Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
1. Andrei Linde, “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, Vol. 271, November 1994, p. 48.
2. “According to inflationary cosmology, the universe [began] growing from a patch as small as 10-26 m, one hundred billion times smaller than a proton, ...” Alan H. Guth and David I. Kaiser, “Inflationary Cosmology: Exploring the Universe from the Smallest to the Largest Scales,” Science, Vol. 307, 11 February 2005, p. 885.
But inflation has a serious problem. “Guth’s original concept called for inflation to end [arbitrarily] after a fraction of a second. But Steinhardt and others soon discovered that inflation would continue forever in a few spots, spawning rogue areas that went on ballooning.” Alexandra Witze, “Inflation on Trial,” Science News, Vol. 182, 28 July 2012, p. 21.
3. Just as a tent curtain or tent is opened along multiple folds from a much more compact (or denser) form, the analogy of “stretching out heaven like a tent curtain” (Ps 104:2 and Is 40:22) may mean that the heavens existed in a smaller, denser, finite form before the stretching began at multiple places concurrently. Also, the evidence cited in this section titled “Stellar Velocities,” “Intergalactic Medium,” “Speeding Galaxies,” “Dwarf Galaxies,” “Strings of Galaxies,” “Colliding Galaxies,” and “Helium-2 Nebulas” implies a finite universe before stretching began.
4. Both the big bang explanation and the stretching explanation agree that (a) in the beginning, energy and matter appeared out of nothing, and (b) the universe has expanded. Those profound ideas in Genesis, Job, and Isaiah were written 700–2000 years before the big bang theory was proposed. Since then, man’s scientific ideas about the universe have changed many times. Man’s ideas are fallible.
5. “[Astronomer Richard S.] Ellis notes that the new findings also hint at a puzzle. His team estimates that the distant galaxies, which are too tiny to be clearly resolved by Hubble, are making stars at a puny rate. In some cases, that rate is as low as the mass equivalent of 0.0025 suns per year. According to current models, that rate couldn’t have generated enough ultraviolet starlight for a critical milestone in the evolution of the universe—the wrenching apart of neutral hydrogen into their subatomic constituents.” Ron Cowen, “Hubble’s New Finds Go the Distance,” Science News, Vol 176, 10 October 2009, p. 8.
u Andrew J. Bunker, Richard S. Ellis et al., “The Contribution of High Redshift Galaxies to Cosmic Reionization: New Results from Deep WFC3 [Wide Field Camera 3] Imaging of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field,” arXiv:0909.2255, 22 September 2009, pp. 1–13.
6. “Shapiro and Teukolsky calculated that there were likely to be as many as 108 stellar-mass black holes in our galaxy, under the assumption that all stars of initial mass >10 times that of the Sun met this fate [of sustained collapse].” Rob Fender and Tomaso Belloni, “Stellar-Mass Black Holes and Ultraluminous X-ray Sources,” Science, Vol. 337, 3 August 2012. p. 540.
7. “The masses of these early black holes are inferred from their [quasar] luminosities to be >109 solar masses, which is a difficult theoretical challenge [for the big bang theory] to explain.” Rennan Barkana and Abraham Loeb, “Spectral Signature of Cosmological Infall of Gas Around the First Quasars,” Nature, Vol. 421, 23 January 2003, p. 341.
u “These supermassive black holes pose major puzzles: Why are they so common in galaxies? Which came first—the galaxy or the hole? And how did they form in the first place?” Jenny E. Greene, “Goldilocks Black Holes,” Scientific American, Vol. 306, January 2012, p. 42.
u “The daunting problem for theories of structure formation in the Universe is to understand how such huge black holes [3 billion solar masses] and the vast reservoirs of gaseous fuel were assembled so soon after the Big Bang ...” Edwin L. Turner, “Through a Lens Brightly,” Nature, 27 June 2002, p. 905.
u “... such black holes indeed formed early in the history of the universe and were already devouring matter voraciously a mere billion years after the Big Bang.” Ron Cowen, “Mature Before Their Time,” Science News, Vol. 163, 1 March 2003, p. 139.
u “The galaxy, some 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, sets a new record for the most distant object sighted by astronomers.” Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “Warped Light Reveals Infant Galaxy on the Brink of the ‘Cosmic Dawn’,” Science, Vol. 337, 21 September 2012, p. 1442.
8. “But the standard model [the big bang theory] still can’t easily account for a large number of mature or massive galaxies in the early universe.” Ibid.
u “But this uniformity [in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation] is difficult to reconcile with the obvious clumping of matter into galaxies, clusters of galaxies and even larger features extending across vast regions of the universe, such as ‘walls’ and ‘bubbles’.” Ivars Peterson, “Seeding the Universe,” Science News, Vol. 137, 24 March 1990, p. 184.
u “Gravity can’t, over the age of the universe, amplify these irregularities enough [to form huge clusters of galaxies].” Margaret Geller, as quoted by John Travis, “Cosmic Structures Fill Southern Sky,” Science, Vol. 263, 25 March 1994, p. 1684.
u “Yet how could the universe have gone from homogeneous plasma to pancakes to galaxies so quickly? Gravity alone was simply not strong enough to do it.” M. Mitchell Waldrop, “The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe,” Science, Vol. 219, 4 March 1983, p. 1051.
u Robert Irion, “Early Galaxies Baffle Observers, but Theorists Shrug,” Science, Vol. 303, 23 January 2004, p. 460.
9. “Standard cosmological models implied that matter in the universe was not concentrated tightly enough to have formed black holes so early on. Clearly the models were wrong.” Michael Lemonick, “The Great Cosmic Census,” Discover, March 2009, p. 64.
10. “More embarrassing to astrophysicists is our lack of understanding of black hole jets—phenomena in which the forces near a supermassive black hole somehow conspire to spew out material at ultrarelativistic speeds (up to 99.98 percent of light speed). These amazing outflows traverse distances larger than galaxies, ...” Avery E. Broderick and Abraham Loeb, “Portrait of a Black Hole,” Scientific American, Vol. 301, December 2009, p. 44.
11. Chris Willott, “A Monster in the Early Universe,” Nature, Vol. 474, 30 June 2011, p. 583.
u Part of the problem big bang theorists face is that quasars—seen so far back in time—can’t grow fast enough to reach their massive size so quickly after the big bang. The faster quasars grow, the more radiation they put out, which, in turn, slows the influx of matter and their growth rate. This “speed limit” is called the Eddington radiation limit.
12. This correlation applies to many characteristics of galaxies: total mass, mass of the galactic bulge, galaxy luminosity, and the number of associated globular clusters. The strongest correlation is probably between the black hole’s mass and the mass of the galactic bulge.
13. “For reasons not fully understood, it appears that the sizes of central black holes and the masses of their galaxies, especially the central bulges, are almost perfectly in step.” Charles Petit, “Ultra Massive: As Big As It Gets,” Science News, Vol. 174, 25 October 2008, p. 20.
14. “These black holes at the centers of galaxies are big (as black holes go). But compared with a galaxy, they’re really small. So they don’t have that much of an effect; we have nothing to fear. They only affect the very closest stars to them. But recently it was observed that the mass of a central black hole correlates with the mass of the galaxy around it! Before that observation, we didn’t know if the black hole formed first and then the galaxy formed around it, or if the galaxy formed first and then the black hole formed from the galaxy. The correlation means that the black hole and galaxy had to form together. They couldn’t be separate events because a black hole can’t affect an object as big as a galaxy. Whatever gave rise to that galaxy had to give rise to the black hole.” Andrea Ghez, “Frontiers of Astronomy,” Discover, May 2009, p. 44.
15. “The black hole’s inactivity [today] suggests that the central few light years doesn’t contain enough raw material to make stars. And the enormous gravitational tidal forces around the black hole would seem to prohibit stars from forming even if the material were there: it’s hard for a cloud of gas to contract into a star under its own gravity when something that weighs as much as four million stars is sitting next door.” Jeff Kanipe, “A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Not So Far Away,” Nature, Vol. 446, 5 April 2007, p. 601.
u “... the stars we studied to prove that there was a black hole turned out to be very young. Young stars have absolutely no right to be next to a black hole because a black hole should shear them apart [if they evolved]. We have no idea how these stars formed.” Ghez, p. 43.
16. “In principle, this could have occurred if the density of the gases in the centre of the Galaxy was much higher in the past. Higher density would allow clumps in the clouds to collapse to form stars, even in the presence of a strong gravitational field [of a black hole].” Ibid., p. 602.
17. “Astrophysicists can model the accreting material to some extent, but it is unclear how gas in the accretion flow migrates from an orbit at a large radius to one near the [event] horizon ...” Avery E. Broderick and Abraham Loeb, p. 44.
18. Robert Irion, “The Hunt for Stealth Galaxies,” Science, Vol. 308, 20 May 2005, pp. 1104–1106.
u “The existence of quiescent, extended gaseous disks around a handful of dwarf irregular galaxies is puzzling.” Liese van Zee, “A Large Gas Disk Around a Small Galaxy,” National Radio Astronomy Observatory Newsletter, Issue 103, April 2005, p. 13.
19. “The discovery of massive, evolved galaxies at much greater distances than expected—and hence at earlier times in the history of the Universe—is a challenge to our understanding of how galaxies form.” Gregory D. Wirth, “Old Before Their Time,” Nature, Vol. 430, 8 July 2004, p. 149.
u A. Cimatti et al., “Old Galaxies in the Young Universe,” Nature, Vol. 430, 8 July 2004, p. 184.
u David Shiga, “Nursery Pictures,” Science News, Vol. 167, 5 March 2005, pp. 148–149.
u “Until now, we wouldn’t think that you could make galaxies emerge that early in the universe.” George Helou, as quoted by Alex Hutchinson, “New and Old Galaxies Show Up in All the Wrong Places,” Discover, January 2006, p. 61.
20. “Thirty-seven of the brightest galaxies were detected, including a quasar, but thousands of galaxies were probably in the string, according to astronomer Dr. Paul Francis who heads the team. But none of the existing computer simulation models were able to reproduce galaxy strings as large as the one the team found. ‘We are looking back four-fifths of the way to the beginning of the universe and the existence of this galaxy string will send astrophysicists around the world back to the drawing board to re-examine [big bang] theories of the formation of the universe,’ Francis said. The simulations tell us that you cannot take the matter in the early universe and line it up in strings this large. There simply hasn’t been enough time since the Big Bang for it to form structures this colossal.” Science & Space, “Galaxy Find Stirs Big Bang Debate” on 8 January 2004 at:
www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/08/galaxies.find.
u Paul J. Francis et al., “An 80 Mpc Filament of Galaxies at Redshift Z=2.38,” presented to the American Astronomical Society (Atlanta, Georgia), 7 January 2004.
[80 Mpc = 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles
= 2,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers
= 261,000,000 light-years]
u M. Mitchell Waldrop, “The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe Gets Larger—Maybe,” Science, Vol.38, 13 November 1987, p. 894.
u M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Astronomers Go Up Against the Great Wall,” Science, Vol. 246, 17 November 1989, p. 885.
21. “Violent encounters between galaxies appear surprisingly common.” Joshua Barnes et al., “Colliding Galaxies,” Scientific American, Vol. 265, August 1991, p. 40.
u “... merging two spiral galaxies to make an elliptical [galaxy] is statistically improbable.” James E. Gunn, as quoted by Karen Hartley, “Mixing It Up in Space,” Science News, Vol. 135, 8 April 1989, p. 219.
22. “Other studies of elliptical galaxies have found additional signs of recent merging. In some ellipticals, for example, the central region rotates in one direction, while the outer parts spin the other way. Such a countervailing rotation pattern would be difficult to explain if these galaxies formed all of one piece but could come about quite naturally from a merger.” [emphasis added] Barnes et al., p. 41.
23. “Hotter stars ‘are not predicted by normal stellar evolution, so the presence of the He II nebulas is a bit of a mystery’ comments Garnett ...” Donald R. Garnett, as quoted by Ron Cowen, “Gorgeous Gas,” Science News, Vol. 163, 24 May 2003, p. 328.
24. “No one knows what dark matter is, but they know what it is not. It’s not part of the ‘standard model’ of physics that weaves together everything that is known about ordinary matter and its interactions.” Jenny Hogan, “Welcome to the Dark Side,” Nature, Vol. 448, 19 July 2007, p. 241.
u “We know little about that sea. The terms we use to describe its components, ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy,’ serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance.” David B. Cline, “The Search for Dark Matter,” Scientific American, Vol. 288, March 2003, p. 52.