Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - How We Know The Bible Was Made Up By Scientifically-Illiterate People

A new study broadens the horizon of knowledge about how matter behaves under extreme conditions and helps to solve some great unknowns about the origin of the universe.

Deciphering the behaviour of heavy particles in the hottest matter in the universe - Current events - University of Barcelona

The Bible contains no scientific insights or understanding beyond what would have been known to Bronze Age pastoralists—what Christopher Hitchens aptly described as the "fearful infancy of our species." Their knowledge was naturally constrained by the absence of scientific instruments, a lack of understanding of the planet's history, and a worldview shaped by tribal dogma and magical thinking.

Had the Bible truly been written or inspired by the deity it describes — as a vital message to humanity from the creator of the universe — one might reasonably expect it to contain some revelations unknown to its time. Yet it offers nothing by way of evidence to support such a claim. There is no mention of germ theory, no understanding of cells or cellular life, no grasp of atoms, electricity, or metabolic processes like photosynthesis and respiration. All living things are described as strictly male or female, with no recognition of genetics, hermaphroditism or parthenogenesis — except for a single, supposedly miraculous human birth of a genetically impossible male child. In short, the text contains nothing that was not already known or assumed until the development of tools like the microscope and telescope, and much of it was clearly and demonstrably wrong.

The Bible’s authors were storytellers, not scientists. Their goal was not to challenge the cultural assumptions of their time but to frame them within a compelling narrative.

Because religions are not founded on tested hypotheses or objective facts but rather on the best guesses of uninformed people, any alignment with modern scientific understanding is coincidental, not predictive. For example, the biblical phrase *"Let there be light"* is sometimes interpreted as metaphorically reflecting the early high-energy state of the universe following the Big Bang. But there is no indication that the authors understood photons, particle physics, or the quantum nature of space-time. Nor did they suggest that the universe originated nearly 14 billion years ago in a quantum fluctuation of a non-zero energy field.

Recent discoveries illustrate just how far modern science has advanced beyond anything conceivable to ancient authors. For instance, an international team of scientists has recently found evidence suggesting the existence of heavy particles during the universe's first microseconds—particles that influenced the behaviour of other matter. This discovery, utterly incomprehensible to a Bronze Age worldview, is detailed in a peer-reviewed article published in Physics Reports.

The First Few Microseconds of the Universe. Our current understanding of the universe’s first few microseconds after the Big Bang comes largely from high-energy particle physics and cosmology. Immediately following the Big Bang, the universe was an extremely hot, dense soup of fundamental particles, primarily quarks, gluons, leptons, and photons. During this fleeting period—up to about 10 microseconds—quarks and gluons existed in a free, unbound state known as a quark-gluon plasma.

As the universe expanded and cooled, these particles began to combine to form protons and neutrons, eventually giving rise to atoms and the large-scale structures we see today.

The recent discovery published in Physics Reports adds a new layer to this understanding. Researchers from an international team have proposed evidence for the existence of hypothetical heavy particles — possibly beyond the Standard Model of particle physics — that may have existed only in the universe’s earliest microseconds. These particles, although transient, could have played a significant role in shaping the evolution of matter by influencing how other particles interacted and decayed.

This finding extends our knowledge by suggesting that the physics of the very early universe might involve unknown forces or particles that left subtle but measurable imprints on the cosmos. It also helps bridge the gap between cosmology and particle physics, hinting at what lies beyond the Standard Model and potentially guiding future experimental and theoretical research.

The team also provides a more accessible explanation of their complex findings in a news item from the Universitat de Barcelona:

Deciphering the behaviour of heavy particles in the hottest matter in the universe
An international team of scientists has published a new report that moves towards a better understanding of the behaviour of some of the heaviest particles in the universe under extreme conditions, which are similar to those just after the big bang. The paper, published in the journal Physics Reports, is signed by physicists Juan M. Torres-Rincón, from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences at the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), Santosh K. Das, from the Indian Institute of Technology Goa (India), and Ralf Rapp, from Texas A&M University (United States).
The authors have published a comprehensive review that explores how particles containing heavy quarks (known as charm and bottom hadrons) interact in a hot, dense environment called hadronic matter. This environment is created in the last phase of high-energy collisions of atomic nuclei, such as those taking place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The new study highlights the importance of including hadronic interactions in simulations to accurately interpret data from experiments at these large scientific infrastructures.

The study broadens the perspective on how matter behaves under extreme conditions and helps to solve some great unknowns about the origin of the universe.

Reproducing the primordial universe

When two atomic nuclei collide at near-light speeds, they generate temperatures more than a 1,000 times higher than those at the centre of the Sun. These collisions briefly produce a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a soup of fundamental particles that existed microseconds after the big bang. As this plasma cools, it transforms into hadronic matter, a phase composed of particles such as protons and neutrons, as well as other baryons and mesons.

The study focuses on what happens to heavy-flavour hadrons (particles containing charmed or background quarks, such as D and B mesons) during this transition and the hadronic phase expansion that follows it.

Heavy particles as probes

Heavy quarks are like tiny sensors. Being so massive, they are produced just after the initial nuclear collision and move more slowly, thus interacting differently with the surrounding matter. Knowing how they scatter and spread is key to learning about the properties of the medium through which they travel.

Researchers have reviewed a wide range of theoretical models and experimental data to understand how heavy hadrons, such as D and B mesons, interact with light particles in the hadronic phase. They have also examined how these interactions affect observable quantities such as particle flux and momentum loss.

To really understand what we see in the experiments, it is crucial to observe how the heavy particles move and interact also during the later stages of these nuclear collisions. This phase, when the system has already cooled down, still plays an important role in how the particles lose energy and flow together. It is also necessary to address the microscopic and transport properties of these heavy systems right at the transition point to the quark-gluon plasma. This is the only way to achieve the degree of precision required by current experiments and simulations.

Juan M. Torres-Rincón, co-author
Departament de Física Quàntica i Astrofísica and Institut de Ciències del Cosmos (ICCUB)
Facultat de Física
Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.

A simple analogy can be used to better understand these results: when we drop a heavy ball into a crowded pool, even after the biggest waves have dissipated, the ball continues to move and collide with people. Similarly, heavy particles created in nuclear collisions continue to interact with other particles around them, even after the hottest and most chaotic phase. These continuous interactions subtly modify the motion of particles, and studying these changes helps scientists to better understand the conditions of the early universe. Ignoring this phase would therefore mean missing an important part of the story.

Looking to the future

Understanding how heavy particles behave in hot matter is fundamental to mapping the properties of the early universe and the fundamental forces that rule it. The findings also pave the way for future experiments at lower energies, such as those planned at CERN’s Super Proton Super Synchrotron (SPS) and the future FAIR facility in Darmstadt, Germany.

Publication:
Das, Santosh K. ; Torres-Rincón, Juan M.; Rapp, Ralf.
Charm and bottom hadrons in hot hadronic matter
Physics Reports, June 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.physrep.2025.05.002.

Abstract
Heavy quarks, and the hadrons containing them, are excellent probes of the QCD medium formed in high-energy heavy-ion collisions, as they provide essential information on the transport properties of the medium and how quarks color-neutralize into hadrons. Large theoretical and phenomenological efforts have been dedicated thus far to assess the diffusion of charm and bottom quarks in the quark–gluon plasma and their subsequent hadronization into heavy-flavor (HF) hadrons. However, the fireball formed in heavy-ion collisions also features an extended hadronic phase, and therefore any quantitative analysis of experimental observables needs to account for the rescattering of charm and bottom hadrons. This is further reinforced by the presence of a QCD cross-over transition and the notion that the interaction strength is maximal in the vicinity of the pseudo-critical temperature. We review existing approaches for evaluating the interactions of open HF hadrons in a hadronic heat bath and the pertinent results for scattering amplitudes, spectral functions and transport coefficients. While most of the work to date has focused on $D$ -mesons, we also discuss excited states as well as HF baryons and the bottom sector. Both the HF hadro-chemistry and bottom observables will play a key role in future experimental measurements. We also conduct a survey of transport calculations in heavy-ion collisions that have included effects of hadronic HF diffusion and assess its impact on various observables.

Das, Santosh K.; Torres-Rincón, Juan M.; Rapp, Ralf.
Charm and bottom hadrons in hot hadronic matter
Physics Reports, June 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.physrep.2025.05.002.

© 2025 Elsevier B.V. .
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The discovery of phenomena such as heavy particles influencing the early universe presents a serious challenge to those who hold to the literal truth and inerrancy of the Bible. According to a literal reading of Genesis, the universe was created in six days a few thousand years ago, with Earth and humanity at the centre of the narrative. This stands in stark contrast to the overwhelming body of scientific evidence indicating that the universe is nearly 14 billion years old and governed by physical processes entirely absent from biblical accounts.

The Bible offers no hint of particle physics, quantum fields, or the high-energy state of the early universe. It lacks any understanding of the fundamental forces, subatomic particles, or the gradual formation of matter from quark-gluon plasma. The newly proposed existence of heavy particles—postulated to exist only in the first microseconds after the Big Bang—adds yet another layer of complexity and nuance that simply cannot be reconciled with ancient cosmological models grounded in myth and pre-scientific thinking.

For believers in biblical inerrancy, these scientific discoveries raise uncomfortable questions. If the Bible is the literal word of an all-knowing creator, why does it reflect the limited worldview of Bronze Age humans rather than providing insights that anticipate modern science? Why are there no references—however veiled—to the vast age of the universe, to atoms, or to the fundamental laws of nature?

This gap between the scientific and biblical accounts highlights the risk of treating ancient texts as scientific authorities. As our understanding of the universe grows ever more detailed and precise, the explanatory power of literalist interpretations diminishes, requiring ever more elaborate justifications to maintain a worldview increasingly at odds with observable reality.

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