A prestigious scientific journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), has just published an article[1] using the same foundations and starting scenario as the “white-hole” creationist cosmology I published in 1994.[2] Since the sponsoring organization, the National Academy of Séances—I mean “Sciences”—is officially hostile to creationism,[3] I doubt that the editors of PNAS consciously meant to do us a favor. The authors, mathematicians Joel Smoller and Blake Temple, did not reference my writings, so perhaps they knew nothing of my cosmology. However, a connection might exist, because my book, Starlight and Time, is now into its eighth printing with more than 50,000 copies circulating worldwide. Such a connection, whether conscious theft or unconscious diffusion of ideas, would in either case be the sincerest form of flattery!
Smoller and Temple start by rejecting, as I did, the foundational assumption of the Big Bang theory, the “Copernican Principle” or “Cosmological Principle,” which requires that matter uniformly fill all space at all times—even at the very beginning. Since there would never be any empty space around the matter, there could never be a boundary around the matter. Lacking such a boundary, we could never determine a unique center, such as a center of mass, inside it. But Smoller and Temple start, as I did, by assuming that in the beginning there was lots of empty space around the matter, and that the matter did (and still does) have a center of mass. Contrary to what non-experts imagine, this is profoundly different from the Big Bang’s picture of the cosmos.
Smoller and Temple also imagine, as I did, that the matter started its expansion in a white hole, a subspecies of black hole that has all its matter moving outward instead of inward. Furthermore, they even consider, as I did in 1998[4], that the white hole could have resulted from the earlier collapse of a black hole.
There are some important differences in their theory. First, they used a coordinate system (the “Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff metric”) that does not make time dilation effects explicit. I used a coordinate system (the “Klein metric”) that made it easier to compare clocks in different locations and see the effect of time dilation.
Second, Smoller and Temple consider a situation in which the “event horizon” (where the most commonly thought-of type of time dilation would occur) as still today being very far away, well beyond the view of even the Hubble Space Telescope. They imagine the event horizon shrinking to our location (in their view not necessarily near the center) sometime in the very distant future, if ever, so time dilation is not a concern of theirs. My cosmology considers the situation in which the event horizon would have shrunk to the center (near which is the Earth) and disappeared on the fourth day of Earth’s time, thus putting all the cosmic time dilation effects in our past, about 6,000 years ago.
Third, Smoller and Temple consider the effects of shock waves (strong sound waves, like a thunderclap) in the expanding ball of gas. For the sake of simplicity, my 1994 book ignored the possibility of such effects. But in 2002, I proposed (qualitatively) that such shock waves could account for the concentric-shell arrangement of galaxies around our own galaxy, as suggested by “quantized” redshifts.[5] Smoller and Temple’s quantitative analysis of the waves could prove to be very useful to creationists in developing a good theory on how God made galaxies during the fourth day.
In conclusion, I find it interesting to speculate on the impact of this PNAS article on “progressive creationist” Hugh Ross. Dr. Ross has (A) founded his theology on the Big Bang theory, (B) made a career of criticizing my “white-hole” cosmology,[6] and (C) always shifted his course to conform to the latest winds of doctrine from the cosmology establishment. Now that those winds have (at least temporarily) veered toward a creationist view, will he now change his course?
[1] Joel Smoller and Blake Temple, Shock-wave cosmology inside a black hole, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100(20):11216-11218, September 30, 2003.
[2] D. Russell Humphreys, Starlight and Time, Master Books, Green Forest, Arkansas, 1994.
See ref. 6 below for more information on the book.
[3] Frank Press, Science and Creationism: A View From the National Academy of Sciences, 1984.
[4] D. Russell Humphreys, New vistas of space-time rebut the critics, CEN Tech. J. 12(2):195-212, 1998.
[5] D. Russell Humphreys, Our galaxy is the centre of the universe, ‘quantized’ red shifts show, TJ 16(2):95-104. See section 11, p. 102.
[6] D. Russell Humphreys, Seven years of Starlight and Time, ICR Impact No. 338, August 2001.
