Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
As I was going for my walk this morning, I passed by some high voltage power lines. Now, these power lines are ultra high voltage. I think they're well over 100,000 volts.
And when I think about it, these cables that run from the power station provide the energy to run thousands of home, perhaps ten thousands, several ten thousands of homes, through these wires. When you think about these wires up there, these metal wires, I'm not sure what metal they're made out of, whether it's copper or aluminium, but some good conductor like that. So it's amazing that through those wires, on those pulses, one set of poles, it's going to power all the air conditioners, all the stoves, the lighting, the heaters, the refrigerators, all these electric motors and heating devices, welders and so forth that are being used in the local industry are all provided by the energy that's travelling along these wires, the electrical energy.
And when I think about it, it's quite an interesting concept that we provide what we call a voltage or a potential difference. Now, what is a potential difference? Well, we know that if you have an object sitting on a table, say, for example, a ball sitting on the table, and you push the ball and it comes to the edge of the table so that the table isn't supporting anymore, it falls to the floor and we say that it has potential energy, and that is because it's in this gravitational field and it is being pulled by the gravitational energy to the lower state of energy that is closer to the gravitational centre. And of course, the same goes with heat.
If we have something that is hot, if we have heat up a bar of iron with an oxytorch, so that it's glowing red, and we put that glowing piece of metal into some water, the water will immediately begin to boil around the metal and the water will heat up. In other words, the metal rod that was red will quickly lose its colour and cool down. And so the energy that heat energy, when that rod is heated up to 800, 900 degrees centigrade, flows into the cool of water and heats the water.
So always the energy flows from the hotter or the higher thermal potential to the lower, from the higher gravitational potential to the lower state. And the same thing when we talk about electrical voltages. So we have an electric field and we can apply, and the generators in the power station generate a very high voltage.
So they generate, by putting in a lot of energy from the steam turbines, they generate a very high electrical voltage. And then that allows for, it's believed, electrons to flow in the conductor that provides what we call electrical current, because it's actually the amount of current or amount of number of electrons that flowing through something that actually generates the power. So you can have a very high voltage, but no current, and it won't move anything, it won't heat anything.
So you need both, and that constitutes the energy. And what fascinates me is that at the speed of light, which is virtually very fast, virtually instantaneous in terms of everyday living, the voltage flows along these wires at the other end. So we can apply a potential to this wire, this high voltage wire, and 1000 miles away, 1000 kilometres away, instantaneously, as far as we can measure, there are changes that occur.
And so somehow this energy is available immediately, virtually immediately at the other end. Now, this whole concept of electrical potential, electric fields, magnetic fields. We can't easily detect magnetic fields.
Usually. Maybe some people are sensitive to fluctuating magnetic fields, have some sort of sensitivity and can detect them. Sometimes we can detect electric fields, but I suspect it's more that we're getting a reaction on our skin and our hairs are standing up or something like that.
But it's interesting, these fields, they're there, you can move your hand through them, this sort of thing, just like you can move your hand through the gravitational field and we can't detect them. And it just amazed me, this whole concept of electric fields and electricity and how it works. It's quite amazing that metals like copper, silver, aluminium are good conductors of this electricity.
Whereas if we make the material out of something else, like limestone or sulphur or other non metallic elements, with the exception of graphite, of course, graphite, which is form of carbon, can be a conductor. But it's interesting that some compounds are conductors and some elements are conductors and some elements are non conductors. And generally we have, what we call the metallic elements, are conductors of electricity, but the non metallic elements aren't.
So why is it that the non metallic materials don't conduct electricity very easily? And why is it that we can make insulators out of these materials? And it's quite fascinating that it's all to do with the structure around the atom, the way the electrons are arranged. And I can remember when I was studying physics at university, I was in the last classes that were taught valve theory. So we had what we call radio valves.
So valves were used as rectifiers and so forth, in radio sets and in pieces of equipment and so forth, radar sets, all these sort of things. And the changeover was to semiconductor theory, which of course was transistors. And of course, now semiconductor theory has taken over and we have all these little mini computers.
But again, it was quite fascinating learning the semiconductor theory and the sort of forbidden zones in the electron structure. And how electrons could pass under certain conditions and so forth. And we had these semiconductor arrangements that were allow for electrical flow in one direction only.
And thus we could make rectifier systems and so forth. And it was quite fascinating. One of the projects that I was working on in the research laboratories where I was employed at the time.
We wanted to measure the partial pressure of oxygen in molten steel. Because at the time, steel making was largely guesswork. The operators would see the ladle of pig iron that came from the blast furnace being poured into the basic oxygen furnace.
Where oxygen was then blown through the pig iron to burn out the remaining carbon, sulphur, phosphorus, these other nonmetallic impurities. That would affect the strength and the characteristics of the resultant steel that we were producing. And this was the Bos basic oxygen system was a new invention, was actually developed in Australia.
Actually over and above the open half system, which was the old fashioned way of making steel, which much slower process. But the operators just used to look and see how many sparks were coming off the steel as it was being poured. Because the amount of sparks coming off gave us sort of a bit of a visual indication.
The amount of carbon and so forth that was mixed in still with the steel. And it was all done by experience and guesswork. So we were looking to develop a system where we could measure the partial pressure of oxygen.
How much oxygen was in the steel during the process of blowing it with the oxygen lance. And of course, the steel at this temperature is just below 2000 degrees. So a very hostile environment.
Very few things survive in there. You have to have metals such as platinum and so forth. But we were looking at, again, semiconductor type material, utrium doped zirconia at the time.
Because, again, the fact that there was a difference in oxygen level between the level in the steel and the level at a reference material, a chromium oxide material placed at the other end of the semiconductor, generated a small voltage. And so using that voltage measurement, we could actually measure the oxygen level in the steel. Very low levels, of course, in the steel under those molten conditions.
But there was another factor that was involved. And that was the fact that we were using these utrium doped zirconia semiconductor type materials. And so they are a conductor type material.
And again, they would develop their own voltage across the temperature gradient. So you have your molten steel in there, 1700, 800 centigrade out to the outside of the probe, which was at a much lower temperature, maybe only a few hundred degrees. You also produced another electrical voltage, just due to the difference in temperature.
And that was the CBEC coefficient for that mineral. And one of the jobs that I had was actually measuring the CBEC coefficient of utrium dope zirconia with different ratios, because this work had never been published before. And so it's quite fascinating, all these fields that are related.
But what struck me is that through these laws of physics that are based on the structure of the atoms, we have these amazing properties of all the different metals. Another metal that I was involved in researching later on was titanium. And titanium is an amazing metal.
It's one of the most abundant elements in the earth's crust, but very difficult to refine and produce titanium from its ore, from its oxide, or its iron oxide ore that it occurs in. But titanium, of course, is lighter than steel, very strong and very resistant to corrosion. So it's a very good metal.
But it seems that God has limited the amount of titanium that we can get access to. It's not that easy to produce compared to other metals like aluminium and iron and copper and so forth. But as I thought about this, this whole structure of the way these elements formed, when we look at cosmology and that they talk about helium and the synthesis of different elements up to carbon and so forth, but when we look at the higher elements here, we're getting into some very interesting ones in the everyday materials that we use.
And how did the structure of these atoms come about? Did they evolve somehow non directed to have all these amazing systematic properties? It's interesting. James Clark Maxwell, the guy that discovered that light was a combination of electromagnetic fields and was perhaps one of the greatest physicists of all time, said, if people want to believe in evolution, how did Adam survive? And of course, one of the other aspects we talk about is the big Bang theory, and that everything started and exploded. Well, hang on, how did that all generate? Where did it come from? And where did the laws come from that governed that? To me, this just powerfully points to a creator.
And it amazes me that we can apply these voltages, these potential we can generate, and this potential will drive this current through what we call an electrical current, which we understand as a movement of electrons through these conductors that can turn. Powerful electric motors can heat things, and it's just such a useful entity. The amazing properties, they all work together.
To me, just point to an amazing creator. But the other thing is, our minds have been able to understand and make these great discoveries. And one of the things that has really impressed me is know since the time of Francis Bacon and so forth, where you have the formation of the royal society in the UK, and the really development of science that spun from that environment there.
It was essentially in a very christian based environment where people believed in a creator God. They believed that there was a supernatural God that had created the world, that had created everything and was behind everything. And that was the culture in which science developed.
And when I look at a number of the greatest scientists that made the really great, stunning breakthroughs, so many of them were really strong christians, and the same in mathematics as well. And if you go to creationministries.com, have a look through their book list there, or answers in Genesis.
They have books on great scientists that were creationists. And so many of these scientists were scientists that laid the fundamental laws, like Faraday and Maxwell, these sort of people were great christians. And it's interesting that science, this understanding of nature, did not develop in the cultures where people worshipped idols or worshipped nature itself.
I find that very interesting. And I think that God has gradually revealed an understanding to us. But one of the things that fascinates me is that our minds, our human minds, have the capability to understand these complex systems.
And of course, as we delve into biochemistry, of course, we learn that the systems are just so enormously complex, and we have teams and teams of scientists working together, and gradually we've been understanding these things. But again, getting back to physics, though, I think one of the fundamental laws of physics and theories is this whole idea of thermodynamics. And it's interesting, there was a quote of Einstein that was published in Science, in the journal Science, back in 1967, on volume 159157. Sorry, one five seven, page five oh nine. And it was an article, thermodynamics in Einstein's universe. And the author quotes Einstein as saying that thermodynamics is the only physical theory of universal content, which, within the framework of the applicability of its basic concepts, I'm convinced, will never be overthrown.
And this whole idea of thermodynamics, and particularly the second law of thermodynamics, is that everything tends to a state of greatest disorder, or everything tends to the state of higher entropy. So entropy is a state of disorder. And so we go from order to disorder.
And, I mean, we see that, don't we? Just in our living spaces, in our homes, particularly in a child's bedroom, you put everything in its place. All the toys are put away and fall long. The child comes place with the toys, and it's left out because it takes work energy to put it back into order.
And in the book that I've often referred to just recently, Design and Catastrophe: 51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature that's published by Andrews University Press. There's an article in there by a chemistry professor, Dr. Mitch Menzmer. It's called A God of Law, Order, and Beauty. And he points out some interesting things about thermodynamics. And he points out that within thermodynamics, there are three different types of bound, or three types of boundaries between a system and its surroundings.
You can have an isolating, closed and open. And an isolating boundary permits no exchange of energy and matter. And it defines, essentially, the first law of thermodynamics.
And that is that the total energy within an isolated system is constant. Energy and matter cannot be created. Well, you can convert energy into matter and vice versa.
But the total energy of that system, stored in that system, either as energy and matter, remains constant once it's isolated. And so a closed boundary, closed system, as opposed to an isolated system, permits an exchange of energy with its surroundings, but not matter. And in an open boundary system, there's an exchange of both energy and matter with its surrounding.
And so this Dr. Menzmer looks at. If we look at a flower as a living system that exhibits beauty, we can see it's an open boundary system because it requires both energy from the sun and matter, in the form of water, carbon dioxide, and nutrients from the soil.
And so, in addition, however, to this first law of thermodynamics, we've got the second law of thermodynamics. And this is the law about entropy. And it's essentially a law that says that, particularly for living systems, entropy increases.
And that is, it tends to a state of greater disorder. Or another way of putting it is that everything tends to a state of equilibrium where things are balanced. And so a system with high energy, a high entropy, rather, would be one where the energy is widely dispersed at various energy levels and locations.
And the arrangement of the system is highly nonspecific. But, of course, when we look at this particular law of thermodynamics, it has a predictable nature. In other words, we use it to predict what happens.
In other words, if we place a hot object in a cool environment, the hot object will cool down. We won't find that the cool environment will get even cooler and transfer some of its energy to the hot system and make it hotter. It doesn't happen that way.
In other words, if we have an iron bar sitting there, suddenly one end won't become cold and the other end become hot. In other words, we can't drive it that way to produce that higher temperature. The temperature always will run from a hot temperature to a cooler temperature.
Just like if you want the ball that you dropped off the table to go back up onto the table, you've got to apply energy and to push it back up, in other words. And as the ball falls down, it reaches a new state of equilibrium. And it's quite interesting if we look at the flower.
The flower gets energy, as we've discussed in other places, from sunlight. And so there's a flow of heat and thermal energy that gets the and ultraviolet, the energy from ultraviolet light. And the plant itself operates as a little heat engine and converts the heat energy in the sunlight into useful work.
And just like if you have water flowing down a stream, flowing over a water wheel that uses gravity, if you want to harness the gravitational energy from that flowing water, you have to have a machine. And that machine is the water wheel and gears and everything that can use to grind the flour. And so we need a machine.
And of course, in plants, the plants themselves have a little machine, and this machine does the work. It actually creates molecules using that energy. So it manipulates chemical bonds.
So it takes materials, water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and some other nutrients, and using the energy provided by the sun, it puts them into specific arrangements. In other words, that energy is used to create the chemical bonds that produce the new compounds. And, of course, those new compounds are programmed by the DNA in the plant itself, which directs.
It's a blueprint that directs and creates the molecular machinery using pre created molecular machinery, the ribosome and so forth that we've talked know, it's really amazing how these systems work. But initially, as we said, that everything is flowing to the state of lower temperature, to greater disorder. Even the big Bang theorists talk about the big bang expanding and so forth.
So all this points to a beginning to a creator. And I think the evidence is just there in FA said something some amazing super intelligence had to set up this system that works so well, it had to set it up and start. And that's exactly what the Bible says.
The Bible says that in the beginning, God created light energy. And from then on, we have the universe, create the earth, create the universe, create, and so forth space and so forth. There it fits exactly that.
There is a creator and when I think about. And there are so many examples of this, of that the great minds that have made some of the greatest discoveries have been christians. I personally believe that God, the Holy Spirit, has inspired a lot of those thoughts.
In fact, I was watching some documentaries on some of the events that happened during the second World War where particular soul men, particularly in the allies, made decisions that were against the main command, but that led to a very important victory. And there were amazing coincidences that I think, in many cases were supernatural, such as the cloud that came in during the evacuation of Dunkirk. And Herbert Butterfield, who was a historian, professor of history at University of Oxford, wrote a book on this the role of Providence, God's Providence, in people making decisions.
And so I think the evidence is overwhelming for a creator God that has directed our minds and enabled us to discover the laws of physics. And that creator God, of course, is revealed in the Bible. You've been listening to faith and science.
And remember, if you wish to relisten to these programmes, just google 3abnaustralia.org.au all one word and click on the listen button. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
