Fiat Ka-Boom et Ka-Boom Erat

Hunter Baker is the Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at Union University. His work regularly appears on the commanding heights of contemporary Christian thought in journals such as First Things and Salvo. In a recent issue of The City, I came across a passage that stopped me cold (emphasis mine):

"In the 1960s, two astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, discovered that when they used a radio telescope, they heard a constant sound in the background. It seemed to come from everywhere, and they couldn't get rid of it. Eventually, they came up with the theory that the sound was the reverberating echo of radiation created by the massive explosion associated with the creation of the universe. Think about that. The moment of creation still with us even now -- a sound so incomprehensively [sic] powerful that it continues to be heard."

To be fair, Mr. Baker's article was titled Thoughts on the Age; it did not purport to be scientific in any way. Nor was the quoted passage his main point, but merely illustrative of a much larger point -- The Point if you will -- namely that the Resurrection of Christ changed everything and the change continues to this day.

He does not cite his source, so we're left to conjecture about how or whether he filtered this information, or if he just misunderstood it. But more to add to his point than to nitpick his illustration, the evidence of the Big Bang discovered by Penzias and Wilson is much more dramatic in scale than that of a sound that "continues to be heard".

Penzias and Wilson reported "noise", which is engineer's parlance for static - undifferentiated radiation. At first, they disbelieved the universal direction of this "noise" thinking that their equipment was faulty, that their microwave receiver horn antenna (pictured below) had bird droppings in it, or something else. When they eliminated all the possible variables and remade their observations, the "noise" was still there - no matter where they aimed the horn - no matter what they did. It was unshakably present in every direction at about 3 degrees Kelvin: that's HEAT (or the near absolute lack of it) not sound! And it is that radiation at that wavelength that provides the nearly universally-accepted evidence of the Big Bang. The rate of expansion of the universe is known. The temperature of the background radiation is known. That makes the rate of the red shifting from light to heat known. The trap closes around a single explosive event about 13.7 billion years ago.

Is that a distinction without a difference? Maybe. After all, the Bible says Jesus is the mediator of a new covenant whose "sprinkled blood that speaks (continues to be heard) more graciously than the blood of Abel". But in my mind, the red-shifting of supremely intense light to low-grade heat shows that turning around the arrow of time points to one, inescapable Source. How great Thou art.

Just Too Cool not to Pass On

The final image of the progression out to the "edge" of the known universe is a bit misleading. The mere fact that I had to use the word "edge" is evidence of the difficulty. Mathematically, the universe is finite but unbounded; it has no edge. It's that unboundedness that's hard to envision. You can think of it as a sphere similar to that image but it's not spherical - it's more like a 4-dimensional sheet stretched over a curved surface - maybe that of a sphere, maybe something more complex. Does that clear it up for you? You're welcome.

What a Mighty God We Serve

I have always been fascinated by clouds. Lately, it occurred to me that the amount of power needed to put a cloud into the sky is easily calculated with some elementary school math. (I did promise no deep thinking in these precincts.)

Here’s the question: How much power (measured in horsepower, HP) is needed to raise a cloud 1 by 1 by 1 kilometers in dimensions to an elevation of 1500 feet in one hour? (I’ll straighten out the metric to English measures as we go.)

Horsepower is a measure of weight over distance in a unit time. So we need to know how much a cloud 1 billion (yes, 1000 x 1000 x 1000 meters!) cubic meters weighs in pounds. Happily, the US Geological Service provides that answer: the density of a fluffy cumulus cloud is 1.003 kilograms per cubic meter. That means an astounding 1.003 billion kilograms or 2.211 billion pounds! (It floats up there because the air is even denser.)

The formula for horsepower is

1HP = 550 ft-lb per sec

Substituting:

(550 x 1500 ft x 2,211,000,000 lb) / (60sec x 60 min) = 506,687,500,000 HP

The Space Shuttle engines develop 37,000,000 HP. So If I wanted to raise a single cloud according to specifications, I would have to produce enough power to launch 13,333 Space Shuttles. I have read that there is no precise measure of horsepower above 5000, but that’s still a prodigious amount of power. Yet the sun does it multiplied times every day and has done for billions of years.

Just one further calculation: how much power (in any measure you like) is required to do that and to create a being capable of pondering how much power it would take? I don’t know how to calculate it but I don’t think the power is available in the whole world. It has to come from outside this world. Pretty neat, huh?