Glenn Borchardt - Religious Roots of Relativity

Here is the preface from Infinite Universe Theory which was published on December 25, 2017:

When I first became aware of the Big Bang Theory of the universe, I thought Wow! Thats great; finally, they know how it all began! Mom, a devout and very conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran, opposed the whole idea of ither world began with Genesis 6,000 years ago. At billions of years, the timing of the Big Bang was a bit off for her. With an eighth-grade education, she would not be expected to appreciate how fast light travels and how far away those stars and galaxies were. On the other hand, I graduated from a university that favored fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found. I had even gotten my nose out of the books long enough to look around me. After learning a bit of soil science, I returned home to southern Wisconsin to see the evidence firsthand for an Earth much older than 6,000 years. According to geologists at the university, it turns out I grew up next to a drumlin, an egg-shaped hill that once was under a mile of ice. There were thousands of these drumlins, most with the big end facing directly north and the small end facing south. If you travel east to west in Dodge County, Wisconsin, you will be going up and down drumlins about every mile. Each one, so they said, was over 17,000 years old.

Then I found it. Someone carbon-dated peat from one of the many marshes between the drumlins. The date was 17,700 years. As a literalist born of the Lutheran tradition, I had to make a choice: science or Genesis. I subsequently gathered with my own hands hundreds of samples of peat, wood, and charcoal, with many turning out to be much older than that. Some of the samples dated by other means were millions of years old. During my Postdoc, colleagues dated samples from the Moon at 4.66 billion years old. Guess I chose correctly.

I bring this up because it is similar to the journey I would like you to take in this book. You should begin with a lot of skepticism. After all, what could a farm kid from Wisconsin who plays around in the dirt say about the current theory of the universe? Those smart fellows like Einstein and Hawking surely must have known what they were doing. That is what I thought tooup until 1978.

But that was not to be the case after I started looking into their wild claims in depth. How could the universe explode out of nothing? In my scientific experience, everything came from some other thing. Nothing just popped up out of nowhere. How could the universe be 4-dimensional? Everything I knew had only 3-dimensions. How could the universe be expanding in all directions at once? The claims of curved empty space did not appeal to me. How could light be both a particle and a wave at the same time? In Physics 1a, I was told to leave common sense behind. You needed to know some exceedingly advanced higher math, and besides, only a few physicists could comprehend it anyway. It looked a bit like the emperors new clothes.

Being skeptical and commonsensical by nature, I investigated modern physics systematically from top to bottom. What I found was shocking. The whole thing was an enormous, stinking can of dead worms. The most dubious proclamations were founded on presuppositions that had more in common with religion than science. No wonder modern physics was so popular. I would need to uncover the assumptions that were making physics go awry for over a century. From there I would need to rebuild much of its structure, starting with classical mechanics and incorporating what was missing: the assumption of infinity . Happily, not much of this involves complicated math, but if you want to understand this new view of the universe, you need to do some work. In particular, ingrained presuppositions are hard to change. Still, I promise it will be worth it.

I highly recommend your reading Infinite Universe Theory to broaden your understanding of the universe and of the current volume. In this one I focus on the philosophical reasons remain so entrenched. It is a rather simple thesis, but one I have not seen anywhere else.

Berkeley, December 31, 2020 Glenn Borchardt

Science and religion are incompatible. -Coyne, 2015