Is there energy in the cosmos?

Georges Lemaître

During the 1950s two cosmological theories entered in competition: the Big Bang, proposed by Georges Lemaître, and the steady state, proposed by Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold. Although the second had to renounce the principle of the conservation of energy, the most sacred of physics, atheist cosmologists preferred it to the Big Bang, as it seemed to them that this theory required to accept God's creation. In the words of the English astronomer Raymond Littleton, in his popularization book The Modern Universe (1956):

A theory such as this [the Big Bang] that puts back creation to a singular instant in the remote past... to some minds it is an objection that it would imply the removal of the question of the origin of the material of the universe from the realm of science... This consideration does not of course mean that the explosion theory is necessarily wrong, but it puts the act of creation, as we might name it, beyond the reach of science.

In other words: Raymond Littleton objects to the Big Bang theory because it could force us to recognize the existence of a creative God. It cannot be said more clearly.

During the 1960s the Big Bang theory was supported by two surprisingly accurate predictions, made a quarter of a century earlier by George Gamow, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman: the proportion of elements in the cosmos and the cosmic background radiation. When both predictions were tested experimentally, the Big Bang theory became the only defensible cosmological theory, and the steady state theory was forgotten (although see this post in my blog).

In the 1970s it seemed that science would be forced to accept God's creation as the origin of the universe. In 1978, astronomer Robert Jastrow, president of NASA's Lunar Exploration Committee, wrote this at the end of his popularization book God and the Astronomers:

[The scientist] has scaled the mountains of ignorance… as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Werner Heisenberg

As expected, atheist cosmologists did not take long to find a way out of their dilemma. They found it in one of the strangest properties of quantum mechanics: virtual particles, of which I spoke in another post. It is a consequence of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which argues that the vacuum is charged with energy, which can be converted in the spontaneous appearance of particles, provided that the energy and the life time of those particles are bound by the equation:

ΔE. Δt<ħ/2

In other words, the greater the energy, the shorter the duration. A virtual electron would last at most 1.3×10^-21 seconds (just over a sextillionth of a second). A virtual proton, much less. And so on.

The great idea atheist cosmologists found was that the universe could have emerged from the void as a spontaneous fluctuation, exactly the same as virtual particles. Well, they often say that the universe arose spontaneously out of nothing, which confuses nothing with the void and proves their philosophical ignorance, for Parmenides pointed out, over 2,500 years ago, that nothing does not exist. If it existed, it would be something, not nothing. And from nothing, nothing can arise. The void does exist, so it is not nothing: it has space, time, energy and existence.

Let us substitute the void for nothing in the assertion of atheist cosmologists. Is it possible that the universe has spontaneously emerged from the void? To look at it, let's go back to Heisenberg's inequality. We know that the universe has been around for about 13.8 billion years, and that it could last much longer. Applying the equation, we will see that, if the universe had spontaneously emerged from the void, its energy should be exactly equal to zero. In other words, there can be no energy in the universe.

But –I will be objected– how can one say that there is no energy in the universe? Can’t we see that the universe is full of energy? There is barionic matter, which is a form of energy; there are innumerable neutrinos; there is electromagnetic radiation, in proportion one billion times greater than matter; there is heat... I don’t mention dark matter, as we don’t know what it is. How can one say that the amount of energy in the universe is zero?

Very simple: postulating that there must be something that acts as negative energy. And furthermore, that this negative energy must be exactly equal to the positive energy we know, so that the sum of both is exactly zero. This statement has become an ideological postulate for atheist scientists. If it were not true, just now they can’t see how they could escape from a creative God. Although let’s not undervalue the inventiveness of ideologues. Sooner or later they’d find another explanation favorable to their ideology.

Are there any candidates for negative energy? Well yes, there are some: potential gravitational energy; negative mass; dark energy (with other name, the cosmological constant). Of course, we don't know what dark energy is, and negative mass is barely compatible with General Relativity. But atheist cosmologists don’t mind supporting their ideas in a chain of untested hypotheses: ideology before anything else. But even if the total energy of the universe were zero, that would tell us nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God.

The same post in Spanish
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Manuel Alfonseca