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.
Theories for the Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity
The Hydroplate Theory. In the centuries before the flood, supercritical water (SCW) in the subterranean chamber steadily dissolved the more soluble minerals in the rock directly above and below the chamber. [Pages 120–122 explain SCW and its extreme dissolving ability.] Thin spongelike channels, filled with high-pressure SCW, steadily grew up into the increasingly porous chamber roof and down into the chamber floor.
The flood began when pressure increases from tidal pumping in the subterranean chamber ruptured the weakening granite crust. As water escaped violently upward through the globe-encircling rupture, pillars had to support more of the crust’s weight, because the subterranean water supported less. Pillars were tapered downward like icicles, so they crushed in stages, beginning at their tips. With each collapse and with each water-hammer cycle, the crust fluttered like a flag held horizontally in a strong wind. Each downward “flutter” rippled through the earth’s crust and powerfully slammed what remained of pillars against the subterranean chamber floor. [See “Water Hammers and Flutter Produced Gigantic Waves” on page 188.]
For weeks, compression-tension cycles within both the fluttering crust and pounding pillars generated piezoelectric voltages that easily reached granite’s breakdown voltage.79 Therefore, powerful electrical currents discharged within the crust repeatedly, along complex paths of least electrical resistance. [See Figures 189–192.]
Figure 189: Piezoelectric Effect. Piezo [pea-A-zo] is derived from the Greek “to squeeze” or “to press.” Piezoelectricity is sometimes called pressure electricity. When a nonsymmetric, nonconducting crystal, such as quartz (whose structure is shown above in simplified form), is stretched, a small voltage is generated between opposite faces of the crystal. When the tension (T) changes to compression (C), the voltage changes sign. As the temperature of quartz rises, it deforms more easily, producing a stronger piezoelectric effect. However, once the temperature reaches about 1,063°F (573°C), the piezoelectric effect disappears.77
Quartz is the only common mineral in the earth’s crust that is piezoelectric. Granite contains about 27% quartz by volume. If the myriad of quartz crystals throughout the 10-mile-thick granite crust were partially aligned and cyclically and powerfully stretched and compressed, huge voltages and electric fields would rapidly build up and collapse with each flutter half-cycle. If those fields reached about 9 × 106 volts per meter, electrical resistances within the granite would break down, producing sudden discharges—electrical surges (a plasma) similar to lightning. [See Figures 181 and 191.] Even during some large earthquakes today, this piezoelectric effect in granite generates powerful electrical activity and hundreds of millions of volts.78 [See “Earthquakes and Electricity” on page 356.]
Granite pillars, explained on page 434 and in Figure 54 on page 123, were formed in the subterranean water, in part, by an extrusion process. Therefore, quartz crystals in the pillars would have had a preferred orientation. Also, before the flood, tidal pumping in the subterranean water compressed and stretched the pillars and crust twice a day. Centuries of this “kneading action” plus “voltage cycling”—twice a day—would align these crystals even more (a process called poling ), just as adjacent bar magnets become aligned when cyclically magnetized. [See Figure 192.] Each quartz crystal acted like a tiny battery—one among trillions upon trillions. So, as the flood began, the piezoelectric effect within pounding pillars and fluttering granite hydroplates generated immense voltages and electric fields. Each quartz crystal’s effective electrical field was multiplied by about 7.4 by the reinforcing electrical field’s of the myriad of nearby quartz crystals.79
Figure 190: Fluttering Crust. Many of us have seen films showing earth’s undulating crust during earthquakes. Imagine how magnified those waves would become if the crust, instead of resting on solid rock, were resting on a thick layer of unusually compressible water—SCW. Then, imagine how high those waves in the earth’s crust would become if the “ocean” of water below the crust were flowing horizontally with great force and momentum. The crust’s vast area—the surface of the earth (200,000,000 square miles)—gave the relatively thin crust great flexibility during the first few weeks of the flood. As the subterranean waters escaped, the crust flapped, like a large flag held horizontally in a strong wind.
Flutter began as the fountains of the great deep erupted. [See “Water Hammers and Flutter Produced Gigantic Waves” on page 188.] Each time the crust arched downward into the escaping subterranean water, the powerful horizontal flow slammed into the dipping portion of the crust, creating a water hammer that then lifted that part of the crust. Waves rippled through the entire crust at the natural frequencies of the crust, multiplying and reinforcing waves and increasing their amplitudes.
Grab a phone book with both hands and arch it upward. The top cover is in tension, and the bottom cover is in compression. Similarly, rock in the fluttering crust, shown above, would alternate between tension (T) and compression (C). As explained in Figure 189, huge cyclic voltages would build up and suddenly discharge within the granite crust, because granite contains so much quartz, a piezoelectric mineral. Once granite’s breakdown voltage was reached, electrical current—similar to bolts of lightning—would discharge vertically within the crust. Pillars (not shown) at the base of the crust would become giant electrodes. With each cycle of the fluttering crust, current surged through the lower crust, which was honeycombed with tiny pockets of salty (electrically conducting) subterranean water.
Electrons flowing through solids, liquids, or gases are decelerated and deflected by electrical charges in the atoms encountered. These decelerations and accelerations, if energetic enough, release bremsstrahlung (BREM-stra-lung) radiation which frees neutrons from other nuclei.
Neutrons will be produced in any material struck by the electron beam or bremsstrahlung beam above threshold energies that vary from 10–19 MeV for light nuclei and 4–6 MeV for heavy nuclei.86
Figure 191: Piezoelectric Demonstration. When I rotate the horizontal bar of this device, a tiny piezoelectric crystal (quartz) is compressed in the vertical column just below the bar’s pivot point. The red cables apply the generated voltage across the two vertical posts mounted on the black, nonconducting platform. Once the increasing voltage reaches about 4,000 volts, a spark (a plasma) jumps the gap shown in the circular inset. When the horizontal bar is rotated in the opposite direction, the stress on the quartz crystal is reversed, so a spark jumps in the opposite direction.
In this device, a tiny quartz crystal and a trivial amount of compression produce 4,000 volts and a small spark. Now consider trillions of times greater compression acting on a myriad of quartz crystals filling 27% of a 10-mile-thick crustal layer. (An “ocean” of subterranean water escaping from below that crust created water hammers, causing the crust to flutter and produce enormous compressive stresses in the crust.) The resulting gigavoltages would produce frightening electrical discharges, not through air, but through rock—and not across a little gap, but throughout the entire crustal layer.
Figure 192: Poling. Poling is an industrial process that steadily aligns piezoelectric crystals so greater voltages can be produced. During the centuries before the flood, tidal stress cycles in the granite crust (tension followed by compression, twice a day), and the voltages and electrical fields they produced, slowly aligned the quartz crystals. (A similar picture, but with arrows and positive and negative signs reversed, could be drawn for the compression half of the cycle.) Over the years, stresses heated the crust to some degree, which accelerated the alignment process. The fact that today so much electrical activity accompanies large earthquakes worldwide shows us that preflood poling was effective. Laboratory tests have also shown that quartz crystals still have a degree of alignment in most quartz-rich rocks.81
Self-Focusing Z-Pinch
Figure 193: Z-Pinch Discovered. In 1905, lightning struck and radially collapsed part of a hollow, copper lightning rod (shown in this drawing84). Professors J. A. Pollock and S. H. E. Barraclough at the University of Sydney then showed that a strong pinching effect occurs when a powerful electrical current travels along close, parallel paths.
Later, Willard H. Bennett provided a more rigorous analysis.85 The closer the paths, the stronger the pinch—and when the current flows through a plasma, the stronger the pinch, the closer the paths. The flow self-focuses.
Patents have since been granted for using the Z-pinch to squeeze atomic nuclei together in fusion reactors.
In a plasma flow, trillions upon trillions of electrical charges are flowing along a long, narrow path—positive charges in one direction and negative charges (electrons) in the opposite direction. The mutual repulsion of like charges doesn’t widen the path, because the opposite charges—although moving in the opposite direction—are in the same path. In fact, the magnetic field created by each moving charge squeezes all charged particles toward the axis of the path, continually narrowing (or Z-pinching) the flow.During the flood, gigantic piezoelectric voltages produced electrical breakdown in the fluttering granite crust, so each long flow channel self-focused onto its axis.
In that flow, nuclei of the different chemical elements that were stripped of some electrons were drawn closer and closer together. Normally, their Coulomb forces would repel each other, but the electrons flowing in the opposite directions tended to neutralize those repulsive forces. Nuclei that collided or nearly collided were then pulled together by the extremely powerful strong force. Fusion occurred, and even superheavy elements formed. Thousands of experiments at the Proton-21 Laboratory have demonstrated this phenomenon. Because superheavy elements are so unstable, they quickly fission (split) or decay.
Although fusion of nuclei lighter than iron released large amounts of nuclear energy (heat), the fusion of nuclei heavier than iron absorbed much of the energy of fission and decay. Therefore, staggering amounts of energy (heat) were absorbed in producing heavy elements, such as uranium. The more heat produced, the more heavy elements formed. By “cooking” isotopes of uranium, for example, in a “hot plasma brew,” an equilibrium was achieved in the amounts of the various isotopes of uranium produced.
At electrical breakdown, the energies in the surging electrons were thousands of times greater than 10–19 MeV, so for weeks after the flood began, bremsstrahlung radiation produced a sea of neutrons throughout the crust. Subterranean water absorbed many of these neutrons, converting normal hydrogen (1H) into heavy hydrogen (2H, called deuterium) and normal oxygen (16O) into 18O. Abundant surface water (a huge absorber) protected life.
During the flood, most of this 2H- and 18O-rich subterranean water was swept to the surface where it mixed with surface waters. However, some subterranean water was temporarily trapped within all the mushy mineral deposits, such as salt (NaCl), that had precipitated out of the SCW and collected on the chamber floor years before the flood. Today, those mineral deposits are rich in 2H and 18O.87
The Ukrainian experiments described on page 354 show that a high-energy, Z-pinched beam of electrons inside a solid produces superheavy elements that quickly fission into different elements that are typical of those in earth’s crust. Fusion and fission occur simultaneously, each contributing to the other—and to rapid decay. While we cannot be certain what happens inside nuclei under the extreme and unusual conditions of these experiments, or what happened in the earth’s crust during the flood, here are three possibilities:
a. Electron Capture. Electrons that enter nuclei convert some protons to neutrons. (This occurs frequently, and is called electron capture.)
Also, the dense sea of electrons reduces the mutual repulsion (Coulomb force) between the positively charged nuclei, sometimes bringing them close enough for the strong force to pull them together. Fusion results. Even superheavy nuclei form.
b. Shock Collapse.88 Electrical discharges through the crust vaporize rock along very thin, branching paths “drilled” by gigavolts of electricity through extremely compressed rock. Rock along those paths instantly becomes a high-pressure plasma inside thin rock channels. The shock wave generated by the electrical heating suddenly expands the plasma and the surrounding channel walls, just as a bolt of lightning expands the surrounding air and produces a clap of thunder. As that rock rebounds inward—like a giant, compressed spring that is suddenly released—the rock collapses with enough shock energy to drive (or fuse) nuclei together at various places along the plasma paths. This happens frequently deep in the crust where the rock is already highly compressed.
Superheavy elements quickly form and then fission and decay into such elements as uranium and lead. The heat released propels the plasma and new isotopes along the channels. As the channels contract, flow velocities increase. The charged particles and new elements are transported to sites where minerals are grown, one atom at a time.
c. Z-Pinch. As explained on page 349 and in "Self-Focusing Z-Pinch" on page 362, the path of each electrical charge in a plasma is like a “wire.” All “wires” in a channel are pinched together, but at each instant, pinching forces act only at the points occupied by moving charges, and each force is the sum of the electromagnetic forces produced by all nearby moving charges. Therefore, the closer the “wires,” the greater the self-focusing, pinching force, so the “wires” become even closer, until the strong force merges (fuses) nuclei.
Of these three possible mechanisms, c has the most experimental support. Items a and b should accompany item c.
Vast Energy Generated / Vast Energy Removed
Part of the nuclear energy absorbed by the subterranean water can be calculated. It was truly gigantic, amounting to the energy release of 1,800 trillion 1-megaton hydrogen bombs!89 Fortunately, that energy was produced over weeks, throughout the entire preflood earth’s 10-mile-thick (2-billion-cubic-mile) crust. The steady disposal of that energy was equally impressive and gives us a vivid picture of the power of the fountains of the great deep and the forces that launched meteoroids and the material that later merged in outer space to became comets and asteroids.
Although our minds can barely grasp these magnitudes, we all know about the sudden power of hydrogen bombs. However, if that energy is generated over weeks, few know how it can be removed in weeks; that will now be explained.
Heat Removed by Water. Flow surface boiling removes huge amounts of heat, especially under high pressures. At MIT, I conducted extensive experiments that removed more heat, per unit area, than is coming off the Sun, per unit area, in the same time period. This was done without melting the metal within which those large amounts of heat were being electrically generated. [See Walter T. Brown, Jr., “A Study of Flow Surface Boiling” (Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1967).]
In flow surface boiling, as in a pan of water boiling on your stove, bubbles erupt from microscopic pockets of vapor trapped between the liquid and cracks and valleys (pits) in the surface of hot solids, such as rocks, metals, or a pan on your stove. If the liquid’s temperature is above the so-called boiling point90 and the solid is even hotter, liquid molecules will jump into the vapor pockets, causing them, in milliseconds, to “balloon up” to the size of visible bubbles. The flowing liquid then drags the growing bubbles away from the solid. Sucked behind each bubble is hot liquid that was next to the hot solid. Relatively cold liquid can then circulate down and cool the hot solid. (If you could submerge a balloon deep in a swimming pool and then jerk the balloon several balloon diameters in a few milliseconds, you would see a similar powerful flow throughout the pool.)
Once the bubble is ripped away from the solid, liquid rushes in and tries to fill the pit from which the bubble grew a millisecond earlier. Almost never can the pit be completely filled, so another microscopic vapor pocket, called a nucleation site, is born, ready to grow another bubble.
Jetting. As bubbles quickly grow from the hot solid’s surface into the relatively cool liquid, a second effect—jetting (or thermocapillarity)—acts to remove even more heat from the solid. The thin film of liquid surrounding the bubble can be thought of as the skin of a balloon. The liquid’s surface tension acts as the stretched rubber of a balloon and is much stronger in the colder portion of the bubble than the hotter portion next to the hot solid. Therefore, the bubble’s skin circulates, dragging hot liquid next to the hot solid up to and beyond the cold top of the bubble, far from the hot solid. With proper lighting, the hot liquid next to the solid can be seen jetting into the relatively cool flowing liquid. [See Figure 194.] Vast amounts of heat are removed as hundreds of bubbles shoot out per second from each of hundreds of nucleation sites per square inch.
Figure 194: Thermocapillarity. Boiling removes heat from a hot solid by several powerful mechanisms. In one process, the surface tension surrounding a growing bubble propels the hot liquid away from the hot solid, so cooler liquid can circulate in and cool the solid. Furthermore, if cooler liquid is flowing parallel to and beyond the hot, thermal boundary layer next to the solid, as it would have been with water flowing in vertical channels throughout the crust during and shortly after the flood, the tops of the growing bubbles would have been even cooler. Therefore, the surface tension at the tops of the bubbles would have been stronger yet, so heat removal by jetting would have been even more powerful.
Burnout. A dangerous situation, called burnout, arises if the bubble density becomes so great that vapor (an effective insulator) momentarily blankets the hot solid, preventing most of the generated heat from escaping into the cooler liquid. The solid’s temperature suddenly rises, melting the solid. With my high-pressure test apparatus at MIT, a small explosion would occur with hot liquid squirting out violently. Fortunately, I was behind a protective wall. Although it took days of work to clean up the mess and rebuild my test equipment, that was progress, because I then knew one more of the many temperature-pressure combinations that would cause burnout at a particular flow velocity for any liquid and solid.
During the flood, subsurface water provided even greater heat removal, because the fluid was supercritical water (SCW). [See “SCW” on page 120.] Vapor blankets could not develop at the high supercritical pressures under the earth’s surface, because SCW is always a mixture of microscopic liquid droplets floating in a very dense vapor. The liquid droplets, rapidly bouncing off the solid, remove heat without raising the temperature too much. The heat energy gained by SCW simply increases the pressure, velocity, and number of droplets, all of which then increase the heat removal.91 Significantly, the hotter SCW becomes, the more the water molecules break into ions (H+ and OH-) so most of the energy becomes electrical, not thermal. When the flood began, and for weeks afterward, almost all that energy became kinetic, as explained in Figure 195.
Figure 195: Water Gun. My granddaughter Laney demonstrates, admittedly in a simplified form, how great amounts of nuclear energy steadily accelerated the fountains of the great deep during the early weeks of the flood. Laney adds energy by pushing on the plunger. The pressure does not build up excessively and rupture the tube; instead, the pressure continuously accelerates a jet of water—a fountain. Sometimes the jet hits her poor grandfather.
For weeks after the flood began, each incremental release of nuclear energy in the fluttering crust increased the SCW’s pressure within the interconnected pore spaces in the lower crust. But that pressure increase was transferred through those spongelike channels in the lower crust down into the subterranean water chamber, so the increased pressure continuously accelerated the water flowing out from under each hydroplate. Therefore, the velocities of the fountains became gigantic while the pressures in the channels did not grow excessively and destroy even more of the crust.92 The fountains energy was almost entirely kinetic, not heat. That energy expelled water and rocky debris even into outer space.
Of course, Laney’s gun is small in diameter, so the walls of the tube and nozzle produce considerable friction per unit of water. However, if the water gun became large enough to hold and expel an “ocean of water,” the friction per unit of water would be negligible. Also, if Laney could push the plunger hard enough to accelerate that much water, not for inches and a second, but for 10 miles and for weeks, and if the pressure she applied to the plunger slightly increased the gigantic preflood pressure in the subterranean chamber, she too could expel water and large rocks into outer space.
Although atmospheric turbulence must have been great, would the friction of the fountains against the atmosphere overheat the atmosphere? No. First recognize how cold the fountains became. [See “Rocket Science” on page 525.] Next, recall how negligible the friction per unit volume of water was. Also, the rupture—a 10-mile-deep tension fracture—suddenly became miles wide93 and then grew hundreds of miles wide from erosion and crumbling. (Tension cracks are suddenly pulled apart, just as when a stretched rubber band snaps, its two ends rapidly separate.) Therefore, once the fountains broke through the atmosphere, only the sides of the fountains—a relatively thin boundary layer—made contact with and were slowed by the atmosphere. Besides, the fountains pulsated at the same frequency as the fluttering crust—about a cycle every 10 minutes.94 These relatively quick pulsations would not overcome much of the atmosphere’s great inertia, so most of the atmosphere was not dragged upward into outer space. (To demonstrate this property of inertia, which even gases have, give a quick horizontal jerk on a tablecloth and notice how plates on the tablecloth remain motionless.)
Although Laney’s gun is orders of magnitude smaller than the fountains of the great deep, the mechanism, forces, and energy are analogous.
To appreciate the large velocities in the fountains, we must understand the speeds achievable if large forces can steadily accelerate material over long distances. As a boy, my friends and I would buy bags of dried peas and put a dozen or so in our mouths for our pea-shooting battles. We would place one end of a plastic straw in our mouths, insert a pea in the straw with our tongues, and sneak around houses where we would blow peas out the straws and zap each other. (Fortunately, no one lost his eyesight.) With a longer straw and a bigger breath, I could have shot faster and farther. Cannons, guns, rifles, mortars, and howitzers use the same principle. [See Figure 196.]
Figure 196: Paris Gun. German engineers in World War I recognized that longer gun tubes would, with enough propellant (energy), accelerate artillery rounds for a longer duration, fire them faster and farther, and even strike Paris from Germany. In 1918, this 92-foot-long gun, launching 210-pound rounds at a mile per second, could strike a target 81 miles away in 3 minutes. Parisians thought they were being bombed by quiet, high altitude zeppelins (dirigibles).
If a 92-foot-long gun could launch material at a mile per second, how fast might a 10-mile-long gun tube launch material? How much kinetic energy might the subterranean water gain by using nuclear energy to steadily accelerate the water horizontally under a hydroplate for hundreds (or thousands) of miles before reaching the base of the rupture? There, the water would collide with the oncoming flow, mightily compress, and then elastically rebound upward—the only direction of escape—accelerating straight up at astounding speeds. In principle, if a gun tube (or flow channel) is long enough and enough energy is available, a projectile could escape earth’s gravity and enter cometlike orbits. Nuclear reactions provided more than enough energy to launch water and rocks into space.
For centuries before the flood, SCW dissolved the more soluble minerals in the chamber’s ceiling and floor. The resulting spongelike openings were then filled with SCW.During the flood, that pore water provided an enormous surface area for slowing and capturing neutrons and other subatomic particles. Great heat resulted, some becoming earth’s geothermal heat. Simultaneously, electrical discharges “drilled” thin plasma channels within the crust, producing other nuclear reactions and additional heat.
For weeks, all this heat expanded and further pressurized the SCW in the spongelike channels, which were connected to the subterranean chamber. Therefore, higher than normal pressures in the subterranean chamber continuously accelerated the escaping subterranean water, much like a water gun. [See Figure 195.] Velocities in the expanding fountains of the great deep reached at least 32 miles per second , thereby launching the material that became comets, asteroids, and meteoroids! [See page 300.]
Heat added to SCW raises temperatures only slightly, for three reasons.
1. Liquid quickly evaporates from the surface of the myriad of microscopic droplets floating in the supercritical vapor. We see surface evaporation on a large scale when heat is added to a pan of water simmering on the stove at 212°F (100°C). The water’s temperature does not rise, but great volumes of vapor are produced.
2. As heat is steadily added, positive and negative electrical charges (ions) are increasingly produced and separated. Therefore, more and more energy is stored electrically, so temperatures rise very little. The more the water rose and accelerated, the more the temperatures and pressures dropped, so those electrical charges recombined and the electrical energy was recovered as heat with almost 100% efficiency.
3. As more heat was added to the escaping SCW, the fountains accelerated even more. With that greater acceleration came greater expansion and cooling.
Nuclear energy primarily became electrical energy and then kinetic energy. Had the nuclear energy produced heat only, much of the earth would have melted.89 Also remember, quartz piezoelectricity shuts off at about 1,063°F (573°C).
Chemical Evolution Theory. The current evolutionary theory for the formation of chemical elements and radioisotopes evolved from earlier theories. Each began by assuming a big bang and considering what it might produce. Years later, fatal flaws were found.
Initially (in 1946), George Gamow, a key figure in developing the big bang theory, said that during the first few seconds after the universe’s hot expansion began, nuclear reactions produced all the chemical elements.96 Two years later, Gamow retracted that explanation. Few heavy elements could have been produced, because the expansion rate was too great, and the heavier nuclei became, the more their positive charges would repel each other.97
In 1948, the follow-on theory assumed that a big bang produced only neutrons.98 A free neutron decays in minutes, becoming a proton, an electron, and a particle (an antineutrino) that can be disregarded in this discussion. Supposedly, protons and neutrons slowly merged to become heavier and heavier elements. Later, that theory was abandoned when it was realized that any nucleus with a total of five or eight nucleons (protons or neutrons) will decay and lose one or more nucleons in about a second or less.99 In other words, growing a nucleus by adding one nucleon at a time encounters barriers at 5 and 8 atomic mass units.
The next theory said that a big bang produced only hydrogen. Much later, stars evolved. They fused this hydrogen into helium, which usually has four nucleons (two protons and two neutrons). If three helium nuclei quickly merged, producing a nucleus weighing 12 AMU, these barriers at 5 and 8 AMU could be jumped. This theory was abandoned when calculations showed that the entire process, especially the production of enough helium inside stars, would take too long.
A fourth theory assumed that two helium nuclei and several neutrons might merge when helium-rich stars exploded as supernovas. This theory was abandoned when calculations indicated that, just to produce the required helium, stars needed to generate much more heat than they could produce in their lifetimes.100
The current evolutionary theory for earth’s radioactivity, which we will analyze in detail, has the big bang producing only hydrogen, helium, and a trace of lithium. Inside stars, two helium nuclei sometimes merge briefly (for about 7 × 10-17 of a second—less than one ten-millionth of a billionth of a second). If (and what a big “if” that is!), during this brief instant, a third alpha particle merges with the first two, carbon will be formed. Then, the remaining chemical elements lighter than 60 AMU can be created by simply adding more protons, neutrons, and alpha particles—but only if stars had somehow formed. [Pages 28–36 explain why stars, galaxies, and planets would not form from the debris of a big bang.]
Assuming the formation of stars and the highly improbable triple collision of alpha particles at a rapid enough rate, stars “burning” hydrogen for billions of years might theoretically produce the rest of the 26 or so lightest chemical elements. But fusion inside stars must stop when nuclei reach about 60 AMU. How the more than 66 other naturally-occurring chemical elements (those heavier than iron) were produced is not known.101 Charles Seife explains:
We are all made of starstuff. The big bang created hydrogen, helium, and a little bit of lithium and other light atoms. But everything else—the carbon, oxygen, and other elements that make up animals, plants, and Earth itself—was made by stars. The problem is that physicists aren’t quite sure how stars did it.102
Temperatures hundreds of times greater than those occurring inside stars are needed.103 Exploding stars, called supernovas, release extreme amounts of energy. Therefore, the latest chemical evolution theory assumes that all the heavier chemical elements are produced by supernovas—and then expelled into the vacuum of space. By this thinking, radioactive atoms have been present throughout the earth since it, the Sun, and the rest of the solar system evolved from scattered supernova debris. [But again, the theoretical understanding of how stars and the solar system formed is seriously flawed. See pages 28–36.]