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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Serie: BioLogos Books on Science and Christianity
- Sprache: Englisch
This is an adventure that began almost fourteen billion years ago, one that so often threatened to fail. It's truly a miracle I'm still here. Despite everything, I wouldn't have wanted to miss one second of it. And the best is yet to come. With the help of an extraordinary narrator, you're invited to discover the wonder and drama of the history of the cosmos. In this story we follow the journey of one proton who comes into existence at the beginning of creation and makes it all the way through history to today. By becoming a part of atoms and molecules that turn up at some of the universe's most important moments, our friend Proton witnesses emerging galaxies, the origin of life, its evolution into a wild diversity of life forms, the first human beings, the birth and life of Jesus, the beginnings of the Christian church, all the way up to the present day. Through it all, the mysterious, seemingly unbelievable plans of the Creator continue to unfold. . . . Combining its authors' mind-bending scientific knowledge, storytelling skills, and insights from theology, Dawn provides a fresh look at the fundamentals of cosmology, evolutionary biology, and the good news of God in one overarching adventure—in the form of a gripping story. Readers who love both science and Scripture will discover an engaging, thought-provoking tale that reminds us we each have a big place in God's plan of creation—even if we're very, very small. BioLogos Books on Science and Christianity invite us to see the harmony between the sciences and biblical faith on issues including cosmology, biology, paleontology, evolution, human origins, the environment, and more.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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WHAT AN UNBELIEVABLE JOURNEY. What a dizzying rollercoaster ride. An adventure that began almost fourteen billion years ago, one that so often threatened to fail. It’s truly a miracle I’m still here. Despite everything, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss one second of it. And the best is yet to come.
“Make sure it gets written down,” said my friends.
“For whom?” I asked. “You were right there too, for all of it!”
“For the human beings,” they said. “Do it for them, since it’s not only our story, it’s their story as well. They have to know it, and they’re pretty new on the scene. We should tell them what we’ve experienced.”
I wasn’t immediately taken with the idea. “Homo sapiens? They’re so limited. They wouldn’t be able to grasp it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” they said. “Use their language, use words they can understand. Just try it, Pro. Just so they can get a little bit of an idea.”
Okay then, I’ll give it a try.
—Proton
I WAS BORN DURINGa messy runaway frenzy. Collisions. Chaos. Flying objects.
Perhaps you should compare it to a fireworks factory kindled by a spark. Explosions that followed each other at furious speed. The heat. The pressure. You could call it a cyclone, a raging EF5 tornado that took nothing and no one into account, and in which everything and everyone was flung away and destroyed.
“Behind you,” someone yelled. I couldn’t escape; I was pushed and thrown in every direction. To my consternation, I noticed that another newborn proton that had been floating beside me a moment ago, was blown away, far out of reach. There went another, and another. Everything spun, turned, dove, and crossed paths at lightning speed.
“Do you know what’s going on?” a voice called out.
“I have no idea,” I answered. I whirled helplessly while projectiles flew past me on all sides. Around me, time and space exploded. There was nothing I could do to protect myself, to take myself out of the line of fire. A safe place was nowhere to be found.
I must have lost consciousness at some point. When I woke up, I heard voices. It sounded like they were not far from where I was, but I couldn’t see anything.
“How terrible,” said the one voice.
“That was disturbing indeed,” said the other voice.
“Disturbing?” The first voice sounded indignant. “It was way more than disturbing. It was a disaster. A slaughter! No one is left. Everything is destroyed! Everything and everyone.”
I did not understand much of this conversation, but it was clear that the speakers thought they were the only ones left.
“And what about you and me?” the first voice asked.
“We’re the only ones!”
“Not at all.”
“Hello,” I called out cautiously.
The two voices fell silent.
“Hello,” I said again. “Is there anybody out there?”
“Who are you?” the first voice asked.
“I’m Proton,” I replied.
“I told you!” the other voice said triumphantly. “Ha! I told you we were not alone. Hey, Proton, my name is Kalon. That faint-hearted friend of mine is Achaton.”
“What’s happening?” I asked. “What’s the problem?”
“He is new here,” said the voice that had introduced himself as Kalon. “We have to tell him about it.”
The two strangers told me about the past, about the beginning of time and space many eons ago. They told me about someone they called the Creator and to whom I apparently owed my existence. It was a bizarre story, and I found it hard to believe.
“Previously, nothing existed,” said Kalon. “Nothing at all. No matter. No energy. No time. No space.”
“There was the Creator,” said Achaton.
Kalon laughed. “Well, of course the Creator was there. He was always there. He thought of a plan to make something; something grand, something exceptional, something . . .”
“ . . . spectacular!” cried Achaton. “Honestly, Proton, you wouldn’t believe this!”
“The Creator made an egg,” Kalon continued. “A minuscule egg.”
I didn’t really have any idea of what an egg was, but it seemed smart to me to not interrupt Kalon—I didn’t want to appear stupid.
“A seed,” said Kalon, who fortunately did not catch on to my ignorance. “A speck. Smaller than a speck. Incredibly heavy and unbelievably hot.”
“How hot?” I asked.
“A million times a trillion times a trillion degrees Celsius,” Achaton said.
“Much hotter even,” said Kalon. “And that seed contained everything! All building materials. All energy. All forces and laws of nature. Everything the Creator needed. He put all his wisdom into it. His greatness.”
“And then it happened!” proclaimed Achaton, who could hardly contain his excitement. “He said something, didn’t he, Kalon? ‘There must be light.’ He said something like that.”
“That’s what he said,” agreed Kalon. “The Creator spoke, and then something happened that only he could have invented. All powers that the Creator had concentrated into that one speck erupted, spattering apart with a speed and a heat we cannot imagine anymore. A burning hot universe expanded itself in all directions. All of a sudden, everything was there and time had begun.”
It was all a little too fast for me. I was still reflecting, baffled by the mysterious sentence that the one called “the Creator” had supposedly spoken. “What is light?” I asked.
Kalon was silent for a moment. “That we do not know,” he answered. “It’s a mystery. There are many mysteries. I don’t understand everything either, Proton. Maybe it’s something that was there in the very beginning. Something that was necessary to start the whole process. Or maybe there will come a moment when we will think, Aha, that is light.”
Suddenly, there was a head-on collision nearby. “Whoa!” “What was that?” “That was a very close call!” It made me realize how precarious our situation was, but Kalon was not to be deterred. “Now, where was I?” he asked.
“The second eon,” said Achaton. “You were going to tell us about the second eon.”
“Ah, yes! A very special period in history.”
“What period, roughly, are we talking about?” I asked.
“Oh, that is now so long ago. Time had only just begun. It was even before a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second had passed, the moment when gravity could finally begin its work. The Creator had adjusted it with the greatest possible accuracy beforehand, and for good reason. The existence of his creation was at stake. If gravity had been just a fraction stronger, the whole universe would have shrunk immediately. A tiny bit weaker and everything would have dispersed and become too thin. Then no particles would have formed whatsoever.”
“Then I would not have existed,” I said somewhat anxiously.
“Precisely! And that was only the beginning. In the eons that followed . . .”
“Yes, tell him about the quarks,” Achaton chipped in enthusiastically.
“The what?” I asked. Another one of those words I’d never heard before. Everything was new for me and, to be honest, it was far too much for me to comprehend all at once.
“You don’t know what quarks are?” Achaton chuckled. “Unbelievable. You are made up of quarks. Without quarks you wouldn’t exist.”
“Please don’t act as if you’ve always known this,” said Kalon. He sounded irritated.
“Quarks are just building blocks, Proton. The building blocks that we consist of. Achaton, you, me, and the rest of us. Space expanded, the temperature dropped, and this caused particles to form from the energy. Electrons. Quarks. And antiquarks, of course.”
Ah okay, I sighed in relief. At least this was something I could follow, sort of.
Kalon told me about the two eons that followed, in which the other forces of nature acquired their roles. The Creator came up with four fundamental forces: in addition to the gravitational force there were the strong and weak nuclear forces and the electromagnetic force. Four giants, each with a unique set of tasks. All four had to be set very precisely, and it was a tough call on whether the newborn universe was going to make it. The smallest deviation would have had disastrous consequences. The likelihood that the universe would destroy itself was billions of times greater than that it would go well.
“That must have been a tense time,” I said.
“Tense?” Achaton replied indignantly. “That is an understatement, to put it mildly. It was make it or break it! Four times in a row, the universe had to win the jackpot in a global lottery. If the nuclear forces would have been even a teeny bit stronger, things would have gone seriously awry. And what do you think would’ve become of the universe if the electromagnetic force would have been a fraction weaker?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I wished I were more intelligent than I was, so that I could understand exactly what Achaton was telling me. And I wished I had clever answers, but I didn’t.
“Then we would not have met you here. Let’s keep it at that.”
“But the beautiful thing was,” said Kalon, “the forces were perfectly attuned to each other. The gravitational force, the electromagnetic force, and the strong and weak nuclear forces—the Creator saw to it that they became friends.”
“Well . . .” said Achaton. “Friends . . .”
“Okay, friends is perhaps too strong a word. Colleagues then, a team. Partners. They perfectly complement each other, as if they’ve always worked together. The four of them perform one great dance in honor of the Creator.”
Kalon described how the universe suddenly began to expand with greater speed, how it drove on with increasing energy, dark and fast, sizzling hot, extending in all directions.
“Even faster than now?” I asked.
“Ha! There’s no comparison. So unbelievably much faster than now. It was beyond extreme. It’s impossible to imagine.”
Not a second had passed since the Big Bang and another eon had already begun.
“So, small particles had formed from the energy. Countless numbers of particles. For example, the quarks I just mentioned. The ones that make up you and me. The universe was one large construction site full of building materials. There was an unfathomably large number of quarks, all ready for the task the Creator had planned for them—to form matter. Nevertheless, for a time it looked as if they would not be able to fulfill this task because they were destined to be destroyed.”
“What!” I said, shocked. I wondered how he knew all this.
“For every building block there was an anti–building block, Proton. I’m sure I mentioned it.”
“I don’t remember that . . .”
“The antiquarks!” Kalon’s voice sounded almost indignant. “I am sure I told you about antiquarks.”
“But I have no idea what antiquarks are; how could I?”
“They are anti–building blocks. I just tried to explain it to you. I have no idea why the Creator found it necessary to make them, but he did. And as soon as they would touch a quark, poof! Both would disappear and the only thing that remained was a bit of energy. It was a terrible slaughter. The universe came very, very close to being completely empty. With no more building blocks, just energy that was left. But for every ten billion quarks, one quark was not destroyed; what remained was more than enough for what the Creator needed.”
“So much waste,” Achaton sighed.
“Not waste,” Kalon said. “Abundance.”
“And then, modern times began,” Achaton continued. “The time in which we now live. In which we came into existence. Out of the quarks that were still left over.”
“I like to call this the most important time in the history of the universe,” Kalon said earnestly.
Achaton laughed. “I have long thought that this is what the Creator intended. This gigantic, vast universe filled with photons, electrons, neutrons, protons. Held together by natural forces that are so perfectly attuned to each other.”
“You mean,” I said, full of hope, “that we are the big plan of the Creator.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought,” said Kalon. “And so much time has passed since the creation. So many eons. The universe has existed longer than you and I can comprehend. More than a second already. But I have heard it said that the Creator is still extremely active. That he has still bigger plans. That he has decided to continue his work with just a small remainder of us. It’s possible. It actually does seem like it, you see, as times have become turbulent again. Many, many of us have recently disappeared into nothingness, I’m afraid.”
“I even thought that you said all of it would go wrong,” said Achaton.
“Not me. That was you, if I remember correctly.”
“Well, what would it mean, to ‘go wrong’? If the Creator had come up with another plan for us, that would have been fine too. Little by little we’ve learned that we can trust him. Hang on. Hey! What are you doing?”
“I’m not doing anything! What are you doing? You are really squeezing me. Get out of the way!”
“Go away, you, get away from me!”
And then it was quiet.
“Kalon?” I called. “Achaton! Is something wrong? Where are you both?”
There was no reply. Again I heard something whiz by me, and I was dragged along into a chaotic, destructive three-dimensional collision course. What was happening, where were Kalon and Achaton? I still have no idea. I never met them again.
I DIDN’T HAVE MUCH TIMEto mourn the sudden disappearance of Kalon and Achaton. The chaos of flying and violently colliding objects continued at full force. Several times I narrowly escaped a barrage. It dawned on me that there was no guarantee whatsoever that I would escape this mayhem. In fact, I could soon be finished. There was destruction all around me, and it seemed as if protons and neutrons were ready to destroy each other.
“Make way, make way!” I suddenly heard a voice call out. A neutron flew toward me at full speed. At the same time, a neutron and a proton that were tightly attached were approaching me from above. “Get away,” they shouted, “get out of the way!”
But it was too late. We couldn’t avoid each other. In the nanosecond before the collision, I didn’t feel any fear, perhaps just disappointment that this was it; that everything was over before it had even properly begun. That I’d never find out about the plan that Kalon and Achaton had mentioned, the plan of the Creator. That I would never come to know the purpose of this universe.
The blow was heavy. For a very short moment I felt an intense heat that engulfed me and took possession of me. After that there was nothing.
“Is he conscious or not?” I heard someone say. “Is he doing all right?”
“No idea. Hey, you, can you hear me?”
Something bumped into me, and I became vaguely aware of my surroundings. Something had changed. I was no longer alone. I was together with three others: two neutrons and another proton, and we were all firmly attached to each other. That was strange. Until now I’d avoided every proton that I saw, and they had avoided me. It wasn’t so much that we disliked each other, but it was as though we were too much alike, like two magnets repelling each other. Now it seemed as if we were stuck together with super glue.
“What happened?” I asked weakly.
“Ah, he has woken up. Finally.”
“So, you don’t know?” said one of the neutrons. She nudged me. “You don’t know what happened? Listen, guys, he doesn’t know what happened. Who are you? What’s your name?”
I still felt dizzy, but I tried to think straight. Vaguely my name came back into my consciousness. I hesitated. “Proton,” I said. “My name is Proton.”
“All right, Proton, I’m Ensis, and this is Aris. We’re neutrons.”
“And I’m Solon,” another voice chipped in. “I’m a proton, just like you. Let’s call you Pro, okay?”
“Hey, Pro, are you aware that we, the four of us, have just become an atomic nucleus?”
“Sorry? We’ve become what?”
“The nucleus of an atom. Helium!”
“Just a moment,” I said. “I don’t understand. Why are we attached to each other? Who are you?”
There was some muffled murmuring. “He must have been impacted more by that collision than we realized.”
“I hope he hasn’t been damaged, has he?”
“He doesn’t look injured or anything. It must be the shock.”
“Hello?” I called out. “I can hear you. Maybe you could just explain to me what’s happening? In a way that I can understand?”
“Just leave it to me,” said Solon. “Pro, I understand this is a bit much for you to comprehend. You’ve been involved in a rather serious collision, just like us. But don’t worry, all is well. You have survived the whole event unscathed. However, the collision has had some rather drastic results—we’ve clicked together into a new unit.”
“A new kind of mega–building block,” Ensis interrupted, “an atomic nucleus.”
“You have to see it as a kind of promotion,” continued Solon, “a higher rank.”
Aris could not contain her enthusiasm. “The Creator is going to use us to build something!” she cried. “Isn’t that tremendous, Pro? We’re important! He has invented us! We’re needed for the completion of his plan.”
“Just a moment, not so fast,” I responded. “His plan?”
“Yes, you know it, don’t you?”
“I know something about it, of course,” I said carefully, “but not everything.”
“It seems that the Creator is far from being finished with the universe,” explained Ensis. “It must become even bigger, much bigger. A lot of work is being done right now, so that it’ll meet all the requirements. For this, building blocks are needed, of course.”
“What is the Creator going to build, then?”
“We have heard that he’s planning to make beings constructed from atomic nuclei, but then much larger and more complex.”
“More complex than we are?” I asked. I was just getting a bit more used to this new situation, which, in my view, was already pretty complex: two protons and two neutrons connected as if they belonged together. But actually, it was ingenious, how we fitted together, like we were created for each other.
“Billions of times more complex, they say. All kinds of beings that will reflect some of the creativity, greatness, and love of the Creator. There’s a rumor that they’ll be alive, but none of us knows what that is, exactly.”
I tried to imagine these beings, but my imagination didn’t go further than swirling clusters of atoms. “And will they be floating around?”
“Of course not!” Solon sniggered. “They won’t be able to manage that, these beings. They’ll be very vulnerable and prone to fall apart again quite easily. The Creator is going to build a special home for them. He’ll prepare a protected and safe place, somewhere in a far corner of the universe.”
“I don’t know,” I responded, “but to me this looks like a project with enormous risks.”
“That is indeed the case,” said Ensis. “At any moment in the process all kinds of things could go wrong.”
“But the Creator has already taken that into account,” said Solon. “It’s for good reason that he’s chosen to have such a vast surplus of energy and matter. This could go wrong billions of times, and even then, his plan will not be in danger.”
“And now what?” I asked.
“Now we wait,” said Solon, “until it is time.”
I was just going to have to trust this. Trust, however, is not my strongest point.
With the four of us together, we whirled several hundred thousand years in a piping hot soup. That sounds perhaps as if it was a boring time, and, indeed, there wasn’t much to do in the universe, but I now know that humans experience time quite differently than we do. In this perhaps, we as protons (and let me not exclude the neutrons) are more like the Creator. In a millionth of a second, an infinite number of things can happen, while billions of years can, for us, pass in the blink of an eye.
At a certain moment, however, I noticed that some things were beginning to change. Until then I had barely been able to distinguish anything within the chaos. It felt as though we were driving through a dense fog in a car with all its headlights turned on, or tumbling through dark clouds in an out-of-control airplane. We couldn’t see a thing.
But very slowly the fog seemed to lift a little. Things appeared to get a bit clearer, thanks to flickers that very briefly illuminated things and then disappeared, like the flashing of a faulty fluorescent tube in the world of human beings. This was the work of photons, the carriers of light, who’d been virtually invisible until now. They’d been there from the beginning, but only now could I see their effect: they enabled you to distinguish things in the space around you.
“This is it!” I exclaimed in surprise.
“What?” asked Solon.
“Just have a look!” I said. “This must be light! The light that the Creator mentioned.”
I told my nuclear partners, whom I’d begun to see as friends, about when I’d met Kalon and Achaton. How we’d been racking our brains to figure out what light was. This had to be the answer to that puzzle.
It was odd. I was a few hundreds of thousands years old, but I’d never been aware that I’d spent my life in darkness. The words light and dark had no meaning for me because I’d never been able to discern light before. Now that I saw it, I understood what I’d been missing that whole time. It was an unbelievable discovery. This changed everything.
My friends, too, were very enthusiastic.
“What a fantastic idea of the Creator!”
“Now we can finally see what he has made!”
“How did we ever manage without light?”
“This is indeed tremendous! Look, there, in the distance.”
We’d already noticed how busy it was, but now we could see it too. Helium nuclei, protons, and electrons constantly shot by. It was as chaotic as a large city during rush hour, without traffic lights and traffic police. Imagine bicycles, scooters, and cars frantically crossing, shooting right past each other without taking anybody else into account, and multiply the speed by a thousand times. On top of this, picture the automobiles and buses not just coming from four but from every direction, including above and below—a three-dimensional traffic chaos with many collisions and near collisions. Unfortunately, being able to see what was happening did not mean that we could avoid collisions. Crashing, pushing, bumping, bouncing back and then speeding on, it was all part of what was happening. We fully participated in the process. It had become our daily routine.
This was the scene until something strange happened. We had yet another collision with an electron. However, instead of excusing herself and quickly going her own way, as would’ve been the norm, she stayed stuck to us—or, actually, she continued to circle around us as if attached by an invisible thread.
“Hello, up there, what is this?” I called out, irritated.
Before I could get an answer, there was a second collision with an electron. She, too, continued to stay in our proximity, annoying us like a mosquito we couldn’t get rid of.
“Go away!” yelled Aris.
But they did not go. They felt particularly attracted to our friendship group. They circled around us like restless feather-light clouds. High above us we saw the one, then the other, floating past. They were like passersby, but they continuously traveled the same circular path as if they were on a three-dimensional merry-go-round, and we were the center.
“Isn’t this fantastic!” one of the electrons exclaimed from afar. Her voice echoed as if we were in a gigantic, empty space. “We’re a match made in heaven! Ha ha!”
“Well, I find it particularly bothersome,” I said. “Can’t we chase them away?”
“No,” said Solon. “They can’t detach themselves from us. The universe has cooled too much for that. But I don’t know what we are going to do with them either.”
I glanced around. “Now look,” I said, “there are more atomic nuclei with the same problem.”
“Just a minute,” called Solon, “I should’ve known! This is actually very good news, everyone! We’ve had an upgrade. We are no longer a bare atomic nucleus! We’ve become a full-fledged atom. We needed this to become fully usable as a building block. I think things will start very soon now.”
“The execution of the big plan, you mean?” I asked.
“What else? Prepare yourself for some spectacular changes, Pro!”
We soon got used to the presence of the electrons. They circled around us, but at such a distance that fortunately, they really didn’t bother us, as they hardly interacted with us. Nevertheless, I didn’t see very much of that so-called great plan.
To the contrary: the light that had made us so happy steadily became weaker, until it was hardly visible any longer, and finally it was extinguished. Once again, it became pitch-dark in the universe. That felt like a big loss, an amputation almost. There had been a time, of course, when I’d been content with the darkness. When I hadn’t known any better. You don’t miss what you don’t know. But then came the light, a big surprise from the Creator, and now that it was gone, I missed it more than I could’ve imagined.
Was it something temporary, that light? Something that belonged to the beginning but that had now finished its task? Or might the Creator introduce it again?
I had no idea. Was the Creator still occupied with his project? I wondered. Actually, I couldn’t find any evidence of it.
“Are you really sure?” I asked after a couple of million years. “About that plan?”
Solon, Aris, and Ensis knew it with certainty.
“Maybe you haven’t understood it correctly,” I suggested some ten million years later.
“No, we’re certain of the plan.”
“Nothing is happening. I think this is as far as it will go.”
“You’ve got to have a bit of patience, Pro.”
We were two hundred million years further down the line when the light came back! More majestic and brighter than ever. To be honest, I had not counted on it any longer. But I witnessed its return from close by, and it was the grandest, most special event that I had witnessed up to then. I know that the birth of a child always remains vivid in people’s memory. And I will always remember the birth of our first star, the star that would become our home.
It was cold and dark at that time, so we didn’t anticipate the event. What was the first thing we noticed? It became busier in our region, not unlike the rush hour at five-thirty in the evening near a commuter train station. After a little while, it became extremely busy. It was as if everyone in the whole city had the urge to go to the station and squeeze themselves into an already-full train, to set the Guinness World Record for “most people in a train car.” This was just like what was happening in our place in the universe. The force of gravity pulled us and other atoms toward each other. While people get to a point where there is no room to crowd together any further, we kept pushing, with increasingly violent collisions as a result.
The cold was being chased away by an overwhelming heat. Something was happening. We lost our electrons in the chaos, and it seemed as though we landed in a melting pot with other protons and helium nuclei. It became hotter and hotter. When we reached the fifteen million degrees Celsius mark, the light came back in full force.
