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.

David H Rogstad, Ph.D.

Why does the Moon have almost exactly the same apparent size in the sky as the Sun, so that it perfectly blocks out the Sun in a solar eclipse? A few weeks back I mentioned the benefits to scientific discovery provided by this coincidence. By using it, astronomers learned about the Sun’s corona, were able to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and determined the past rotation rate of the Earth, all at a time earlier than would have been otherwise impossible. While there is no scientific reason for this remarkable coincidence, it suggests that God may have provided it as a tool so that we could more quickly discover characteristics of His creation.

Another coincidence has provided archeologists and paleontologists with an extraordinary tool for dating objects that contain carbonaceous material. I speak of carbon-14 with its just-right-for-dating half-life of 5,730 years. This coincidence is remarkable because C-14, along with the inert C-12, not only is an important component of fossils, but if C-14 had a longer half-life, it wouldn’tt provide the accuracy for more recent fossils; if shorter, it wouldn’t work for longer time periods.

In a paper published in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters (available in preprint here and as a news summary here), Jeremy Holt and colleagues note in their introduction that C-14 was not expected to have a long half-life. Based on previous models, physicists expected it to have a similar half-life to that of C-11 at 20 minutes, or of oxygen-14 at 1 minute, or O-15 at 2 minutes, or that of nitrogen-13 at 10 minutes. Why does C-14 have a half-life of 3 billion minutes? This has been a mystery to theorists for half a century.

However, in a breakthrough discovery, Holt and his collaborators have performed a new calculation that includes the change of the meson mass as it travels through an atomic nucleus. Mesons are atomic particles that are believed to mediate the force between two nuclei, and play a role in the radioactive process taking place in C-14. From these calculations the authors were able to account for why C-14, but not the other nuclei, has this long radioactive half-life.

Radiocarbon dating is a method that depends on the naturally occurring presence of C-14 in the material to be dated. Every living thing constantly exchanges C-14 with its environment as long as it lives. Once it dies, the exchange stops. Consequently, scientists assume that a fossil’s C-14 content does not change once the sample to be dated ceases to incorporate carbon, except for the amount gradually depleted radioactively with its 5,730-year half-life. If the amount present when its activity ceased can be determined, then the ratio of the initial amount to the existing amount is related to how long ago it was alive. While scientists must account for misuse of this technique and use proper calibration, in most cases it can provide a very accurate way to date many fossil samples containing carbon.

Radiocarbon dating is an important tool that has yielded rich insight into the events and processes in Earth’s history. Because many of the key truth-claims of the Bible are rooted in history, this technique has also provided support for their veracity.

by Jeff Zweerink

Scientists seek to discover a discover fundamental theory underlying all natural phenomena, including the four basic forces of in nature: the electromagnetic force, the gravitational force, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. In the past several hundred years, unification played a central role in many of the great scientific advancements.

Until the late 1600s, scientists thought the forces governing the heavens differed from those on Earth. Isaac Newton’s work unified our understanding and demonstrated that gravity governed both the heavens and Earth. Two centuries’ worth of measurements confirmed the validity of Newton’s ideas.

In the 1800s, James Clerk Maxwell realized that electricity and magnetism represented two manifestations of a unified electromagnetic force. Again, numerous laboratory measurements confirmed the correctness of Maxwell’s theory.

A number of other important unification scenarios developed during the 20th century. However, the tests of these scenarios became increasingly difficult. For example, in the early 1900s, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity (GR) unified his theory of special relativity with Newton’s universal gravitational theory. Thorough testing of GR required detailed observations of comparatively rare astronomical objects such as binary neutron stars and black holes.

Through the 1970s and 80s, three scientists worked out a theory to unify two of the four fundamental interactions: the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. Experiments carried out at the most powerful particle accelerator at the time demonstrated the validity of the electroweak theory.

Bolstered by success, scientists redoubled their efforts to find a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) which integrates the strong nuclear interaction with the electroweak theory. GUTs generically predict the formation of cosmic defects during the early cooling stages of the universe. These defects could be point-like (monopoles), one-dimensional (cosmic strings), two-dimensional (domain walls), or collapsing spheres (textures). Astronomical observations rule out domain walls and monopoles, but scientists are still searching for cosmic strings and textures.

During February 2006, RTB discussed one potential discovery of a cosmic string (and its subsequent disconfirmation) on Creation Update.

More recently, a team of scientists presented evidence for the discovery of a texture in the cosmic microwave background. Although further tests are required to confirm the authors’ claims, the significance of finding such a cosmic defect is enormous. The GUT energy is more than a trillion times beyond the capabilities of our most powerful particle accelerators. Because the cosmic defects form at the GUT energy scale, they provide a straight forward (and otherwise inaccessible) way to test GUTs to see which, if any, are correct.

RTB welcomes and anticipates such tests because of their potential to verify and refine critical aspects of our creation model—namely that a supernatural Designer created the universe to support human life.