Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I personally think that the more wonder you have, the better a scientist you make, because when it gets, when it gets old and stale, you're not really having fun. You're not. You're not doing the best science ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: By now you've probably heard of the documentary film the Story of Everything, a cinematic exploration of the evidence for intelligent design in the cosmos, from the fine tuning of the universe to the stunning engineering in every living cell. Welcome to I Do the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott, and today we're going to continue our series of interviews with the scientists and scholars featured in the Story of Everything movie. And on this episode, I'm welcoming plasma physicist Dr. Robert Sheldon to the podcast to discuss his participation in the movie and talk about some of his work and his insights in physics and cosmology.
In case you don't know him, Robert Sheldon is a plasma physicist and former NASA researcher who has had a long career in academia studying satellite instrumentation, space plasma physics, comets, cosmology, nuclear propulsion, and science and faith issues. He has published over 60 papers and four books, including, including Laser Satellite Communication.
Well, welcome to Idea the Future, Robert.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Thank you for having me on, Andrew.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, maybe we could start with you telling us how you got into science originally and maybe touch on a few of the highlights of your research and your work in physics so far.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Well, it's a question I've been asking myself.
My father was a missionary to South Korea and my father, mother to South Sudan. So I grew up with the understanding that I should endeavor to save the world. And so I was planning to be a physician and ended up in physics.
I tell people that I couldn't spell. That was the problem.
But, but really it was a series of, of accidents or, or divine providence that, that really affected me. I had some wonderful science teachers through high school and college and, and they encouraged me that I could really make a difference in physics. And so I decided that to save the world, I, I really first had to understand the world.
And in graduates, in graduate school, you know, the, the, you pass a, an entrance exam and you're hunting for an advisor. And I ended up in a group that was building instruments or particle detectors for satellites for NASA. And so they asked me how they could solve a certain problem in mass spectroscopy. And I came up with a design that ended up with four NASA satellites flying my, my mass spectrometer detector. And we made the first measurements of the, of the solar wind, of the, of the isotopic composition of the sun.
And you know, the sun is the, is the heaviest object in our solar system and all the planets are minor constituents. And so if we don't understand the sun, we really don't understand how the planets came to be. And so those were some very important measurements. And then I went on to do more magnetic plasma research. We, we looked at the Earth's magnetic field and the trapped particles in it. That led me to the, the galactic magnetic field and then pretty much active galactic nuclei and eventually all the way back to the, to the very beginning, the extreme magnetic fields of the Big Bang.
So brief history.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, and those things must have fascinated you. But what kept you going in the, you know, know the sort of drier aspects of research?
Were you truly fascinated with the cosmos?
You know, what, how did you know kind of what to zoom into in your studies?
[00:04:14] Speaker A: Well, you know, I think the movie is a good example of it. The more you look at the universe and it poses questions to you, questions that you saying, how did this come about? Or what is the reason for that?
And those scientific questions were always intriguing me.
And so I guess my motivation at the beginning was to solve a problem that had been outstanding in the field for many years. For example, the radiation belts around the Earth were discovered by James Van Allen in the late 50s.
And they have never really been explained why when, when satellites or, or astronauts go into space, they have to worry about so much radiation just trapped around the Earth. And so I addressed that problem and I think I, I found the source of the outer electron radiation belts and they're the responsible for actually destroying satellites. Our GPS satellites are heavily, heavily protected against radiation because they spend most of their life orbiting in those radiation belts. And human being wouldn't survive that location.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Yeah, that's very interesting. Have you had a chance to publish some of your findings in that area?
[00:05:44] Speaker A: Well, I do publish them. Of course science doesn't really follow what most, most people think it does. They think, well, if you came up with a bigger, better mousetrap, people will beat a path to your door. But marketing is everything and marketing seems to dominate in the scientific field as well. So yes, I've published these results. I'm slowly seeing the field sort of acknowledge, yes, there seems to be a valid approach there. And they're, they're coming around
[00:06:15] Speaker B: now. The story of everything. I understand you saw the movie twice while it was recently in movie theaters. What was it like to see yourself on the big screen and what did you think of the movie as a whole?
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Well, of course it's it's flattering to be on the big screen. And then you say to yourself, why did I look so dumb? Or how can I could have answered that question better, you know, And. But it was a. A great movie, and it showed the, the excitement of intelligent design. You know, the, the reason why we do science is because we're. We're thinking God's thoughts after him, that we're intrigued in understanding how the universe is put together. And I think the movie really captured that very well. And that's one of the reasons I saw it twice. And, and I got a different group of friends to come the second time. So I would have come back a third time if it was in the theaters for another week, but.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, well. And we'll also talk about the ways that people can watch the film now that it's out of the theaters. Lots of opportunities for that. We'll touch on that at the end. Now, you're one of over 20 experts featured in the film, and just when we think we've heard from you for the last time, you come back to deliver more insight. Pretty much throughout the film, I was inspired by the enthusiasm you exhibited as you discussed key scientists and concepts. And, I mean, there was a joy sort of emanating from you in.
As you were kind of discussing all of that, and it was infectious.
How did you come to be associated with the project?
[00:07:48] Speaker A: I've asked myself the same question.
I think Steve Meyer, you know, the movie was intended to come out at the same time as Steve Meyer's book, the Return of the God Hypothesis. And as Steve Meyer was working on the book, he called me up to get some clarity on. On how the Hubble constant was measured or how we knew the universe was expanding. And so I explained to him the. The astronomy of the.
What's called the distance ladder, how you tell how far away distant objects are.
And, you know, when, when God gave us two eyes. And, and so because we have those two, two eyes, we can measure distance very well in front of our face. And so there's an old, old trick, you know, you. You can take your fingers and touch them, the tips together, and then say, well, he closed one eye. And now how well does it work? You know, and it turns out it's a little harder because we can't use parallax, the fact that each eye sees a different picture of the world. And so we use parallax to measure the. The stars in our galaxy. And there's a particular kind of star called a Cepheid. Variable that has a very distinct brightness, and it also varies its brightness depending on how big it is. And so they calibrated the Cepheid variables, and then they looked in other galaxies and found Cepheid variable stars. And so now they knew how far away the galaxy was because the star gave a calibrated distance. And now that they had several galaxies, you could calibrate the brightness of the overall galaxy. And that enabled you to see very distant galaxies, even maybe to the corners of the universe, and figure out how far away it was. And so that's called the distance ladder. And that's, I think the reason that, that Stephen asked me to be in the movie is I just didn't stop with the distance ladder. I got carried away with other astronomy. And I think he enjoyed that. But you'd have to ask Steve what his reason was.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: Yeah, well, speaking of ways to measure things, your first words in the movie, about eight minutes in are fuzzy things that never focus in your telescope. And you're talking about what astronomer Vestal Slipher was seeing through his telescope in the early 20th century. Can you tell us why his work is important to the discovery that the universe had a beginning?
[00:10:25] Speaker A: Well, the story goes back to the 1600s.
Galileo had pointed this telescope. He had sort of worked out some optics problems. And he pointed it at the moon, and he saw mountains on the Moon, and he pointed it at Jupiter, and he saw moons circling Jupiter, and he pointed at Venus, and he saw that Venus was not a bright point, but it looked like a crescent moon. And all those observations undermined the, the astronomy that came from Ptolemy that had dominated Europe for 1500 years.
And so it really opened the, the field to, to scientists. And they kept building bigger and bigger telescopes. They learned how to polish lenses. And as they were doing that, they could resolve the Milky Way. Instead of being a sort of cloudy region, it resolved into millions and millions of stars. And so people were really amazed that we lived in this universe that had so many more stars than a naked eye could see.
But there were these fuzzy objects in the, in the field of view. And if it was moving, people called it a comet. If it didn't move, they called it a nebula. And there's, there's a story about a famous astronomer, Charles Messier, who made a catalog of 110 nebula because he didn't want people to think that they had just discovered a new comet. Even today, they have star parties. Astronomers have star parties where they try to see all 110 objects in one night. It's quite a challenge. But the nebula, were they fuzzy blobs of gas in our own universe? As they, they didn't call it a galaxy, it was a universe. So. Or are they, are those fuzzy objects another universe that's so far away, an island universe, that we can't resolve the stars in it? And so this debate came about, you know, our, is our galaxy. That's, that's later what they called these island universes. Is our galaxy alone or are we looking at other galaxies? And this debate went on for 100 years until Edwin Hubble resolved it in the 20s or slipher in his observations using Cepheid variables, using the distance ladder. And so the distance ladder showed that these objects are much farther away than anyone expected.
And they called it a galaxy. And we started to realize that we are a tiny little speck in the entire universe of galaxies. In fact, there are as many galaxies in our universe visible to us as there are stars in our own galaxy. So that's an amazing relationship.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And it is amazing how it doesn't all just happen at once, you know, and that, that's another thing I like about the movie and about Steve's book, obviously. And anyone who approaches this is it really is a grand story and it doesn't all happen at once. There's one thing discovered and that leads to the next thing and to the next thing. And truly that, that is history of science in, in general. But it's quite fascinating how the story comes together, isn't it?
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Beyond fascinating. I think, you know, I, I think that it leaves us with a sense of awe and wonder, you know, that I, I, I personally think that the more wonder you have, the better a scientist you make. Because when it gets, when it gets old and stale, it, you're not really having fun, you're not doing the best science.
[00:14:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. I like that. And that actually ties into, I've been doing a little research on ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician and pioneer programmer who worked on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. And she said something very similar, you know, just the importance of imagination to those who want to study science.
And I think that that ties into the wonder.
Now, you also comment in the film about Einstein and his groundbreaking discoveries that massive bodies in space actually curve space itself and that there's an outward pushing force besides gravity that's at work, what is now termed today the cosmological constant. What implications did Einstein's work have for our understanding of the origin of the universe?
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Well before Einstein it was Newton. And Newton said two objects are going to attract each other because of the force of gravity. And so they looked at all these stars in our galaxy and they said, what keeps the stars in their places? Everyone believed at that time that the universe had existed forever.
And if it lasted forever, then even the slightest push is going to eventually bring everything together into one block job. So the question was, well, why is Newton's gravity not, not contracting our galaxy? And the only answer they could think of was that all the gravitational forces are so evenly distributed that they balance each other out and that we're living in this delicate balance of gravity that keeps the stars up there in space.
Well, many people, many scientists said, well, it would seem to us that if you perturb it, if you push one a little bit, that it will increase its gravitational strength and the balance will be lost and everything will collapse. So Newton himself understood this problem and he suggested that it was the finger of God that kept pushing things back where they belong in the universe.
Well, Einstein's theory said that it wasn't a force between the objects, but that the space time becomes bent. And the usual illustration is a rubber sheet over a drum head. And if you put a heavy ball in the middle of that rubber sheet, it will sink and cause anything nearby to roll towards that spot. And so this is the idea or the analogy for the curved space time. And there was no getting around it.
Gravity would pull everything together. And so Einstein was so disturbed by this, since he also believed in an infinite universe, that he had to put in an anti gravity term into his equations just to balance out the gravity. And that was the only way he could get the universe to exist forever.
So a lot of mathematicians and scientists told Einstein, Einstein, it isn't going to work. Even with that trick, things aren't going to work the way you want. But Einstein was stubborn because people don't quite realize. But Einstein was motivated by his metaphysics, by his understanding of how the universe was put together. And his metaphysics was, it had to be eternal. It couldn't have had a beginning. And so that's, that's the reason for it. And so that's why Einstein's theory really pushed the idea of is there a beginning to the universe?
Well, let me just continue that story.
So you had a, a Belgian monk, Lemaitre, who, who told Einstein, I have this solution of everything starting from a single spot and expanding outward. And Einstein at first brushed him off and thought, well, you know, that everybody has a solution. That doesn't mean that it's right. But then Edwin Hubble started measuring galaxies and their velocities, and all the galaxies seemed to be moving away from us.
And the best understanding of that was that at some point in the past, they were all in a point and were expanding away from that spot.
And so Lemaitre was right. His solution actually does describe the universe. And Einstein had a conversion experience. And he then went back and said, you know, that anti gravity term I put in? That was my dumbest mistake I've ever made.
And so that was how we got the idea of the Big Bang. It was a solution.
What it says is the universe is not in equilibrium. The universe hasn't lasted forever, but that it had a beginning, and that's why the universe looks the way it does.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: Well, thank you for recounting that. And, and the movie does, does do a good job of sort of illustrating that and telling that story.
And we see that footage, you know, Einstein heading to the telescope to peer in and take a look at some of the evidence for himself.
You know, old ideas, ideas that are firm in our head can, can die hard and does take a while to, to come around. And, and we see that in the story of the development of the Big Bang hypothesis. Well, I want to play a clip from the movie right now. You are discussing in this clip the great physicist Fred Hoyle and how he wasn't comfortable attributing a beginning of the universe to, as he put it, a cause that I can never verify. Let's watch this clip and then I'll ask you a question about it.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: That view of the universe was debated and many people argued against it.
Fred Hoyle was a famous physicist who said, I'm a Democritean. He said, I believe nothing comes from nothing. His argument was, there can't be a beginning to the universe because that would be something coming from nothing. I don't like the idea that something is dependent on a cause that I can never verify.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: It was Hoyle that coined the term Big Bang, right? And he hated the idea of a beginning. What was his alternative theory and why didn't it work?
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Hoyle saw himself as a materialist and as an atheist.
He really did not like the idea that the Big Bang model matched Genesis 1:1. You know, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and that troubled him a great deal. And so he would mutter under his breath like Democritus, I believe nothing comes from nothing.
You can't have a beginning of a universe.
And so he worked on an alternative that said, well, if protons are popping out of the vacuum all the time, then the universe can be constantly expanding and still be eternal. And so as the galaxies move away from each other, they leave a lot of empty space.
Protons or hydrogen atoms are. Are sort of instantaneously appearing in that empty space and then collapsing to form new stars and new galaxies and moving apart from each other and new ones come in. And so that was called the steady state universe. And in his mind, that was the only way you could avoid the idea of a creator, of a beginning, of a Big Bang.
And it also, let me just say this.
Hoyle did the mathematics of evolution, and he concluded that evolution was too slow to explain the life on Earth in a few million years. And so he said the only way evolution can work is if you had eternity to work to. To let it develop.
And so his idea was that both evolution and the idea of a creation required a eternal universe.
That was sort of Hoyle's way of looking at it.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: It all hinged on. On eternity.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: And there's another bit of stubbornness in science that needed to be overcome. Now, one thing that impacted Fred Hoyle was, was what he discovered about carbon. And I wondered if I could zoom into that with you, because I think you can shed more light on it.
Hoyle was investigating carbon and how it forms in the universe. He discovered that carbon would have to form at just the right energy level in order to maintain stability. And then he verified it at Caltech. Tell us about that excited state that he uncovered and how he was using the anthropic principle to do science there.
[00:23:50] Speaker A: Well, it sort of goes back to Hoyle's hatred of the Big Bang.
And so many people had said, well, it's because of the Big Bang that we have hydrogen and helium and carbon and nitrogen and all the materials to make the universe with. Because at that moment when the universe was very compressed and very hot, nuclear reactions occur just like chemical reactions. And you can add and subtract protons and neutrons and make all the elements that show up in our world today.
And Hoyle said, that's ridiculous, that that can't happen. And so he built an extensive model of the Big Bang. They call it the Big Bang nucleosynthesis. And he showed that the Big Bang really only made hydrogen, helium, and a little bit of lithium, but it made no carbon at all.
And so what Hoyle argued was that the carbon we have is. Must be made in stars. And he looked at the spectrum, and it Didn't.
How do I put this?
It's very difficult to make carbon by adding protons to a previous element, a lighter element.
So lithium has three protons. You add another proton, it's beryllium, and add another proton, it's boron, and add another one, and you get carbon. And so he looked at that and said, there's no way you can go from helium to boron because beryllium is unstable.
And so he needed a way to make carbon.
And his argument was, we know something in the universe makes carbon because I'm here and I'm made out of carbon. And so we must have a process that can make it. And so that's known as the anthropic principle. And people have taken that to many extremes. But as far as I know, Hoyle is the only one who actually used the anthropic principle to justify his search for why carbon was made. Well, it turns out that carbon is made by adding three helium atoms together, and each one is a four. And so three of them make a 12, which is carbon. And in order for that to stick together and not just sort of break apart as soon as it's formed, he needed an excited state of. Of carbon that would allow that blob of. Of helium atoms to stick together long enough to settle down into a carbon state. And so he said, there's gotta be an excited state here that keeps that carbon atom together.
And he pestered these fellows at Caltech who had a cyclotron. America had built the first atom smashers after World War II. And. And so these cyclotrons did. Were the. The only ones in the world at the time that could do this kind of work. And he begged them to measure this excited state of carbon. And when they finally measured it, they found it exactly where Hoyle had predicted it would be, and they got the Nobel Prize for it. But the Nobel committee did not like Hoyle and would not give him the Nobel Prize. So Hoyle is one of these.
One of these people that has richly deserved the Nobel Prize and never received it for, I think, for not believing in the Big bang. I think the Nobel committee couldn't forgive him for that.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: But nevertheless, he found evidence that supported that in what he discovered about carbon. Is that right?
[00:27:42] Speaker A: That's right. So what he said about carbon was, it looks like someone has engineered the carbon atom to have this resonance in it so that it would be made. And to him, there was no reason that carbon should have this resonance other than his existence. Or to put it another way God was monkeying around with the energy levels in the carbon atom so as to produce this fortuitous event that led to the carbon having that. And, and if, you know, Hoyle said if anything would could convince him that God exists, it was his carbon level. But unfortunately, that wasn't sufficient to convince Hoyle. As far as I know, he died still disbelieving.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Right.
Well, one could call that a form of fine tuning. And that's what I was going to ask you about next.
You have an interesting take on the fine tuning. You see the evidence for fine tuning as a matter of quality over quantity. You recently mentioned to me a term you, your ID email group has recently coined implausible. Implausible. Not impossible, but more than implausible. Tell us how that applies to cosmological design.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: So much of the cosmology is it's not that it's impossible for carbon to have this energy level, but given all the possible ways you can put a carbon atom together, it's very implausible that carbon would have that energy at just the right value needed to make it in the center of large stars. And so we call that fine tuning. And a number of atheist physicists have said, you know, we only have one universe, so how can you tell whether it's tuned or not? How do you know if there's a dial on our universe at all unless you had two universes to look at?
And so they argue that even though it seems implausible, you have to say, I don't, I, I, I don't know any other way or any alternative way to build a universe. So I can't tell you if it's, if it's unlikely or not.
This is Sabina Hassenfelder's argument that if you don't have more than one example, you really can't build any statistics about it. Now, what people have done, what scientists do all the time, is they build a model. And in their model they have some dials. And the dials have things in them like the weight of a proton compared to the weight of an electron, the strength of the electromagnetic force compared to the strength of the gravitational force. And then they play with those dials and they say, well, what if the electromagnetic force was stronger or weaker? And when they play with those dials, they get some interesting results. And one result is the universe collapses into a black hole or everybody turns into an atom bomb because the nuclear forces aren't strong enough to hold the nucleus together. And you get all these variations where life as we know it is not possible.
And then they say, well, God must have fine tuned those dials. And that's the part that both Sabina and me argue that, that it's not a fair argument because God doesn't use a computer program. Or at least we don't think he uses a computer program.
So what? The dials are our computer program. They're not God's. And so there, there might be a very good reason why that dial can't be turned at all.
We just don't know what it is. And so we say, well, you know, I'm going to turn it.
And so that doesn't mean that, that the universe isn't designed very, very carefully. It just means that we cannot examine how, we cannot quantitatively examine how accurate that tuning is.
So the fine tuning argument is a qualitative one. It's a, it's a, oh, wow, isn't this amazing? But it's not a, this is a 1 in 1 million chance that this would happen. We can't give a number to it.
[00:32:10] Speaker B: Right.
And, and I was going to say, what, what are the, the folks that support a multiverse hypothesis do with that? Because then, then you, but even then, you can't really compare other universes because they're unobservable. So do they end up with the same approach to the fine tuning?
[00:32:30] Speaker A: Well, the multiverse is exactly an answer to fine tuning. It says let's not assume God and let's just assume that there's a giant computer program out there that's making universes left and right. And so ours just happens to be a setting of the dials that is maybe one in a million, one in a zillion. But if there's an infinite number of universes, then our universe has to exist. It has to be one setting of those dials. And so this is sort of taking it to the other extreme and, and saying that the computer model is more, is closer to God or more close to metaphysical reality than our universe is. And so in what space, in what area of the universe does this computer program live?
What contains all these multiverses? And so that's sort of the question that gets asked by philosophers, but they have no answer for it. And why should there be something that holds all these multiverses in it? And that, to me, is the reason why I don't like the idea of a dial setting. But, but as you pointed out, they're unobservable. It's a hypothesis. It's a, it's a very bad hypothesis. And when I'm. When I'm being sarcastic, I say, well, imagine that you have a Borg that can communicate from one multiverse to another, and then he starts to collect all the resources available and starts to manipulate our universe through his knowledge of all the other possibilities.
Wouldn't we call that Borg God? And you know, how would we know that it wasn't God? You know, it would look just like God. So therefore your multiverse hypothesis comes right back to God again.
Since everything is possible, one of those universes has God in it.
[00:34:34] Speaker B: So the fine tuning for you then is a case of quality, a case of it's there and why is it there? And it's remarkable that it's there rather than here's the exact numbers, but we don't really have anything to compare it to. But does that take away from the power of the evidence for fine tuning?
[00:34:56] Speaker A: Would you say, well, there's many ways to look at this. You can look at a Vermeer painting and say, that is a very artistic demonstration. Or you can say, look at the brush strokes. How small was his brush when he was painting it? So you can examine it with a microscope and say, look, look how he's cleverly mixed the colors that went into it. So the more you know about the painting, the more you're amazed by it. But you don't come away with saying, I can get a AI to do Vermeers for me left and right. There's nothing special about it now that I've analyzed it. And so the idea is art and aesthetics is not something that is dissectable. It's not quantitative.
We can't understand a beautiful painting by looking at what makes it put together. What are the paints and the brushes that go into it. And I feel the same way about our creation that trying to explain it in terms of a model, which is what fine tuning does, somehow takes away from the beauty and the amazingness and the wonder of our creation.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: Fascinating. Well, you've written a three volume book series called the Long Ascent wherein you explain how modern cosmology, biology and archaeology illuminate our understanding of Genesis 1 to 11 of the Bible. How did you get started on that project and what was your goal with it?
[00:36:26] Speaker A: I was two years into my graduate program in physics and I was feeling very burnt out and I decided to follow in my father and my grandfather's footsteps and go to seminary. And at seminary I met my wife and felt much, much encouraged and went back and finished my physics degree.
But later on, when I lost my job teaching physics, my Wife said, why don't you go back to seminary and pursue a seminary career instead of.
So I went back to seminary and really felt that science had been sort of neglected at seminary. And I could make a very good case for why.
Genesis was a scientific book, a book that supported the Scripture as being true and infallible and at the same time scientific.
And that's the beginning of this book.
I tried to write that as a thesis three times and still could not convince the advisor at seminary that science and the Bible made a good thesis. But I came away from seminary and said, let me finish this book. And I had lots of time on my hands, and I started researching it, and everything I found just became so, so illuminating, so exciting. And so one of the very first things I found was the location of Eden. And that's sort of been lost for a thousand years or more. But at the time when Moses was writing Genesis, he knew exactly where it was. He tells you that the rivers went through a certain area and that they had gold there. And so he's. He's trying to locate it for you and, and using his knowledge of geography. It's just that we lost all of that links to that geography, and so we don't know where it is.
So the. The book started with the location of Eden, the time of Noah's flood. And once you get the date of Noah's flood, all the other events in the first 11 chapters of Genesis fall into a timeline because we're told things like how long people lived and where they went. And so you can adjust the timeline and figure out how long after Adam was Noah's flood and how long after Noah was. Was Abraham, that sort of question.
So that book sort of developed and it got so big, my wife, my. My daughter actually said, no one's going to read a book that long. And so I ended up splitting into three books. But that sort of occupied my time for.
Between the teaching job and the job working as a missile analyst over at the Defense Department.
[00:39:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you've certainly got a lot to say about that. And do you anticipate it going beyond three volumes or have you reached a conclusion there?
[00:39:36] Speaker A: There are so many things we can learn from Genesis. And one is. Is that the Jewish form of understanding scriptures, I call it Midrash.
Midrash tends to be more anecdotal. It tells a story about the Bible.
It allows for many interpretations of the same text.
And the key here is that the rabbis felt that Moses writings were inspired, that every word was given by God, and written down by Moses and you don't dare change a single word. On the other hand, what it means, the interpretation is up to many different interpretations by different rabbis. And you can't nail down and say, I know what this passage is about.
Conversely, in the west, in the church, the Christian church couldn't read Hebrew. So they were working with the translation, with the Greek translation, the Septuagint, and later with the Latin translation, the Vulgate. And when you translate a story, you can't do a word for word translation that wouldn't make sense.
In fact, some of the words in Hebrew don't have a single word in Greek or in Latin. They, they have many words in Greek and Latin that would fit that, that particular one. And so what you're going for is a story, what the story means.
And as a consequence, you can only put one meaning into a translation. And so the early church sort of felt that the meaning of the Old Testament was what was inspired. And the actual words to describe it could be anything, but the meaning had to stay the same. So you see the difference. The Jewish one said the words are inspired and many meanings could be attached to it. And the early church said the meaning was inspired and many words and different languages could be attached to it.
And so we tended to go with one interpretation of Genesis and say that's what it must mean.
And we sort of fight over the meanings.
The, the rabbis said there's no point in fighting over the meanings. Everybody has their own meaning. Some meanings are better than others. Some meanings in, encourage you and develop and, and tie into other meanings. But meanings are, are a human endeavor. They're, they're our attempt to understand what God has written down in Scripture. And so that approach to exegesis allows us to take Genesis 1 to 11 and say, can we extract a scientific meaning? Can we extract a religious or theological meaning? Can we extract something else from that? And all of these things are perfectly valid ways to look at the Bible.
And so that understanding of Genesis allowed me to go in and say what would happen if we took one of the Hebrew words that we don't know the meaning of. In English, I use the example of the Hebrew word rakia, which the, the Greeks did not really understand too well in 200 BC and, and so they, they, they interpret it in the word stereoma, which is a pretty generic stuff kind of meaning, underlying stuff.
And then the Latin vulgate didn't know how to translate it. So they just sort of took that idea from the Greeks and called it firmamentum. And a firmamentum is something that underlies and holds things up like, like a foundation.
And the King James didn't know what to do with the Latin, so they just transliterated it. So we have firmament. And so it says that God put the stars in the firmament, and so it holds the stars in place.
So we just had this long discussion of Newton and Einstein. Well, what holds the stars in space? Einstein. And he would say, well, it's gravity that holds him in space.
And so what would happen now if I just said, okay, that's what the word rakia is close to meaning. It means gravity. And I went through the, the Genesis passage and I put in sort of modern words for all of these strange Hebrew constructs that we didn't really know what they meant. And suddenly the story of Genesis came alive to me, and it matched the Big Bang model very well. It gave me information about evolution. It gave me information.
Here's an interesting one.
In verse three, it said that the Spirit of God hovered over or brooded over the face of the two waters. And so if you use a Big Bang model for Genesis, that's way too early for water to appear.
And why is it two waters? And why is the spirit brooding over these two waters? And working through that, the connotations of that, I came to the conclusion that water must have been made in the Big Bang, that Fred Hoyle was wrong, that it didn't make just hydrogen, helium. It made carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen as well.
And so then I plugged in these, these water in the Big Bang, it requires a strong magnetic field. And I started to see it made lots of comets. And comets would be initially frozen. And so the two waters are the waters below on the Earth's surface and the waters above in the frozen comets that are filling the galaxy and the universe. And. And I started to work through how these comets would behave. And they actually behave like dark matter. And so I got a whole bunch of books on dark matter and started plugging in the, the effect of, of interpreting it as a comet. And all of the strange behavior of dark pattern that really puzzles astronomers was explained by comets. And so I said, here we have the Bible, verse three, telling us exactly how the universe is constructed. And we've ignored it because we treated the Bible as only being theological or only being mythical or something like that.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:46:15] Speaker A: If we can treat it as science, it actually gives us real insight into what God was doing.
[00:46:21] Speaker B: So anyway, that's fascinating. Yeah, Very interesting project, taking what we know from, you know, modern fields of science and really taking a hard look at what gets lost in translation or what was poorly understood or perhaps not communicated, you know, throughout the centuries.
Of course, that's going to require you to go back to the original languages. And have you studied those at length?
[00:46:50] Speaker A: Well, I did go to seminary.
I can't say that I'm fluent in any of those languages, but. But the wonderful thing is so many tools exist now on the Internet and on the computer so that you don't have to be fluent in Greek or Hebrew. You can bring up a Bible in Hebrew and look at the translation into Septuagint into Greek and look at that, do the word analysis and parse it and all these things without knowing the language.
I would say the bare minimum, you should probably be able to recognize the Alphabet and know how to go through a dictionary. But beyond that, so much of this analysis is available to just amateurs.
And I consider myself an amateur. Just amateurs like me. And I think that people talk about, how is AI going to change the world? This is an example where AI using that term loosely, the tools available to AI enable just the average person to pick up a Bible and start understanding and searching and looking for these answers without a lot of help from commentaries. And so I think we're sort of at a cusp in history when that shelf full of commentaries that we all had to purchase when we went to seminary has become obsolete and we can do without them now. But you asked me a little earlier, I've written four books. Am I thinking about another book? And then the fifth book in this series is going to be called the Magnetic Big Bang, and I'm going to look through how adding magnetic fields to the Big Bang really transforms our understanding of the universe, and that some of the mysteries we've been struggling with in the last 50, 60 years, dark matter, dark energy, numerous I would call Big Bang conundrums called the horizon problem, the flatness problem. These things go away when you go back and remodel the Big Bang. So that's the purpose of the fifth book.
[00:49:07] Speaker B: Okay. And you're busy working on that already or
[00:49:12] Speaker A: they're slow gestation. But yes, I've written two papers and had a hard time getting them published.
And.
Well, I have a friend who publishes a journal basically by himself, and I sent it to him and he said he's really backlogged. Would I be willing to be the editor for his journal?
So I volunteered.
So hopefully that second paper will get published soon.
[00:49:38] Speaker B: Okay. Well, I wish you well with those projects. They. They all sound quite fascinating. And do you have a website or a central place where people can learn about your work?
[00:49:51] Speaker A: My website is rbsp.info. the long story is, is that NASA had a mission called the Radiation Storm Probe mission. And so I took out a, a URL for the Radiation Storm Probe, but I didn't win the contract, so it became my private.
My private.
[00:50:11] Speaker B: Wow. Okay, so rbsp.in.in that's right. Okay. All right, great. And the book series you've, you've been working on is called the Long Ascent. And of course, your expertise is amplay on display and the Story of Everything. And folks, if you haven't seen the Story of Everything, you're in for a treat at the time of recording this podcast. The movie is available for purchase on Amazon Prime. It's also available on Blu Ray and dvd.
And finally, there's a way to have a license showing of the movie at your church, your synagogue, or your study center.
So the best place to go for all that information is discovery.org story discovery.org story will tell you everything you need to know about how to access the story of everything. Rob, once again, thank you for your time.
Appreciate all your insights today.
[00:51:04] Speaker A: Well, thank you, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:51:07] Speaker B: Well, for Idea the Future, I'm Andrew Ming Dermot. Thanks for joining us.
