INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF SOILS

How many of my readers have heard of the International Year of Soils? The year will be ending in 28 days. Why an International Year of Soils? Without soil much of the world would be starving. Yes, we can grow plants in water, but not enough to feed the world. Most plants get their food, water, and support from soil. Most food is grown in soil. Trees grow in soil. Think about where we would be without soil. What would we do for protein? We can get protein from plants in correct form and combination, but most protein comes from animals . . . that live on plants. What would we do for shelter? Trees grow in and on soil, so without soil there would be little wood for construction. What would we do for heat and energy? Coal, oil and gas all originate through plant growth. Wind and Solar energy you say? How would you build the equipment to collect the wind and solar energy? Regardless whether the equipment is made of metal, glass, plastic, or something else, energy is required for production, and that energy originates in plants and, ultimately, the soil. That is the reason for an International Year of Soils!

Each month of 2015 had a theme addressing one aspect of our dependence on soil. Here are the monthly themes and a website where you can access related information. I encourage you to explore these websites if you have not already done so.


January - Soils Sustain Life

 February - Soils Support Urban Life


 March - Soils Support Agriculture

April - Soils Clean and Capture Water

May - Soils Support Buildings/Infrastructure

June - Soils Support Recreation

July - Soils are Living

August - Soils Support Health

September - Soils Protect the Natural Environment

 October - Soils and the Products We Use

 November - Soils and Climate

December - Soils, Culture, and People

HOW DID THE BIG BANG HAPPEN???

Have you ever driven in a “pea soup” fog? I have . . . twice. You creep along, and as one center line dash disappears from sight the next one emerges from the fog. Even fog lights are useless. They can’t penetrate the fog. You may be on a mountain road, as in one of my experiences. You are tense, fearing you might miss that next curve, or it might be sharper than expected. Science can be like that. Your mind creeps along from one idea to another, trying to make sense of the whole. You may finally have a “eureka moment” and the fog disappears, but you are still not really sure how you got there. 

Back to that mountain road, a car suddenly appeared behind me, passed me, and disappeared into the fog. It was as if I were parked. I proceeded down the mountain, expecting to find the car crushed against a tree or a broken guard rail where it had gone over a cliff. There was nothing. The diver had obviously driven the road many times and knew every curve. Scientifically, Stephen Hawking is like that driver. His “fog” is his non-functioning muscles. He has nothing to do but think, and he has become very proficient at thinking. His brain has become comparable to the muscles of a world champion body builder.

Among many problems, Dr. Hawking has directed his brain into the “curves” of the Big Bang theory.  Carefully considering every “curve,” he concluded that this occurred into nothingness – no time, no space, no mass – simply nothing. It was not even comparable to a vacuum, because a vacuum implies space! In reality, this is basically in agreement with the Judeo-Christian explanation of our beginnings. But how can this be? Logic says it shouldn’t happen. Thermodynamics calculations say it can’t happen. Yet it did. Something had to be present, and it had to be in a unique form never attained since. 

My brain power does not approach that of even one a small lobe of Dr. Hawking’s, but allow me to at least consider the possible conditions leading to the Big Bang. 

First, there is a thermodynamic temperature scale, only used by scientists, called the Kelvin (K) scale. Zero Kelvin is considered “absolute zero,” at point at which everything should be frozen; 0^o K = −273.15°C = −459.67°F. Scientists have been able to cool systems close to absolute zero, but it is not even theoretically possible to reach the zero point. Were this possible, a system at absolute zero would still have mass. Therefore, whatever the Big Bang was, it probably occurred within a system at a temperature even below the thermodynamic absolute zero.

Second, in another blog I pointed to Einstein's equation, mass equals energy divided by the speed of light squared (M=E/C², or he stated it as E=MC²).  In other words, all mass is nothing more and nothing less than organized energy. The atom bomb and the subsequent hydrogen bomb supported this theory as being true. Modern research is also supporting the theory. Going back to conditions prior to the Big Bang, if there was no space and no mass, whatever initiated the university had to be energy only. Furthermore, all of the energy had to be potential energy only. The presence of kinetic energy would mean something was moving, which would imply the presence of space. 

If nothing was moving, then even electrons and their components could not be moving. For that matter, electrons or their components could not have even existed because, no matter how small, they would have occupied space – which was non-existent. This leaves with one and only one possibility: immediately prior to the Big Bang event there could be nothing present but some potential energy. How can this be? 

Given that we now have some potential energy floating in nothingness, expansion into a universe means that some kind of spark had to cause a small packet of potential energy to transfer into kinetic energy. This packet would have nudged another small packet of potential energy, and a minute amount of heat would have resulted. Suddenly we have a chain reaction and the potential energy transfers to kinetic energy and space is created. The packets of energy organize into hydrogen atoms, and off we go!

Assuming this is what happened, we still have unanswered questions. Where did the original energy come from? Can energy exist separate from mass? Where did the initial spark come from? Can we ever know? Some physicists hypothesize prior universes and that ours somehow originated from them. That just begs the question, because we would then have to ask how any "parent" universe(s) originated. Jews and Christians have the answer: God did it. But that, in turn, raises another question. Where did God come from? All this is meaningless, because the origin questions are unanswerable.

OK, theoretical physicists, where am I wrong? Or am I just repeating conclusions that you drew long ago?

MATTER/DARK MATTER – DOES IT MATTER?

What is matter anyway? Einstein theorized that all matter is simply constructed from energy. Does that make sense to you? We think of objects in the terms of the whole. Certainly, we understand that a car, for example, is constructed from many parts, but where is the energy? If two cars collide, pieces of the car are scattered in the area. There is also sound and a certain amount of light and heat associated with the collision. Sound is really energy traveling through the air, and if loud enough it can cause damage. We usually can understand that heat is energy; who has not been cold in a very overcast day, only to be warmed if the sun suddenly breaks through the clouds and sunlight hits us. So, light, too, is a form of energy traveling through the air.  

Back to the wrecked car that is now in pieces. We pick up a piece of metal, which is now simply a mass of iron, or maybe aluminum, with, perhaps, a few other metal s mixed in. We pick up a piece of glass, which is silicon. We pick up a piece of plastic, and know it is made of carbon and oxygen, maybe with a few other constituents. All of these elements are much too small to see individuals, but working together they form a solid piece called matter.

Now we take our car pieces to a laboratory. It takes some pretty elaborate equipment, but we separated and look at a few element atoms. We discover that each atom consists of a positively charged nucleus and surrounding negatively charged electrons. We also discover that the nucleus is actually made up of positively charged electrons. The only real difference between our iron, aluminum, silica, carbon, and oxygen atoms is the number of positive electrons in the nucleus!

The number of laboratories in the world that can go farther begins to decrease, but we can actually continue breaking down the wrecked car pieces. We find, for example, that the oxygen nucleus is about five femtometers in diameter. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think that small! I can think down to one millimeter, because a ruler is divided to that extent. However, there are 1 billion femtometers in one millimeter! (I can’t think that large either!) The electrons are only about one hundredth of the size of the nucleus. Yet, now equipment exists to study the properties of electrons, and it turns out they are made up of even smaller particles. So far as I know, there is only one lab in the world that can study these smaller particles by causing them to collide at near the speed of light. When this happens, they are, basically, dissipated into energy!

Conclusion: Einstein was correct and matter is nothing more and nothing less than organized energy!

What about the so-called dark matter? Astrophysical measurements and calculations during recent years indicate there is something in the universe that can’t be seen or measured in any way. It has been labeled “dark matter,” but what is it? How does it differ from solid matter? 

Matter can be seen, felt, and measured, but is it really solid? What is “solid” matter, anyway?  It has been concluded that matter is nothing but energy, but matter sure feels solid! It feels solid simply because the energy is organized, and the organization is controlled by a balance between attractive and repulsive forces. For example, gravity is simply a convenient way to express the attractive forces between bodies. We stay on the surface as a result of repulsive forces between bundles of energy. If this balance were to disappear we would either migrate to the center of earth or fly off into space. In either case we would likely disintegrate into our component energy. 

 Returning to dark matter, apparently, these attractive and repulsive forces do not exist. As a result, there is nothing to reflect light and therefore nothing to see, either visibly or with any instrument currently available. Were we to touch this dark matter, our hand would pass through it and we would never know it was there. Likewise, it could be constantly passing through us unknown. We do know there are cosmic particles that pass right through the earth unchanged without having any effect on it.

One can only conclude that dark matter may be no more and no less than a collection of unorganized energy. It could be left-over energy from the beginning, or it might be the result of some matter having been annihilated.

Thus, whatever its source and make-up, whether dark matter matters depends on its role in the universe (and, of course, whether funding agencies feel it important enough to provide scientists with the funds necessary for its study).

The greatest questions are: 1. What is the source of all this energy?  2. How would it have appeared suddenly into nothingness? And, greatest of all, 3. How would this energy have spontaneously become organized into our universe’s many forms of matter?

{Additional comments on this subject can be found in “Scripture Versus Science: Reconciling God’s Ancient Wisdom With a Modern World View.”}

WAS IT EVOLUTION?

(Excerpted from "Scripture versus Science: Reconciling God's Ancient Wisdom With a Modern world View")

Many of the world’s biologists claim that the fact of evolution is settled. They hold firmly to evolution being a provable fact. In another blog I have pointed out that there is no physical evidence of an evolutionary process, let alone a testable hypothesis of how it happened. Their conclusion is based primarily on two general observations. Similarities between divergent species have long been considered an indication of a relationship of some kind. Now that the human and many animal genomes have been mapped, the striking similarities between the DNA of all animals is taken as proof of evolution. The high correlation between the DNA of humans and primates in particular has been taken as evidence of common ancestry. Let us consider the DNA observations.

Jeremiah it told to "go to the potter's House." (Jeremiah 18:2), so let's do likewise. What do we see there? A potter throws an appropriate quantity of clay onto a spinning disk and begins to shape it into the desired form. As skilled fingers work, an urn, for example, begins to take shape. If that isn't working right the potter may decide to make a cup instead. The process remains exactly the same, but the slight changes create a different product.  Only the quantity of clay used and the finishing touches differ.

The finishing touches are what make each product unique. Each piece of pottery is one of many, perhaps a group of containers or perhaps a group of gallon jugs. In all pieces the production process is identical. Whether a part of a generic group or a specific use group, however, the potter imparts a unique personality onto the piece. Every living organism, whether under the classification of the animal kingdom or Homo sapians has some degree of similarity. Likewise, every living organism is unique in some small detail. Humans are all basically of the same form, and at a larger scale we are even similar to all mammals. Two people may look similar, but there is always some difference between them. Every individual on the earth is unique in some way.

As biological scientists have unraveled the complexity of DNA, they have discovered that all animals have a similar pattern, and human DNA differs only slightly from that of primates. This has been used to “prove” that humans did not arise through intelligent design, but evolved from an ancestor common to the primates. However, this proves nothing other than a person’s inability to consider the option of intelligent design. If one applies a bit of logic, would it not make sense to find that all animals have similar DNA? Why would a designer alter the basic structure of a successful design? A potter does not redesign the entire process when embarking on production of a new piece. Does a builder redesign the basic structure for every new construction project? Would a scientist design a new protocol for every potential research project? Of course not. No matter how simple or complex a project may be, the starting point is the same for all similar endeavors. Only the details are altered to fit the requirements of the project at hand.

Despite the claims of biological scientists, similarities in animal genomes do not prove they were created in an evolutionary process. In fact, sections of the genome that have been considered “junk DNA” have recently been found to be the instructions for creating a unique individual, so our DNA is not so similar to primates as scientists had previously assumed. It must be recognized that whether humans were formed through intelligent design via DNA manipulation (supposedly evolution) or by some kind of spontaneous creation process, similarities in the gene sequence would be logically expected.

As pointed out in another blog, a major problem with the traditional evolution theory is that it requires a series of mutations to explain the transformation of one species into another. Theoretically, slow change is a possibility, but since any hypothesis of the formation process is based on observations, we must consider the observation that only very rarely do mutations result in a viable organisms. Mutations are almost always fatal to the offspring. Any evolutionary process should be supported by finding organisms with properties intermediate between the assumed parent and offspring. This criticism is answered by assuming that changes occurred rapidly, so few intermediate species existed from which fossils would be formed. The problem here is that a series of nonfatal mutations would have been required, and if single nonfatal mutations are rare, a series of such mutations over a short period of time would be extremely improbable, unless controlled through intelligent design.

To compound the problem at hand, and to enable the reproduction system, similar evolution had to happen simultaneously to a woman and a man; otherwise their children would be some kind of hybrid and could not create human offspring that were duplicates of themselves. On the other hand, if the genes were carefully adjusted to form a human, would it not be a simple matter of changing the Y-DNA that defines a man into the mitochondrial DNA that defines a woman?

Within either the plant or animal kingdom, one would expect DNA commonality to increase with the degree to which two organisms share similarities. It should be expected that humans share some DNA characteristics with cows or elephants.This similarity should not be used as proof of a common ancestor. It can be considered as evidence of intelligent design. In reality, evolutionary changes by natural alterations of DNA to form humans are infinitely improbable. When biological scientists insist that all life forms are the result of an evolutionary process, they are actually admitting that there is an intelligent designer in charge of things.

The Big Bang Theory

As you hear talk about The Big Bang, you need to realize and remember that this is not a fact, but only a theory of how the universe was created. Over the years there have been many theories put forth, and there are currently other theories. The Big Bang is only the currently most popular theory, and as such it has, since the mid-1900s, been the most studied theory. As it has developed, the theory does have many points in its favor, but like all other theories it contains some problems. The most problemic is in the event proposed.

Stephen Hawking ranks right with Einstein as a primary theoretician of recent centuries, and he is one of those who have been studying the theory. His calculations have said that, prior to the event, there was nothing: no space, no time, no mass . . . nothing! In microseconds, out of nothing the foundation of our entire universe suddenly appeared! This is a major problem with The Big Bang theory, as well as with every beginnings theory ever developed. Things simply don't arise from nothing! Reason says it can't happen. Research says it can't happen. Thermodynamics says it can't happen. If you asked him, Hawking would probably tell you it can't happen - yet, his calculations say that it did!

The underlying problem is that we are trying to explain something of which we have no knowledge and we have no way of gaining event knowledge. Our attempt to understand the event can only be through examining events which occur today and gradually work our way backwards to the original event. This requires a paradigm that all reactions are unchanging through time. But what if they have changed? Many calculation involve the speed of light. What if the speed of light approached infinity during the first microsecond of the creation event, and has been hyperbolicly slowing since that time? (This has been suggested by a few.) By now it would be effectively constant over the several centuries since it was first measured, and all historical measurements using speed of light would be in error. Light travels in a straight line and it's path can only be altered by passing through a boundary between substances of differing density. What if the boundary at the edge of our universe actually reflects light? In this case the universe might be much smaller than calculated. Both events are unlikely, but we cannot know they are absolutely impossible, because we have no way to test the possibility. What these points do demonstrate is the problem with using an incorrect paradigm when making theoretical calculations of events that can not be reproduced.

When it comes to the origin of the universe, we have only theories and calculations - we have no real knowledge. In the bible the Lord asks Job, "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?" (Job 38:2) He then goes on to ask a series of questions, to which no human, even today, has the information necessary for an answer. A few astrophysicists have suggest the existence of multiple universes, some of which may actually coexist with ours. While this seems unlikely, most, if not all, societies believe in some kind of heaven supervised by a god. Would not a heaven be a coexisting universe? In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, an all powerful God is recognized and worshiped. To fit all biblical descriptions of God, there would need to be no space, so time, and no mass in heaven. So far as we know, there is only one thing remaining upon which a universe might exist, that being energy. Einstein theorized that all mass is, basically, organized energy, and this has been proven true. Could initiation of our universe possibly be the result of an all-powerful God simply gathering some energy from what we call heaven and, in an event we are calling The Big Bang, setting into motion the organization of this energy to form mass? All of time and space are mass dependent, so would follow that event.

Just something to think about!