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When Judaism Meets Science
Posts Tagged ‘Isaiah’
In the Beginning and In the End
Credit: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
When the cosmos was about to be created — the fundamental forces of nature being unified in an exceedingly hot, dense point and galaxies, stars, planets, even stable matter itself yet unformed — there was no recognizable space, no measurable time. There was no darkness over the surface of the deep because there was no deep, no surface, no over and no under. No wind hovered over any water, as there was not yet any hydrogen or oxygen, much less any combination of them in the form of water. And there was no wind, either. What there was — all that there was — was chaotic, pulsating Potential.
At some moment, for reasons yet unclear, what was began to change into what is. Gravity separated first from the combined strong nuclear and electroweak forces. Then the strong force emerged and the electroweak force devolved into the electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force. The nascent universe, still small and unbelievably hot and turbulent, was an ever changing soup of energy and sub-atomic particles. It was all good, and about to become better.
Within one second from the mystery of beginning, our mini-universe inflated, and then started to expand. Its temperature dropped from an unfathomably hot state of 100 nonillion degrees Kelvin to only one trillion degrees, but that relative cooling was sufficient for sub-atomic particles to become protons and neutrons and other heavier particles. At the three minute mark, with the temperature now down to a cool billion degrees, particles fused into atomic nuclei, mostly hydrogen nuclei, some helium nuclei and other kinds as well. This, too, was good. read more
An Earth-like Exoplanet, Extraterrestrial Life and the Messianic Age
The most Earth-like planet yet discovered has been found right in our neighborhood according to a report in an April 18, 2014 issue of the L.A. Times from the journal Science. By sifting through observations from more than 100,000 distant stars, astronomers say they have discovered the first definitive Earth-sized planet that orbits in a habitable zone where water could exist in liquid form — a necessary condition for life as we know it.
Scientists don’t know whether the planet has water or a protective atmosphere. But they said the landmark discovery gives astronomers great hope that a bumper crop of Earth-like planets is waiting to be found nearby. “This is really a tip-of-the-iceberg discovery,” said Jason Rowe, an astronomer who spent a year analyzing data gathered by the Kepler space telescope.
The planet is 10% bigger than Earth, and its parent star is a red dwarf, smaller and dimmer than our sun but that is good news because red dwarfs are the most common star in our galaxy. UC Berkeley astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, who discovered the first exoplanet said. “This is the best case for a habitable planet yet found. The results are absolutely rock solid.” read more