Today’s New Reason To Believe

by Jeff Zweerink

One biblical message Reasons To Believe consistently echoes is the mandate to weed out false ideas by testing everything. Jeremiah 33:25 makes a testable statement about the laws which govern heaven and earth, namely that they do not change. Two teams of scientists have developed the most precise clocks to date. In doing so, they have provided a powerful way to test for any variation of one of those physical laws, the electromagnetic force.

For years, atomic clocks that used a transition in cesium atoms stood as the best time-keeping devices available. However, the precision of atomic clocks depends on the size of the transition, with larger transitions giving better precision (assuming all other effects remain equal). Two papers recently published in Science describe new atomic clocks based on optical transitions five orders of magnitude larger than the microwave transitions in cesium.

The clock from one group uses neutral strontium atoms and checks the precision of the clock with another clock that uses calcium atoms. The other group built their clocks from single aluminum and mercury ions. Both clocks exceed the precision of the best cesium clocks.

All atomic transitions depend on the fine-structure constant, which also determines the strength of the electromagnetic force. Repeated tests over one year of observations with the single-ion clocks constrain variations in the fine-structure constant to less than two parts in one hundred million billion per year.

Other groups have used black holes to constrain variations in the fine-structure constant and have achieved similar results. Furthermore, observations of distant quasars (described in the 2006 Breakthroughs booklet) demonstrate that the value of the fine structure constant early in the universe matches today’s value.

Thus, continued testing affirms one critical aspect of RTB’s cosmic creation model. We live in a universe governed by constant laws of physics.

by Jeff Zweerink

Do graphite whiskers in meteorites require shaving dark energy out of cosmological models?

Consider a familiar scenario. Your child lies on the couch acting unusually calm. You touch your their forehead and it feels warm. The insta-thermometer gives a reading of 101.2^oF from the child’s ear. The traditional thermometer in the mouth gives a reading of 101.4^oF. Without question, your child has a fever.

But does your conclusion change if you discover that the batteries in your insta-thermometer are dying?

Graphite whiskers may represent dying batteries among the evidence for dark energy in the universe. Astronomers use the brightness of Type Ia supernovae to measure the expansion rate of the universe. Because these supernovae each emit the same amount of light (after some straightforward calibrations), astronomers use the measured brightness to determine the distance to each galaxy containing the supernova. Comparing the distance with the redshift provides the expansion history of the universe. Because distant supernovae have appeared dimmer than expected, astronomers concluded that dark energy pervades the universe, causing its expansion to accelerate for the last 5 billion years.

One alternative explanation is that a “grey dust,” proposed to populate intergalactic space, absorbs the supernovae light in a way that mimics the effects of dark energy. By carefully analyzing the oldest remnants of the early solar system—namely carbonaceous chondrite meteorites—scientists from the Carnegie Institution have discovered one potential grey dust candidate. Specifically, the researchers found graphite whiskers in three different parts of the meteorite (see here).

Graphite absorbs light that is characteristic of distant supernovae very efficiently. Thus, if enough graphite whiskers were ejected from star-forming nebulae and/or supernovae out into the intergalactic medium, they might explain the dimness of Type Ia supernovae without needing to invoke dark energy. Much work remains to check the validity of this explanation, but finding the graphite whiskers was a critical first step.

In the bigger picture, the possibility of these results removing the necessity of dark energy remains small. Type Ia supernovae are not the only indicators of dark energy. Data from both the WMAP and the SDSS both provide compelling evidence for dark energy, independent of the supernovae data.

Dark energy stands as the strongest single piece of evidence for fine-tuning in the universe—evidence that effectively argues for the intervention of a supernatural Designer. While scientists may have discovered some dying batteries (the graphite whiskers), rather than shaving dark energy out of the cosmological models, this phenomenon remains charged for the long haul.

by Jeff Zweerink

Your child lies on the couch acting unusually calm. You touch his or her forehead and it feels warm. The instant thermometer gives a reading of 101.2^oF from the child’s ear. The traditional thermometer in the mouth reads 101.4^oF. Without question, your child has a fever.

Taken alone, any of the four techniques used to test for fever leads most parents to the proper conclusion that the child is ill. However, with each subsequent measurement, the strength of the parent’s conviction in the conclusion grows. Similarly, scientists will often draw the correct conclusions from one measurement of a quantity, but they continue to test the results by making additional measurements. If those measurements give the same results, scientists’ confidence in the conclusions grows.

Although potent evidence buttresses RTB’s cosmic creation model, results from a large survey of distant galaxies continue to provide dramatic confirmation. Scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have produced the most comprehensive survey of distant galaxies to date. Using a particular subset of galaxies in the survey—red luminous galaxies—the team of scientists measured numerous characteristics of the universe that could either verify or falsify RTB’s creation model.

The first step in measuring these characteristics required quantifying the correlations in the spatial distribution of the galaxies (shown as acoustic peaks in a graph), similar to the methods used to analyze the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The acoustic peaks from the galaxy distributions, if found, would provide a picture of the universe at an age of two billion years. This picture could then be compared with the corresponding picture imprinted on the CMB when the universe was only 380,000 years old.

Researchers did find the acoustic peak. The peak is “smoking gun” evidence that the density fluctuations measured in the CMB grew by simple gravitational attraction to become the galaxies and clusters of galaxies observed today. While previous work indirectly pointed to this conclusion, these results provide a direct confirmation.

The size, shape, and location of the acoustic peak also allowed the team to gauge other important characteristics of the universe. They found that:

1. The value of the density of matter extracted from the acoustic peak matches values obtained via other techniques.
2. The size of the acoustic peak requires the presence of dark matter during the era of CMB production.
3. The shape of the acoustic peak provides a geometrical argument for the existence of dark energy (a.k.a. space energy density).

More recently, the SDSS team measured the amount of dark energy in the universe today as 77.0 ± 5.1%. This value matches the measurements made by the WMAP team.

It is significant to note that the SDSS measurements are independent of previous techniques. Consequently, the results had the potential to contradict fundamental aspects of RTB’s creation model, which is derived from the Bible and predicts the basic features of big bang cosmology. Remarkably, the findings affirmed every aspect of the model pertinent to the study. Therefore, it can now be verified that the essential characteristics of RTB’s cosmic creation model are confirmed nearly beyond doubt.