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In the past two years, a set of breakthrough discoveries has stirred waves of exuberance from the scientific community. Carlos Frenk, of Britain's Durham University, exclaimed to reporters, "[It's] the most exciting thing that's happened in my life as a cosmologist." Cambridge University's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Stephen Hawking, a master of theoretical physics and of understatement, described just one of the several breakthroughs as "the discovery of the century, if not of all time." Michael Turner, University of Chicago and Fermilab astrophysicist, said researchers have found "the Holy Grail of cosmology."

What is this "holy grail" to which Turner refers? The answer is perhaps best stated by George Smoot, University of California at Berkeley astronomer and leader of one of the breakthrough projects: "What we have found is evidence of the birth of the universe. … It's like looking at God." According to science historian Frederic B. Burnham, many scientists have suddenly come to consider God's creation of the universe "a more respectable hypothesis today than in any time in the last 100 years."

This set of discoveries brings cause for celebration not only among scientists, but also among Christians. There is substance here for encouraging our faith and for developing a more effective outreach to the unbelieving. God has revealed his glory in new and dramatic ways.

Until April 1992, astronomers knew only of ordinary matter, the stuff that we and these pages are made of - protons, neutrons, electrons, and a small host of other fundamental particles that strongly interact with radiation. The stuff that researchers have just found evidence for is different. It is called "exotic" matter, for it does not strongly interact with radiation.

The reason this discovery generated so much excitement among astrophysicists is that it constitutes a significant piece of the nearly completed puzzle of how the universe came to be. Perhaps another reason is that exotic matter actually makes up a sizable proportion (no less than 60 percent and maybe as much as 90 percent) of the matter in the universe.

Since 1990, astronomers had been certain that the universe must have erupted from some kind of extremely hot, extremely compact creation event. Evidence for this scenario came from measurements of the entropy of the universe. What is the connection between entropy and this cosmic big bang?

Entropy describes how efficiently a system radiates energy and how inefficiently it performs work. A burning candle illustrates a highly entropic system. The candle is effective in radiating heat and light but relatively ineffective in propelling an engine or performing any other type of work. Physicists designate the entropy of a system by a number that indicates the amount of energy degradation per proton. A burning candle has a specific entropy measure of about two, and that is considered high.

Compare that number with what astronomers have discovered about the universe. It has a specific entropy measure of one billion. Let the impact of that number sink in. Only an explosion can generate an entropy measure significantly higher than that of a candle. But none of the explosions produced by humans comes anywhere close to one billion. Only an explosion from an incomparably hot, incomparably compact source could generate such an enormous specific entropy.

But a troubling hitch remained in the big-bang creation models. The radiation left over from the creation event, radiation that permeates the cosmos, appears smoothly distributed throughout the cosmos. This smooth distribution would lead us to expect that matter, too, would be smoothly distributed. But as we see even with our naked eyes, it is not. Some radiation ripples have been found, but they are much too tiny to account for the clumpiness of matter. Matter is very clumpy. It is densely clumped in galaxies and galaxy clusters. If the radiation is so smoothly dispersed, why isn't the matter also smoothly distributed?

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December 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 14