The colors represent small fluctuations in the temperature of the radiation, about 1 part in 100,000 or 0.001%.  Since the average temperature is a mere 2.73 K (2.73 degrees above absolute zero), the fluctuations are roughly 0.00003 K.  To put this in perspective, imagine setting your oven to 350ºF and it never varies by more than 0.008ºF.

2. This light was created just 80,000 years after the universe was cool enough for neutral hydrogen atoms to form.

I couldn't find any baby pictures,
but here I am when I'm about
10% of my current age.

3. It provides the best estimate for the age of the universe.  13.82 billion years.

4. The universe is 4.9% normal matter (protons, neutrons, and electrons for the most part.) Dark matter makes up 26.8% and dark energy 68.3%.

5. The universe is amazingly uniform, isotropic in the physicist's lingo. But there is a tiny difference in the size of the fluctuations in one half of the sky as compared to the other half.  Intriguing!

6. This picture represents the universe when it was just 0.00002750 of its present age.  Let's compare this to one of my students who say is 20 years old; this student was only 5 hours at 0.00002750 of 20 years.    

Where did the universe come from? Part 2

In part 1, I showed that a literal reading of the Bible leads to a litany of contradictions. In support of this position, Dr. John Haught, a theologian from Georgetown University, said during a panel discussion that appeared after the Discovery Channel program Curiousity: Did God Create the Universe that the Bible is not a source of cosmology. (I'll go further and say it's not a chemistry, geology, or biology book either.) His view is that the Bible is a source of hope for Christians.

So maybe someone can explain to me why so many people think that a scientific explanation for the origins of the universe is an attack on Christianity. Particularly in light that the central tenet of Christianity, if I remember my catechism correctly, is that salvation comes through Jesus. No where in the Bible does it demand that you believe that God created the universe.

But I digress from the main point of this post: The Prime Mover or the First Cause. Simply put, God had to create the universe, because how else does it come into existence.

The argument for the First Cause goes like this:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Aristotle is credited for first making the first of this sort of argument, the cosmological argument. Many Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers have spent much energy on this.

Sounds like a pretty good argument, doesn't it.

Now if I were a philosophy professor teaching logic, I could spend an entire semester tearing this apart, but I'm a physics professor. So let's examine it with the physical evidence.

Statement #1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. This statement seems to be common sense, but it's physically wrong. All of quantum mechanics is built upon the notion that nature is governed by chance. It's often difficult for many physics students to comprehend this. Even Einstein didn't like this probabilistic nature, but your computer, your cell phone, your TV, the scanner at the grocery store, and the light sensor on lamp poles all work because nature is random, not deterministic.

Let me illustrate with an experiment: The Two-Slit Experiment. Watch this You Tube video for a good explanation of the experiment. The basic set up is the experimenter shoots a beam through two small slits onto some detector; let's just call it a movie screen. It doesn't matter what the beam is. It could be a beam of photons (a laser), a beam of electrons, or a beam of atoms. What we measure on the movie screen is where each photon, electron, or atom lands. We find that where each thing lands is completely random; that is, where it ends up is governed by the laws of chance. The implication is that nothing causes that tiny bit to land where it does.

You don't have to like this result, but you have to realize that every modern device you use works, because nature, at its most basic level, is not caused.

Statement #2: The universe began to exist. Hawking believes that the universe began with the Big Bang out of nothing, and the laws of physics allows for light and matter to be created out of nothing. However, many physicists for good reason hypothesize that this universe is one of many, and at the Big Bang, sprung from the mutiverse, and it's conceivable that the multiverse has been around forever. As with all science, when there are competing hypotheses, experiments decide. We'll have to wait for those results.

So if you're with Hawking, you can accept the second statement, but if you're with physicists like Brian Greene, you don't.

Statement #3: Therefore, the universe has a cause. The argument failed with the first statement. Therefore, the universe was not caused.

I'll leave with this statement from Hawking. "Science does not deny religion. It provides a simpler alternative."

Where did the universe come from? Part 1

Allow me to tell you how I'm approaching this post. In part 1, I thought I was setting up a straw man argument. I will be arguing against a position - the biblical story of creation - that is held by strict creationists like Ken Ham. We encountered Mr. Ham and his Answers in Genesis site in an earlier post - Your Elementary School Teachers Were Right. I don't think I know any people who hold this view. Later, in part 2, I will discuss the notion of the Prime Mover or First Cause, and what roles god may play in the universe.

First I will describe what young Earth creationists - Biblical literalists - say about creation. When I started thinking about writing this, I had hoped that this position is truly a minority opinion among the religious, but I since have found a 2010 Gallup poll found that 40% of Americans believe in this version.

The Book of Genesis (1:3-2:4) says that on the first day, he created the heavens. the Earth, and light.(1) The firmament is created on the second day. This means that the sky is like a tent over the Earth. Land, sea, and plants are created on the third day.(2) God on the fourth day puts lights in the firmament; these would be stars including our Sun plus the Moon.(3) On the last two days, he creates life, first sea life and birds, then land animals, and finally humanity.

Furthermore, through the analysis of Biblical chronology, young Earth creationists arrive at the age of the universe at about 6000 years.

What is the scientific consensus? (N.B. here I am only describing the results of science. I leave a general description of how scientists have arrived at these results for a later post.) The universe is 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years old. About 10-37 seconds after the Big Bang, the universe entered a period of inflation in which it expanded exponentially. This lasted for about 10-32 seconds. The universe then consisted of an extremely hot plasma consisting of quarks, gluons, and electrons. Through a process not yet understood, matter began to dominate over anti-matter.

A billionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe cooled enough so that quarks started to be bound and protons and neutrons were formed. At the one minute mark or there abouts, hydrogen and primordial helium formed. Finally, after a few hundred thousand years, the universe became transparent. The light left over from this time forms the cosmic microwave background.

Galaxies began forming in the first million years. The oldest known galaxy, IOK-1, formed about 750 million years after the Big Bang. Our Milky Way galaxy formed between about 9 billion years ago.

Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago from the accretion disk of the Sun. Life appeared about 3.8 billion years ago; 2 billion years ago is when eukaryotic cells evolved. One billion years later, life became multicellular. Lots of stuff happens, and then around 2 million years ago, our Homo ancestors come onto the scene. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens arise in Africa 200,000 years ago.

Now here's the thing. Science completely conflicts with a literal interpretation of the Bible. I'm not an expert in cosmology or in evolutionary biology, but I can back up everything I wrote with evidence - tons of it.

(1) The image to the right is a T-shirt popular with physics students
(2) In Genesis 2:5, plants came after the creation of man.
(3) Notice the Moon is included as a source of light. Maybe I'm being picky, but the Moon is not a source, but only reflects the Sun's light.