Assuming you could speak whatever ancient form of Hamito-Semitic language the Bronze Age authors of Genesis spoke; what do you think they would say if you asked them how to weigh a neutron star?
They might just about grasp the meaning of 'weigh' but 'neutron' and 'star', let alone 'neutron star'?
The plain fact is that we not only speak a different language but have words for ideas and objects which would have been incomprehensible to people who thought the entire Universe was a small, flat planet with a dome over it, that contained nothing that couldn’t be found within a day or two's walks of their pastures in the Middle Eastern petty state of Canaan, later to split up into even smaller waring tribal area under the leadership of despotic warlords.
You could have done the same with words like 'electricity', 'atom', bacteria', 'virus', 'genes', 'energy', 'galaxy', 'thermodynamics', 'chemistry', 'physics' and, of course 'evolution'. These are all as absent from the Bible as are elephants, penguins, north and south-poles, democracy, civil rights, or gender equality, because the authors knew nothing about them and had no way of knowing anything about them.
It wasn't that they were stupid, after all it probably takes a lot of intelligence and a long apprenticeship to understand the needs of a herd of sheep and/or goats and where the best grazing is without encroaching on the neighbouring tribes grazing rights. My dear old maternal grandfather was a highly-respected third-generation shepherd in his day who was head-hunted to look after a prize-winning flock of Oxford Downs and given a cottage to live in, that his family then lived in for four generations. He was by no means a stupid man - simplistic in his understanding of many things. A fundamentalist Christian who knew the Bible by heart and took everything in it as 'Gospel truth' and misogynistic to the core, but not stupid.
But they not only lacked the technology (how can you learn about bacteria when you don't have glass good enough to make a microscope) but they believed they knew the answers already. They thought they knew the answers to the questions their limited horizons suggested - and the answer was always the same - a god did it (which god or gods didn't matter, it was the god or gods the rest of the tribe believed in), so what would you want a microscope for? there is nothing in water that you can't see, except water. There is nothing over the earth but the dome with the sun and moon and stars fixed to it, so why would you need a telescope to find out about galaxies?
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How the authors of Genesis saw the Universe.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1: 1-10
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1: 14-18
And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them.
Daniel 8: 10
And this ignorance which meant almost everything they included they got wrong and everything today that we take for granted that they left out, is how we know it could not have been written by the god described in it - an omniscient creator god who knew everything because it created everything.
So, back to weighing our neutron stars.
Not only would our Bronze Age ancestors not have had a clue how to go about it or even what you were talking about, but the chances are, the man on the Clapham Omnibus doesn't either. And more to the point, neither do very many cosmologists who study these things because like a great deal of science, our knowledge is like an advancing wave-front building on what is known and advancing into the unknown. The trick is to know what you don't know and how to go about discovering it. For a creationist, admitting that you don't know something is tantamount to blasphemy and humility gone mad, because their one certainty in life is that every question has the same infallible answer - God did it! To suggest otherwise is blasphemy!
So, how does a cosmologist weigh a neutron star and what exactly is a neutron star anyway?
In this article from The Conversation, Dr. Daniel Reardon, Postdoctoral researcher in pulsar timing and gravitational waves, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, explains what we know (and don't know) about neutron stars and how we can go about weighting them. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
What happens when matter is squashed to the brink of collapse? We weighed a neutron star to help NASA find out
Artist’s impression of a white dwarf star orbiting a pulsar and producing a gravitational time delay.
Daniel Reardon, Swinburne University of TechnologyCarl Knox / Swinburne / OzGrav
Neutron stars are some of the most extreme objects in the universe. Formed from the collapsed cores of supergiant stars, they weigh more than our Sun and yet are compressed into a sphere the size of a city.
The dense cores of these exotic stars contain matter squashed into unique states that we can’t possibly replicate and study on Earth. That’s why NASA is on a mission to study neutron stars and learn about the physics that governs the matter inside them.
My colleagues and I have been helping them out. We used radio signals from a fast-spinning neutron star to measure its mass. This enabled scientists working with NASA data to measure the star’s radius, which in turn gave us the most precise information yet about the strange matter inside.
What is inside a neutron star?
Matter in the core of neutron stars is even denser than the nucleus of an atom. As the densest stable form of matter in the universe, it is squashed to its limit and on the brink of collapse into a black hole. Understanding how matter behaves under these conditions is a key test of our theories of fundamental physics.
NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER) mission is trying to solve the mysteries of this extreme matter.
NICER is an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station. It detects X-rays coming from hot spots on the surface of neutron stars where temperatures can reach millions of degrees.
Scientists model the timing and energies of these X-rays to map the hot spots and determine the mass and size of the neutron stars.
Knowing how the sizes of neutron stars relate to their masses will reveal the “equation of state” of the matter in their cores. This tells scientists how soft or hard – how “squeezeable” – the neutron star is, and therefore what it is made of.
A softer equation of state would suggest that neutrons in the core are breaking apart into an exotic soup of smaller particles. A harder equation of state might mean neutrons resist, leading to larger neutron stars.
The equation of state also dictates how and when neutron stars get ripped apart when they collide.
Solving the mystery with a neutron star neighbour
One of NICER’s primary targets is a neutron star called PSR J0437-4715, which is the nearest and brightest millisecond pulsar.
A pulsar is a neutron star that emits beams of radio waves that we observe as a pulse every time the neutron star rotates.
This particular pulsar rotates 173 times per second (as fast as a blender). We have been observing it for almost 30 years with Murriyang, CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales.
Murriyang, CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope.
CSIRO
Fortunately, we were able to use radio waves to find an independent measurement of the pulsar’s mass. Without this crucial information, the team would not have recovered the correct mass.
Weighing a neutron star is all about timing
To measure the neutron star’s mass, we rely on an effect described by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, called the Shapiro delay.
Massive and dense objects such as pulsars – and in this case its companion star, a white dwarf – warp space and time. The pulsar and this companion orbit one another once every 5.74 days. When pulses from the pulsar travel to us across the compressed spacetime surrounding the white dwarf, they are delayed by microseconds.
A white dwarf orbits a pulsar, warping spacetime and delaying radio pulses from the pulsar.
Credit: Carl Knox / OzGrav.
Because PSR J0437-4715 is relatively close to us, its orbit appears to wobble slightly from our point of view as Earth moves around the Sun. This wobble gives us more details about the geometry of the orbit. We use this together with the Shapiro delay to find the masses of the white-dwarf companion and the pulsar.
The mass and size of PSR J0437-4715
We calculated that the mass of this pulsar is typical of a neutron star, at 1.42 times the mass of our Sun. That’s important because the size of this pulsar should also be the size of a typical neutron star.
Scientists working with the NICER data were then able to determine the geometry of the X-ray hot spots and calculate that the neutron star’s radius is 11.4 kilometres. These results give the most precise anchor point yet found for the neutron star equation of state at intermediate densities.
Our new picture already rules out the softest and hardest neutron star equations of state. Scientists will continue to decode exactly what this means for the presence of exotic matter in the inner cores of neutron stars. Theories suggest this matter may include quarks that have escaped their normal homes inside larger particles, or rare particles known as hyperons.
The millisecond pulsar PSR J0437-4715, on the left as seen from Earth and on the right as seen from its own equatorial plane. The purple-pink colour indicates the temperature of the hot spots at the poles. The hot magnetic poles are not exactly opposite each other. Because the star is so dense, the animations also show the effect of light bending caused by extreme gravity.
NASA / Sharon Morsink / Devarshi Choudhury et al.
Murriyang has a long history of assisting with NASA missions, and was famously used as the primary receiver of footage for most of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Now, we have used this iconic telescope to “weigh in” on the physics of neutron star interiors, advancing our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Daniel Reardon, Postdoctoral researcher in pulsar timing and gravitational waves, Swinburne University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
But maybe that’s unfair. They merely made up the tales. The decision to put their tales in a book with other tales and declare it to be the inerrant word of an omniscient creator god was not theirs; it’s those who did that who we have to blame for misleading people for so long with their preposterous claims.
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