All Things are Present Begore Christ’s Eyes
- stephenstrent7
- 13 minutes ago
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God Creating the Universe, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, Michelangelo
Where Science Meets Religion by Trent Dee Stephens, PhD, for the Come Follow Me lesson April 21-27; Doctrine and Covenants 37–40
We are told in Doctrine and Covenants 38:1-3, “Thus saith the Lord your God, even Jesus Christ, the Great I Am, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the same which looked upon the wide expanse of eternity, and all the seraphic hosts of heaven, before the world was made; The same which knoweth all things, for all things are present before mine eyes; I am the same which spake, and the world was made, and all things came by me.”
We humans have spent most of our existence convinced that the material around us is solid matter. The Greek philosophers, especially Leucippus (5th century BC) and his successor, Democritus (c. 460 – c. 370 BC), were apparently the first to codify the concept of the atom. The word, “atom” is derived from the Greek word atomos, which means “indivisible”. The original concept of the atom is that all matter is composed of indivisible, solid particles.1
Then in 1897, J. J. Thompson discovered that cathode rays are comprised of electrically charged particles, 1,700 times lighter than a hydrogen atom (the lightest of all atoms). He called these particles “corpuscles”, but the name was later changed to “electrons” because they are the particles that carry electricity. As electrons have a negative charge, Thompson reasoned, there must be something else in the atom with a positive charge to make the overall charge in an atom neutral. Therefore, atoms must not be indivisible, as the Greeks had proposed and as scientists had assumed for hundreds of years. However, the implications derived from the fact that cathode ray particles are only 1/1,700 the weight of the smallest atom does not seem to have occurred to Thompson, or anyone else, for another fifteen years or so.2
Then, in 1908-1913, Ernest Rutherford and his colleagues Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden bombarded thin gold foil sheets with alpha particle beams. Even though the gold sheets appear to our eyes and touch to be solid, only about 1 in 20,000 alpha particles were actually reflected by something solid in the foil, whereas, approximately 99.99995% passed right through the foil undeflected. Those data mean that 99.99995% of a “solid” gold atom is actually empty space.3
If 99.99995% of “solid” matter is empty space, why can’t we see through and walk through walls? Apparently resurrected beings can. On that first Easter night, Jesus Christ, a physical, tangible being, passed through the walls of the “closed room” in Jerusalem and revealed himself to His disciples.4 Furthermore, Moroni, apparently traveling via a beam of light, and visited Joseph Smith in his bedroom in Palmyra, New York.5 We apparently can’t pass through a solid object because of the charge between the electrons and the protons, and also because we apparently don’t know how to pass through “solid” objects. Christ, obviously, and Moroni, possibly, know a lot more about passing through walls and, apparently, space travel than we do.
Well, at least the nucleus is “solid”, right? The nucleus, which occupies only 0.00005% of the volume of an atom, and which is comprised of protons and neutrons, accounts for more than 99.9994% of the total atomic mass. Each proton is composed of two “up” quarks and one “down” quark, whereas each neutron is composed of three quarks: one “up” quark and two “down” quarks. Quarks were first, independently proposed in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann6 and George Zweig.7 But here’s the more modern kicker: the quarks in protons and neutrons account for only 2% of the mass of those sub-atomic particles; the other 98% appears to come from the gluons, which hold the quarks together. However, how gluons generate such mass is unclear, because gluons, themselves, are massless.8
Where physics is concerned, the Greeks and other scientists, down to the beginning of the twentieth century, may be thought of as kindergarten children. After Rutherford and his colleagues, in 1913, particle physics was born, and its practitioners graduated to first grade. In 1964, with the discovery of quarks and gluons, particle physicists graduated to second grade. Now, they may be close to being third-graders. Most of the rest of us haven’t even started school. Why should we then be surprised if someone with a PhD in Particle Physics tells us “all things are present before mine eyes”9? I, for one, who am struggling to comprehend what the third-graders are talking about on the playground, am not surprised when a Professor of Particle Physics tells the group that “all things are present before mine eyes”. Especially when I have no idea what that even means. To the contrary, I am humbled to think about what I don’t know and thrilled at what I will be privileged to learn as I pass through grade school, middle school, high school, college, and graduate school. I look forward, with great anticipation, to becoming enrolled in kindergarten in the next life.
Trent Dee Stephens, PhD
References
1. Pullman, Bernard, The Atom in the History of Human Thought, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1998, pp. 31–33
2. Smith, George E., J. J. Thomson and The Electron: 1897–1899 An Introduction, The Chemical Educator, 2:1-42, 1997
3. Rutherford, E., LXXIX. The scattering of α and β particles by matter and the structure of the atom, Philosophical Magazine Series 6, 21:125, 669 — 688, 1911
4. Luke 24:36-43
5. Joseph Smith History 1:27-54
6. Gell-Mann, Murray, A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons, Physics Letters, 8:214–215, 1964
7. Zweig, George, An SU(3) Model for Strong Interaction Symmetry and its Breaking, CERN Report No.8182/TH.401, 1964; see also: cds.cern.ch/record/352337/files/CERN-TH-401.pdf?version=1
8. Ent, Rolf, Thomas Ullrich, and Raju Venugopalan, The glue that binds us, Scientific American, May 2015, 42-49
9. Doctrine and Covenants 38:2
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