ANOTHER surprising convergence of science and religion:
We are both scientists, and as such we carefully and sometimes rather tediously gather and analyze data on a wide range of topics, then home in on a number of different kinds of truth, and then publish it in a book or scientific journal.
We’re also members of the Church of Jesus Christ. The Church’s doctrine we subscribe to is found in surprisingly many sources, both ancient and modern, including the Standard Works, Statements of the First Presidency, General Conference talks… and even Hymns. At least two very interesting, uniquely Church of Jesus Christ doctrinal concepts are found ONLY in the “LDS Church Hymn Book.” For example, here are two stanzas from Hymn #284:
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If you could hie to Kolob
In the twinkling of an eye,
And then continue onward
With that same speed to fly,
Do you think that you could ever,
Through all eternity,
Find out the generation
Where Gods began to be? -
Or see the grand beginning,
Where space did not extend?
Or view the last creation,
Where Gods and matter end?
Methinks the Spirit whispers,
“No man has found ‘pure space,’
Nor seen the outside curtains,
Where nothing has a place.”
That’s a fair description, if you avoid modern physics terminology, of what cosmologists have learned in the past half century about the universe. Kolob (see the subsequent chapter titled “Sgr-A* and Kolob”) appears to be close to the center of the galaxy. No “pure space”? He’s right – because we now know there is vacuum energy no matter how empty the “space.” Electrons and positrons constantly pop out of nowhere. And there’s “dark energy” besides that (also discussed in a later chapter).
And where ARE the “outside curtains,” the bounds of the universe? Current cosmology, just calculating from proto-galaxies that we can see now from 13 billion years ago, suggests the radius to the Outer Edge must be at least 40 billion light-years (Gott et al., 2005).
How about “See the grand beginning, where space did not extend”? To us, this clearly refers to the microseconds after the Big Bang, as a singularity began to unfold and fill space. For 300,000 years light couldn’t get out of the dense seething plasma because electrons and nuclei hadn’t formed yet. The details of this epoch are poorly understood, and even then, only by using plasma experiments and mathematical modeling. These things were not even known in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Keep in mind that mathematical modeling of the Big Bang, and String Theory, are very different things. The former back-calculates conditions from observable data, whereas the latter is a theory of everything that unfortunately has 10500 possible solutions that you cannot really constrain – it can predict anything you want. String Theory has no connection to any collected data.
However, William Wines Phelps wrote this hymn nearly two centuries ago. The first time we sang it, we liked the music but the words didn’t make a lot of sense. Later we earned advanced degrees, and a childhood interest in stars and galaxies gave way to a research interest in astrophysics and cosmology.
There is an interesting side implication of the last stanza, which we correlate with vacuum energy. If the sudden appearance of paired particles occurs next to the event horizon of a black hole (the “point of no return” for light and anything else that falls in), one particle will fall into the black hole and one will not. This means, among other things, that Black Holes are “gray and fuzzy,” and that without additional matter drawn in will fade with time (although extremely slowly), and the information that passes the event horizon may not, in fact, be lost (Hawking, 2001). Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, two of the greatest theoretical physicists alive at the time, had a long-standing bet on this. (Penrose won the case of beer when Hawking finally conceded the point; there is no direct physical proof for ANY of this, or course.)
While theoretical particle physics has focused on String Theory for nearly 40 years, there have been huge advances in biology and cosmology during that time. Recent advances in cosmology have included an improved understanding of the Big Bang – how matter and energy expanded (in incomprehensible violence where the laws of physics may have been different) from a single point in empty space. Or perhaps space itself didn’t exist beforehand. Some additional understandings have implications for the speed of light limitation. Quantum entanglement appears to prove that information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light. Vacuum energy implies that there is an underlying energy field in what might appear to be empty space.
We rediscovered W.W. Phelps’ hymn a few years ago and were stunned. We read it several times to make sure we understood the implications. Phelps died in 1872, and during his lifetime he did NOT have access to Nature, Discovery, or Phys. Rev. Letters – but he did have another source of information: direct personal revelation – a way that individuals can receive information directly from God, unmediated by religious authorities. That sure soaks some preachers’ business models! This is a doctrine that most people on the planet instinctively understand and believe, but it is NOT preached by any other religion that we are aware of. In fact, it draws the vociferous ire of a number of fundamentalist Christians and Muslims.
This hymn, for us, is yet another tangible and reassuring piece of evidence that all truth comes from, and leads to, a single source. Phelps was interested in something, thought and prayed about it, and quietly penned words to a hymn with content that cosmologists and astrophysicists finally figured out with several billion dollars’ worth of instrumentation – a century and a half later.