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Eternity Paradoxes
There was just one hitch in this wonderful synergy of atomism and
thermodynamics; if thermodynamics were true, then the universe could not
have existed forever. It would have run down long before eternity. The whole
problem, of course, is that eternity is a very long time, which materialists
insisted upon in order to avoid the question of creation. But if eternity
really were that long, there were a number of glaring inconsistencies,
especially in astronomy, but more specifically, with general physics that
could not be explained away. Since Maxwell, like Gassendi before him, had
not wed atomism to anti-creationism, it is significant that these puzzles
were of metaphysical origin, not physical. That is, the whole problem was
that Epicurean metaphysics was getting a free ride with atomic physics, and
intentionally so, for there was a great desire to use atomism as a vehicle
for crushing Augustinian metaphysics. Could Gassendi or Maxwell be
vindicated, could atomism be a valid physical theory without the
anti-creationist metaphysics? I will take the scientifically unpopular view
and say no, that metaphysics is essential to the formulation of physics. As
Thomas Kuhn described a century later, Maxwell's attempt to fit atomism with
Christianity is symptomatic of a "paradigm shift", when conflicting evidence
is gerry-rigged into the creaking system. It convinces no one so well as
oneself, and in the end, dies an unlamented death. Thus it was entirely
appropriate that Deism languish in the grip of materialism. But materialism
too, had a few problems left to address.
Since cosmology, as Tyndall claimed, was the battlefield for materialism, it
is appropriate that Astronomy should be the scientific answer to Augustine.
That is, if there were a scientific answer to Genesis, it would lie in
cosmology, a subfield of Astronomy. Unfortunately Astronomy was not a sure
bet either, for it had a number of "eternity" puzzles, that did not fit
easily into a materialist metaphysics. As the blackbody radiation problem
or the photoelectric effect were to physics, these niggling details became
in the 20th century, the undoing of astronomy. Let us list a few of these
"eternity" puzzles.
- Self-gravitation:
If, as Newton claimed, a gravitational attraction were present betweeen any
two bodies with a force proportional to the product of the two masses and
inversely proportional to the square of the distance, then what is to keep
the universe from collapsing into a single blob? A glib answer is that they
are so far away. But Newton's law doesn't say the gravitational force goes
to zero, it just gets small. When a small number is multiplied by infinity,
infinity always wins. Even if the force were miniscule, say, a fly's sneeze
acting over eternity should have profound effects. The only proposed way to
avoid this consequence is to assume that the matter in the universe were
distributed so evenly as to cancel out the attractive force. Worse than
that, one must assume that something actively kept the universe as smooth as
butter lest the slightest wrinkle or perturbation should initiate a
catastrophic collapse. For a materialist, that answer was worse than the
problem.
- Olber's paradox:
Any 5-year old can ask, as Heinrich Olbers asked in 1826, another conundrum.
If the universe extends forever, and there are an infinite number of stars,
infinitely far away, then why is the night sky mostly black? Shouldn't we
see a sky packed cheek to jowl with stars? The glib answer was, well,
there's dust out there too that absorbs the starlight. But with the success
of thermodynamics, we know that every object will eventually come into
temperature equilibrium with its surroundings, so if the dust is absorbing
starlight, even the dust should eventually rise to the temperature of the
stars at some point in eternity, and glow with white hot heat. If the sky is
dark, then either the stars are not eternal, or the heavens do not obey
thermodynamics, neither a popular materialist position.
- Thermodynamics:
For that matter, if the earth is surrounded by hot stars for an eternity or
two, why isn't it and us, at white-hot heat? And why would there be any
termperature differences at all in the universe? Wouldn't maximum entropy
require that the universe all arrive at the same temperature, in the famous
"heat-death" end of the materialist universe?
Thermodynamics, a brief introduction
Perhaps this paradox requires a little more elaboration. Remember
that one of the victories of 19th century scientific materialism was the
proof that all matter is made up of atoms. We know this about water and air
and rocks because we can do experiments with them, as Maxwell demonstrated
in his lecture. But how can we be so sure that stars, as Aristotle conceived
them, are not made of more heavenly stuff? What evidence do we have that the
whole universe is composed of atoms? That is where the subdiscipline of
Thermodynamics comes to play.
The field of thermodynamics, as most fields in science, arose from the need
to build better heat engines. If you recall, the industrial revolution began
with the harnessing of water power, with vast mills built beside
fast-flowing rivers, such as Burlington VT. A water wheel (or whole fleets
of water wheels) would drive a huge leather belt that ran the length of the
mill, and every machine had its little belt driven off of the main shaft.
This was transformed by coal fired steam engines, that enabled, for the
first time, for a mobile energy source. No longer were the industrial
machines of the 1800's bound to a location near a river, but wherever coal
could be shipped. (The leather belts remained, however, until electricity
provided a means of liberating machinery from its tether.)
The first steam engines of James Watts design were hardly efficient,
gobbling enormous buckets of coal to operate, such that they were initially
only used at coal mines to run the pumps. Many bright young engineers
improved on the steam engine, until it became the marvel seen today in
vintage steam locomotives. A very modest amount of coal could now be used to
propel an enormous piece of machinery. Just how efficient could engineers
make this system? Could it ever be run on so little coal that, say, the
boiler could be heated at the roundhouse and return without restoking? One
needed to know how much energy it took to run the engine and how much energy
was in the coal. Benjamin Thompson, an American scientist before the
Revolution (where he spied for the British, and thus abandonned his hometown
of Woburn, MA) had shown that one can harness horses to a cannon boring
machine and generate heat from work. Studying these equivalences seemed to
show that energy can be converted from one form to another, say, from heat
to motion, but never destroyed. This became known as the first law of
Thermodynamics.
Many other relations followed from this. One could hook up a heat engine to
a refrigerator. If the refrigerator were perfect, it could return the heat
that the heat engine needed to operate. If it were perfect, this would
produce a perpetual motion machine, but since the Garden of Eden mankind has
been cursed with perpetual work, making such machines impossible. By this
sort of reasoning, it was possible to show that one cannot efficiently turn
heat into work, and then use that work to generate more heat to run itself
forever. The name given to this "rule" was the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics,
"Entropy must always increase."
A bright French engineer by the name of Sadi Carnot, worked out the
properties of steam (or of any heated gas), and concluded that to take water
to steam, expand it, collect the work of pushing a piston, cool it and start
over again, could be plotted on a pressure-volume graph. The states of this
closed cycle engine did not retrace precisely its steps on this graph paper,
but made a triangle or rectangle whose area was equal to the work produced,
and in which the heat is added in a known way (boiling the water). In such a
way, Carnot was able to calculate the maximum amount of work that could be
extracted from a given amount of heat input. It turns out to depend on the
temperature; the higher the temperature of a given amount of heat, the more
work could be done. I like to think of this as better quality heat, (sort of
like a better water heater for your shower), or equivalently, the lower the
entropy. This "efficiency" calculation, relating entropy and temperature,
was given the title, "The third law of Thermodynamics".
All of these Laws of Thermodynamics were worked out with gases and steam
engines and chemistry sets. In other words, it was an empirically derived
science based on macroscopic (large scale) properties of matter. Powerful in
itself, it was not yet fundamental physics until its theorems could be based
on the mathematics of statistics. This was the work Maxwell began, and
Boltzmann developed. One of the first things that Boltzmann did when he got
hold of Maxwell's equations, was to take the experimental discovery of his
advisor, Stefan's law of temperatures that the energy radiated by a hot
object rises as the fourth power of the temperature, and prove this result
mathematically by assuming the existence of atoms. This was a powerful
argument for the existence of atoms, since just about everything hot will
glow according to Stefan's law. It allowed physics to replace empirical laws
with mathematical theorems.
The power of this accomplishment cannot be understated. A rule that was
empirically derived from observations, an inductive generalization from a
limited set of data, could always be disproven by new observations. "Mr
Kent, this kryptonite doesn't obey Stefan's Law of temperatures!" But when
an empirical result can be proved to be the result of a mathematical theorem
concerning large collections of atoms, it takes on the nature of deductive
truth. "Well then, kryptonite cannot be made of any atomic material science
knows about." That is to say, thermodynamics was based on measurements of
laboratory matter, and could not easily be extrapolated to astronomical
objects like the Sun. But when Boltzmann found a relation between atoms and
light, he enabled future astronomers to analyze the light from stars and
infer many of the properties of the stars. In such a manner, stars were
found to be made of all the same ingredients as earth-based materials. Thus
Boltzmann's pioneering work enabled Thermodynamics to explain not just
Earth, but the entire matter of the Universe.
To summarize these results, a hot atom will transfer its excess heat to a
cold atom, useful motion always decays into less useful random motion,
entropy always increases. The power of thermodynamics, then, was that atoms
everywhere and at all times and places must obey the same laws. Either
thermodynamics is true everywhere, or it is not true at all. So we come at
last back to the eternity paradox. If the Earth violates thermodynamics by
remaining temperate, despite being heated by all the stars in the universe
for a very very long time, there is a serious problem that physics alone
cannot solve. The irony is that the very tool used to vindicate materialism
is now also sharpened against materialism. (Thermodynamics continues to cut
both ways, and is a topic often subject to scientific agnosticism, disguised
with the nearly incomprehensible word, "entropy".) Let me state this one
more time. The power of statistical mechanics is that it generalizes
thermodynamics to all atoms everywhere, so if the universe does not obey
statistical mechanics then there is a serious problem either with our
cosmology or our thermodynamics.
19th Century Conclusions
All these puzzles arrive because of the assumption of the eternity of
the universe, which despite our attempts to minimize, is a really long time.
And all these puzzles vanish when one adopts Augustine's view of creation.
Despite this easy solution to the problem, prior commitment to materialist
metaphysics kept nearly all scientists muzzled. Thus these
self-contradictions within scientific materialism were labelled "paradoxes"
and left for future (materialist) science to explain. It is an embarassment,
but scientific agnosticism is far too often employed to maintain or even
evangelize for a self-inconsistent metaphysic. To a certain extant, the
abandonment of logic evident in late 20th century post-modern critique has
its precursors in late 19th century metaphysics. One could reinterpret
Thomas Kuhn's "Structures of Scientific Belief" to be not about theories,
but about metatheories, or metaphysics. His paradigm shift is a truly a
metaphysical war, in which the victors rewrite the history to claim the
utter rationality and invincibility of their arguments, while the
battlefield is littered with the corpses of true observations and factual
conclusions.
Yes, at the end of the 19th century, scientific materialism had won the
battle on the power of atomism and thermodynamics, but it was to prove a
short-lived and Pyhrric victory that the 20th century reversed.
20th Century Creation
(This lecture parallels the Augustine
lecture, mentioned early in the course.)
The 20th century dawned with physics at its zenith. Not one, but several
famous luminaries made predictions that all the basic physics was understood
and mathematically described with a few minor puzzles that just needed a
little tidying up. This triumphalism meshed perfectly with the spirit of the
age. In Germany, Hegel could write about the high spiritual attainment of
civilization. In England, hymnwriters were extolling the immanent arrival of
the Millenium, the 1000 years of peace and prosperity promised in the final
book of the Bible. Mark Twain commented on the turn of the century as "the
gilded age", when net world trade had reached a peak not exceeded until the
late 1980's. So it is not surprising that physicists should have gotten so
cocky, everyone was.
So in 1905, when Albert Einstein published his papers on "special
relativity" and "the photoelectric effect", it had the impact of a bombshell
on smug scientific complacency. The world was not as advertised, indeed, not
even as it appeared. The full consequences of these two papers were not
appreciated by the young, 24-year old Einstein, but grew greater with each
passing year culminating 40 years later in a fireball that outshone the sun
in the high desert of New Mexico. Although the full significance wasn't
immediately appreciated, nonetheless, all of the great physicists of those
decades: Bohr, Einstein, Fermi, Pauli, Heisenberg, were unsettled by the
metaphysics revealed in these discoveries. For both papers deeply undermined
scientific materialism.
Let us summarize then, the consensus view of materialism that was so deeply
shaken. Remember Newton's trinity of time, space and matter. Two centuries
of work had elaborated the third point slightly with the thermodynamic laws
for particles, which we expand as below.

- Time is eternal
- Space is infinite
- Matter is indestructable
- Entropy is always increasing
- Particles interact randomly
- Energy is conserved
We have mentioned three eternity paradoxes that have trouble with this
materialist trinity. a) Newton's paradox, which asks whether or not all the
stars would have coalesced from gravitational attraction given an eternity;
b) Olber's paradox which asks whether the night sky should be white, which
is to say, if one looks long/far enough in any direction one should find a
star; and finally c) Entropy paradox which asks why there should be any
temperature difference at all after an eternity in a constantly increasing
entropy universe.
Various solutions were proposed, none were very satisfactory. Newton
supposed that an infinite universe with no edges and very evenly distributed
matter might be in gravitational equilibrium. Olber's paradox was supposed
that either dust obscured the stars (which was only a temporary solution,
since eventually the dust would be as hot as stars), or the universe was
finite. The entropy problem had no good solution, other than to suppose that
an infinite supply of matter in an infinite universe might not reach
thermodynamic equilibrium for an infinite time, or perhaps that the universe
was not eternal. The answers varied, but you get the drift. After a few
infinities, the mind would boggle a bit and accept anything. It was into
this muddied cosmology (wrested from theology!) that Einstein's theory
started giving answers no one particularly wanted.
Einstein's Special Theory
SpaceTime
As is well known, Einstein was a firm believer in symmetry and isotropy. He
argued in a famous 1905 paper that if you had two physics labs, one in your
garage and one on a train, the physics should look exactly the same no
matter how fast your train was going. This answered the famous
Michelson-Morley experiment that attempted to find a bias in the speed of
light travelling upstream or downstream to the Earth's motion through space.
No, said Einstein, light travels
the same speed in all reference frames. But this could only be done with a
weird tranformation that squished space and stretched time. In fact,
Einstein's special theory of relativity suggested that time = space. This
immediately caused problems with the finite space solutions that might have
solved Olber's paradox, or the finite time solutions to the entropy paradox.
It also made the answers to one paradox tangle with all the others. For if
space and time were the same, two of the four possibilities are excluded:
- time eternal, space infinite
- X time limited, space infinite
- X time eternal, space finite
- time finite, space finite
But the first solution is the one we were having all the problems with
earlier. So it seems that Einstein is driving us toward the last
position, the one for which Tyndall had previously destroyed in the name of
materialism, the finite space & time solution which was the theological
position of Augustine.
MassEnergy
A second consequence of Einstein's special theory of relativity showed up
a few months after the first bombshell, 1905,
in a very short 2 page paper entitled, "Does the inertia of a
body depend on its energy content?" in which he argues for the rest mass of
a photon, and argues that m = E/c2. (Nope, he never said
E=mc2). Einstein's paper uses a somewhat arcane thought
experiment, which I always believed was better illustrated by a simple TV
monitor. We can time the electrons on their journey from the gun at the back
of the monitor to their destination as a spot on the screen. When we up the
voltage, we are increasing the energy, and simple physics suggests that the
velocity of the electron should be related to Energy as E=1/2
mv2. That isn't what we find. Instead, the electron approaches
but never exceeds the speed of light, no matter how much voltage we give the
electron. So why won't it go any faster? Where does all the extra energy go?
Well, it seems to have gone into the mass and gotten heavier, sort of like a
retired prizefighter. A calculation of the extra weight the electron gained
reveals the famous relation, E=mc2. But if energy can be
converted into mass, can mass be converted into energy? Absolutely, as
nuclear physics began to reveal electron-positron pair production from
light, and their subsequent annihilation into light, the first discovery and
Nobel prize going to an experiment using cosmic ray showers
recorded on film high in the Alps, which showed muons and a whole zoo of nuclear
particles produced in the energetic collisions of mundane matter.
That claim strikes at the heart of Newton's third trinitarian belief, the
indestructibility of matter, and no doubt contributed to the cult status of
this equation. For if Matter can be destroyed into or created out of energy,
then we cannot really talk about laws of entropy and energy conservation!
For if number or energy is not conserved, we can no longer argue that the
entropy must always increase. But wait, surely a little theory can't
reverse centuries of experience? Can't we just do some fine-tweaking of
the theory. Could we construct something that looked
like "mass-energy" conservation to replace it? This is certainly what is
suggested in most physics books.
But the bookkeeping starts to unravel when we ask the question, "what is the
gravitational potential energy doing?" The problem is that gravitational
energy is negative. Depending on assumptions of where to "normalize" the
gravitational potential, the total mass-energy content of mass, kinetic, and
gravitational energy can be made anything one desires. Even more
fundamentally, as QM later argues, the energy of a system is known only in
inverse proportion to the time: ΔE Δt = h. Thus for short
periods of time, the energy can be anything. All these arguments leave the
concept of mass-energy conservation in a bit of a shambles. It works fine
under most laboratory conditions, but fails to work at those critical
moments when you most need it, like at Creation.
SpaceTime and MassEnergy
Einstein didn't leave well enough alone either. He kept working on the
problem of acceleration, which wasn't in his original 1905 "special theory".
Finally after 11 years of working on it, he published his "general theory of
relativity" in 1916. In it he argues that just as physics looks the same on
all trains, so physics should look the same in all elevators. That is, just
as light travels the same speed in every reference frame, so light looks the
same in all accelerated (whether by motion or by gravity) non-inertial
reference frames.
A thought experiment is appropriate here. Suppose you are in an elevator far
away from the earth, say, in intergalactic space. (Okay, Einstein should
have said rocket ship, but perhaps elevators were high tech in 1916).
You would like to know how fast you are accelerated, and invent the
laser-pointer accelerometer.
A small laser pointer is affixed to the side of the elevator and shines
on the opposite wall where its position is marked. If the elevator
accelerates, which you immediately notice by the extra weight you feel
on your feet, then the light will fall behind the marked spot, simply due
to the motion of the elevator during the time it takes the light to
cross the elevator. That's reasonable enough.
But then, Einstein claims, this must also be true of the elevator sitting
at rest in the basement of your office building. The laser pointer should
make a spot lower down, because gravity is pulling down the light. "Gravity,
affecting light?", you could almost hear the derision. But that is exactly
what Sir Arthur Eddington found when he took an expedition in 1919 to measure
star positions around the sun during an eclipse (when we can see the stars in
the daytime!) The stars appeared to move closer to the sun, showing that the
sun bent the starlight inward like a dent in a shiny fender. Suddenly Einstein
was propelled to fame and glory, beyond that even of Isaac Newton. And
suddenly physicists were struck with a dilemma greater than Newton's static
universe.
Newton had feared that gravitational attraction would cause the stars to
all clump together, but Einstein now demonstrated that not only the stars but
space itself would clump together, producing what we now call a giant black
hole. Einstein didn't know about black holes, and he certainly wasn't going
to predict them, so he did what you and I would do in his shoes, he fudged
the equations. That is, he added what he called "the cosmological constant"
which just balanced the inward bending of gravity to keep space-time flat,
sort of like a paintless dent repair tool. It should be clear that Einstein
When Edwin Hubble, after painstaking
nights of measuring the faint light from galaxies and passing it through a
prism was
Last modified, Feb 24, 2003, RbS