Blowing Smoke

Jay Grant is again blowing smoke. Here is what Jay Grant is really saying in his withered little column “Veiling the Truth” (12/8/2000): The universe is perfect and precise in its creation and the universe is in perfect balance. God created the universe as is and the universe is perfectly tuned. Therefore, evolution in all its forms is impossible.
Perfection like heaven itself is changeless, static. Perfect balance again is another way to say, nothing changes. According to Grant, the universe must look like god and heaven. The truth is the universe is not balanced or perfect.

Jay Grant undermines his own argument from the get-go. He rightly tells us, our universe is continually expanding. An expanding universe is by definition continually undergoing change, creating and recreating itself moment to moment. What causes the universe to accelerate away in all directions? More than three centuries ago, Sir Isaac Newton taught the world that only an unbalanced force can cause an acceleration. Therefore, the entire universe had or is presently experiencing an unbalanced force. That initial unbalanced force is known as the Big Bang.

Jay Grant writes the universal gravitational constant (=6.67 x 10-11Nm2/kg2, a really tiny number) is an example of god’s perfect balance. Again, Jay Grant undermines his own argument. In an accelerating universe, the universal gravitational constant is getting smaller as everything in the universe moves away from everything else. Because of the acceleration given to the universe by the Big Bang explosion, the universal gravitational constant is not constant at all but is itself undergoing change.

The universe is also filled with variable stars. Variable stars change their brightness over time. Cepheid variable stars and RR Lyrae stars first grow bright then after a few days or months, these stars grow dim again. What causes this variation in brightness? The inward pull of gravity and the outward push of nuclear induced radiation are out of balance with one force winning for a time only to be reined in by the other force. When the outward push of radiation can no longer hold back the inward pull of gravity, a huge cataclysmic explosion occurs. Nova and Super Nova stars blow themselves up spewing forth the chemical ingredients that will eventually evolve into life itself. From the nuclear fusion furnaces of stars to the DNA ovens coding for the diversity life: talk about undergoing a spectacular change!

Jay Grant is correct when he says there are hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy and there are billions of galaxies in the universe. In the universe, no two galaxies look alike. There are great groupings of galaxies which are known as spiral, elliptical, and irregular shaped galaxies. These islands of stars distributed throughout the sea of space-time are all different in size, particular shape, and the number of stars they contain. With all these differences, which one is the perfect galaxy in this perfect universe? Jay Grant does not tell us.

As astronomers look deeper into the distant reaches of our universe, they are also looking back in time. Telescopes are actually time machines that look into the past. In the distant past, the universe was filled with quasars. There are no more quasars in the present universe. What happened to all the quasars? They evolved into galaxies.