Apologetics: Modern Physics

God has a way of turning up in the strangest places. When we look into the skies with remarkably powerful telescopes seeing stars billions of lights away (and so billions of years in the past), we see evidence of creation from nothing, the sudden appearance of light, and the separation of light from darkness.

We see the hand of God.

When we look through our microscopes, we discover that even the simplest cell is incredibly complex — far more so than we imagined when I was in high school.

But, as it turns out, we can walk and we can talk because the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered. Proteins make up most of the dry mass of a cell. But instead of a cell dominated by randomly colliding individual protein molecules, we now know that nearly every major process in a cell is carried out by assemblies of 10 or more protein molecules. And, as it carries out its biological functions, each of these protein assemblies interacts with several other large complexes of proteins. Indeed, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.

Bruce Alberts, “The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular Biologists,” Cell, 92 (February 6, 1998): 291-294 (emphases added; quoted at this website).

If we look at even smaller reactions, at the subatomic level, the discoveries are even more surprising — and point more clearly to God. It’s hard to explain in the abstract. We need a couple of videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzbKb59my3U [may be slow to load and appears to end before it really ends]

Weird beyond words, right? If you watched the videos, then you learned that according to “modern” physics, that is actually about 100 years old and yet unchanged, the reality of how photons and other subatomic particles behave is affected, indeed, defined by the presence of an observer (or anything else that increases entropy depending on the experiment’s results).

Therefore, there are events that are defined by the observer potentially thousands of years in the past. For example, imagine a photon from a very distant star. It approaches a very heavy object in space. One part of the photon’s probability wave will travel a path around the object to the left, because the object’s gravity literally bends space into a gravity-lens. Another part goes right.

Believe it or not, stars behind massive objects have sometimes been seen by telescopes on both sides of the object because of the light-bending effect of gravity. The pretty cool.

But far cooler is the fact that the light had to “choose” which path to follow probabilistically and that choice is made only when the light is observed, that is, only when it’s seen on earth in a telescope.

Now, what really happened (to the extent we can grasp this stuff) is the probability wave of light split and went both ways around the star and approached earth as a probability wave diffracted just like the two-split experiment.

When the telescope was pointed at the sky and an observer appeared, the probability wave had to choose whether to land in the telescope or not and whether to appear as from the right or the left side of the star.

And yet at that time, the probability wave was certainly larger than the solar system. The math is clear that it would be truly huge having traveled that far. And somehow the wave “knew” it had to make the choice and do so based on a probability wave too big for light to travel fast enough to communicate the information contained in the wave. That is, how did the wave “know” the odds without knowing the wave’s shape?

The shape changed every time the light passed a heavy object. Clearly, it would take minutes or even hours for a person in a space ship to measure the wave (which cannot be done without forcing the wave to roll the dice and make a choice to become a particle — but if it could be measured) whereas the wave instantly chooses a position to take when it encounters an observer.

It is, in a word, impossible, and yet there are plenty of pictures of dual stars resulting from gravitational lenses.

None of this makes sense, largely because the physics require causation outside of the universe. When a probability wave encounters an observer and so “chooses” to randomly become a particle in a given position, there is no hidden calculator to figure out how to act this way. In fact, even with a supercomputer, the math could not be done quickly enough. And yet it’s done.

The laws of nature as we perceive them — the mathematics of physics — describe what happens but the math is not actually figured by nature. It just happens. And the cause is not in this world.

(Col 1:16-17 ESV) ¹⁶ For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities– all things were created through him and for him. ¹⁷ And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

(Heb 1:3 ESV) ³ He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,