Gerald Schroeder - Genesis and the Big Bang theory: the discovery of harmony between modern science and the Bible

To my children,
whose probing questions led to the writing of this book.

Genesis and the Big Bang has evolved over the past decade from a few notes jotted in response to questions from my children to the form it has today. In this ten-year period, I have never changed the title because my goal has remained the same: Finding and exposing the unity that binds the biblical Genesis and cosmological theory. It is, in fact, the same unity that binds all mankind and all the universe.

I have had much help in this effort, not the least of which has come from my wife, Barbara, whose efforts have kept our home life on course. The training I received during my undergraduate and graduate studies at M.I.T. gave me the tools needed for scientific research. The subtleties of Scripture and the subtleties of science have much in common. My aspiration to engage in research in one or both of these fields was fostered early on by my parents, who had a reputation among their closest of associates as being natural philosophers. Later on, Professor Robley Evans, under whom I completed my doctorate research, and Rabbi Chaim Brovender and the late Rabbi Herman Pollack, under whom I did my first serious biblical research, were guides in learning to sift facts from what is often a plethora of less than relevant information. Adelaide and Seymour Kahn contributed their resources along the way.

In the formal preparation of Genesis and the Big Bang, three individuals were decisive and essential contributors: Helen Rees, who believed in and guided the project from the earliest stage; Marc Jaffe, who read, commented on, and reread the manuscript as it evolved; and Michelle Rapkin of Bantam Books, who edited the manuscript and whose suggestions at times gave me the impression of a gentle intellectual breeze moving aside a curtain and allowing an unobstructed Sun to illuminate the text. To all who helped me I offer my sincere thanks and hope that their efforts were not wasted.

Jerusalem, Israel

Who was it that said, If you can only afford one newspaper, read the oppositions?

Study astronomy and physicsif you desireto comprehend therelation between the world and Gods management of it.

Maimonides

The Guide for the Perplexed

U ntil 1961, my image of a deer was a blend of the healthy, full-coated stag in the Bronx Zoo and Walt Disneys Bambi. During that year, on a clear, cool autumn morning in the Nevada desert, this image was indelibly changed. I was sitting on the roof of a Department of Defense (DOD) pickup truck that had been parked since the previous night atop Rainier Mesa, located in the midst of the Atomic Energy Commissions Nevada Nuclear Testing Sitefor the first time in three years, the United States had detonated an atomic bomb.

I was part of any liberals dream come true. The goal of my work was to develop a method for locating the epicenters of underground nuclear explosions. This technology would be essential if the United States and the Soviet Union were ever to reach an accord for nuclear disarmament. Mutual disarmament without a workable treaty might rapidly degenerate into unilateral disarmament, and this could be more destructive to peace than an all-out arms race. One of the stumbling blocks for such a treaty is the system of verification; there must be a method to prove that no signee to the treaty has reneged and conducted a clandestine weapon test. Such a test would most likely occur underground. The earth, in theory, can absorb so much of the energy and radiation released by the blast that the test might go undetected by alien observers. My colleagues and I reasoned, correctly we were to learn, that we could identify the epicenter of such an explosion by detecting subtle changes in the soils structure caused by the seismic wave of the weapons blast. This would be effective even if all the bomb-produced radiation was contained underground within the huge glass ball that forms as the heat of the blast melts the adjacent rock.

Because I was working toward the establishment of an enforceable treaty for disarmament, I could morally justify being part of the excitementand there was to be much of thatof the nuclear scene. In this profession, we rarely referred to the weapon as a bomb or the blast as an explosion. The weapon was a device and the blast an event.

United flight 711 arrived at Las Vegass McCarran International Airport late at night. The glow from the strip motels gave the place an aura of fantasymore like an amusement park than a city. That aura of fantasy was to remain even as I was lining up for admission to my sixth atomic blast. But this time it was my first exposure, and, in fact, the first for many of us involved.

I picked up the keys to my Avis Chevy and packed the four sacks of commercial cement I had brought with me. That shipment had cost the taxpayers $400 in overweight baggage, but I needed that particular cement because I knew its radioactive content. I had measured it a few days before in the iron room of the M.I.T. Radioactivity Center. The four sides, floor, and ceiling of the iron room were made of 5-inch-thick slabs of iron cut from the shielding of a mothballed battleship. This shielding absorbs so much of the natural radiation background of both cosmic and earthly origins that even the small amount of radiation associated with the radium contained in a healthy humans skeletal frame can be quantitatively measured. The sacks of cement I was bringing produced a radioactive signal of about four times that of a humans. Knowing this, I could calculate the effect it would have on the data I was here to gather at the weapon test.