Per Ardua Ad Astra

Ooh, finally. Somebody came in support of evolution after all in the Star Education. Looks like my pessimistic opinion that nobody would bother to come out and support evolution is wrong after all. Well, to be sure, nobody came out and said that creationist science is wrong and why so, but Dr Mazlan Madon sure did a great job by sidestepping the whole debate and hitting the nail dead squarely on the head by saying that creationism, ID and its variants (ID is just creation science renamed to avoid the Supreme Court ruling forbidding the teaching of religious related science in schools, because of the separation of Church and State and also because it isn’t science, so in essence they are the one and the same, just relabelled).

Anyhow, Researcher did come out and write again. Apparently, the writer too wishes to sidestep the creationist science thingy. Why most scientists do that is to avoid getting into a useless debate with those who advocate creation themed ‘science’. For example, if some evolutionist illustrates the gradual change of one species using fossil evidence, the creationist will argue that it is inconclusive evidence, because there are missing gaps in the fossil evidence (where is the fossil in between these 2 fossils then? It’s not continuous! So evolution is wrong!) and so forth. So it’s pretty useless to convince the unbeliever in this case. And to top it all off, they think that evolutionists should burn in Hell for not believing! Pretty harsh judgement to pass off isn’t it? Sigh, the extreme views people can hold can be pretty astounding.

But IMHO, evolution and God can still be reconciled. Many scientists do acknowledge this fact, science and religion can be reconciled. Well, to simply put it like this you can still get the best of both worlds: God created Man using the mechanisms of evolution and natural selection. In this way, how we came into being, and who created us are answered satisfactorily form both the religious and scientific concept. End of story. As for MOSTI advocating creationist science, that’s more of a political or religious issue than science I think.

Moving on to the next part of the Researcher’s letter, he mentions another statement in a survey described in the ‘The Public Awareness of Science and Technology Malaysia 2000’ publication. The statement goes like this ‘The Universe began with a huge explosion’. The statement is deemed False. The Researcher is again up in arms again, over this statement. In his view, it means that MOSTI is proclaiming that the Big Bang theory is wrong!

But hold on a minute! To me, the Big Bang was always a fishy concept. If it is really an explosion in the conventional sense (a really humongous bomb going off), then it is really odd. Think about it. When a bomb goes off, there is a huge expansion of space in between the atoms of the explosives material of the bomb going off. So it’s essentially like a block of solid combusting to become vapour almost instantaneously and sending shrapnel everywhere in the process (standard college level Chemistry, explosions are reactions involving extremely high rate of reactions).

So is the Big Bang literally a Big Bang? I didn’t think so. Because, an explosion would require pre-existing space to expand into! In that case, it would be an infinitely compact singularity of matter exploding into an infinite space. Now why is the singularity there and why did it go off? What caused it to go off? Where did the infinite space come about? So at that time I concluded that I must have understood the Big Bang concept, because the infinite space must have come from somewhere, and hope to be able to understand it better later on. Thanks to SciAm, their article ‘Misconceptions about the Big Bang’ helped me resolve all my questions (well, almost) and all is well now. And to answer the question ‘Is the Big Bang literal?’ most specifically, please refer to this sidebar, second point for a summary of the main article. And if the Researcher ever read this, please read the sidebar too! Note: Yep, space is expanding, but we don’t expand and planets fly apart because subatomic forces and gravity continue to hold us together, so you can’t blame the Big Bang for getting fatter! Besides, if that really happens, the measuring tape will be expanding at the same rate too, and the measurement will still stay the same.

So for the evolution statement, the Researcher is right. MOSTI is wrong. But for the Big Bang statement, I think it’s the Researcher that had the misconception. But at least the main issue is laid to rest, for now…

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 9:53 am and is filed under Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.