A True Sense of the Miraculous

Third Nephi starts with a literal bang and in my opinion, the most impressive sign God has ever given to man. For one night, after the sun goes down, the sky remains as bright as at mid-day. It’s followed by a new “star” which was visible in the night sky. The record doesn’t say how long it remained visible. My guess is it faded from sight over a period of days or maybe weeks.

From our perspective and knowledge of astrophysics, the event they saw is easily explained. In the distant past, a star exploded and in the act, emitted a powerful, focused, stream of energetic particles. They crossed the vastness of space and struck the Earth's upper atmosphere causing it to fluoresce in a massive aurora so brilliant it lit the ground like day and lasted through the night.

For me, the miracle isn’t in what happened, but in the timing of the event and the precision needed to aim the stream of particles to hit the Earth from astronomic distances. There are a couple of aspects to this which could simplify the complexity, but not enough to diminish its miraculous nature. Some might say, the wavefront could’ve been spherical in which case no aiming is needed, just timing.

The complication to this is we’ve not seen an explosion powerful enough to do that over the distances involved. To my knowledge there aren’t any known nova or supernova remnants close enough to us to account for this phenomena if it had emitted just a spherical wave. But, we have observed stellar explosions which emit two focused beams of particles which shoot off in opposite directions from the star's center.

The other miraculous aspect is the timing. I cant begin to imagine how many decimal places are needed to compute the travel time to the day to pull this off. Not only that, you need its "flight path" through space and you have to account for the effect of gravity fields of stars it passes.

Then there's the aiming. My guess is the explosion was somewhere not close but still inside our galaxy. Heavenly Father wasn't aiming from near-Earth, or interstellar but interstellar distances. That He scored a bulls-eye from so far away boggles my mind.

The Nephites and Lamanite knew none of this. For them the sky lit up without the sun for a night. The real miracle is how soon they forgot or discounted the event. But I can’t be too critical — I’ve experienced many smaller but much more personal miracles in my life. Yet I need a constant diet of them because I so quickly forget myself.

Geek Time - this has nothing to do with the Book of Mormon

I’m embracing my geekiness with this post. I read an article stating some astrophysicists speculate the observed phenomena described as “dark matter” may be grouped into particles like baryonic matter. This is Spock-fascinating stuff for me, but before I geek out on it, let me explain why.

First off, a primer on “baryonic matter." In school we're taught the basic building blocks of stuff are protons, neutrons and electrons. This was avant-garde material when I was young but it’s way out of date now. Today, instead of the basic three particles there are a whole slew of them not to mention several different ways to classify them. Based upon what’s called the “Standard Model,” there are quarks, leptons, bosons and the Higgs-boson. How many isn’t germane to the discussion, you just need to know there are lots of them. All are lumped under the category of “baryonic” matter. In effect, baryons make everything you see around you, including light and even electricity.

Gravity appears to be the glue that holds the universe, galaxies, stars and planets together and dancing along. Earth is round because of gravity. It orbits the sun because of it. The sun shines because its constituent mass is held so tightly together fusion occurs. You get the idea: gravity makes the universe go round.

Here’s the nub: there’s not enough matter in the universe to explain the behavior scientists see. Here’s why: when scientists run their computer models, they’ve found galaxies spin so fast they should be flinging stars all over creation. They’re not. Since the math for this is pretty inflexible, they had to find a way, some magic sauce, to make the equations work. That magic sauce is “dark matter” and “dark energy.”  The amount they determined was needed to explain how the universe worked was a lot higher than they expected. They computed, baryonic matter makes up less than five percent of the total. The rest came from these two other sources.

This is old stuff for astrophysicists. What geeked me out, is now there are indications dark matter may not be a single type of particle but a bunch of different types like baryons. In sophisticated circles, dark matter, goes by the moniker, “WIMP.” It's an acronym for "weakly interacting massive particles." It means wimps exert a weak gravitational pull on baryons. Because of this, galaxies spin along the way we see them and all is good. They don’t interact with baryons in any other observed way. A bazillion wimps could shoot through you right now and you’d never know the difference.

If that seems hard to believe consider this: atoms are mostly empty space. "How empty," you ask? Hydrogen the simplest atom, consists of one proton and one electron. The proton is the center, the electron “orbits” it. Now for the scale. Make the proton the size of the sun. Guess where’s the Jupiter-sized the electron is. Give up? It's further away than Pluto. That's a LOT of empty space!

Let’s step back from the geek brink for a second. Given this scale, what makes matter look solid is not what it’s made of but the forces these particles give off and interact with. You see, touch, eat, feel and essentially live because force of fields bouncing off of each other at the sub-atomic scale. Without them, you're a ghost!

So, now into the über-geekness of this post. Some scientists speculate this wimp-matter may not only have different types of particles, but also its own set of forces. Forces which could give it the ability to form stars, planets and even life. All unobserved and unaffected by us, yet occupying the same volume of space we do.

Because they are bound by gravity, who’s to say this spatial overlap isn't more granular than just at the galactic level. What if they overlap at the stellar and planetary level too? Imagine our baryon Earth and a wimp Earth, both occupying the same volume of space moving together. The baryon-Earth orbits the baryon-sun we see while the wimp-Earth orbits a wimp-sun.

The cool part is comments by Joseph Smith argue for this interpretation. Just a couple are: “Angels are from this Earth.” Maybe the baryon-Earth and the “wimp-Earth” are a single world in God's eye? There’s also, “spirit is matter too, just more refined.” The word “refined” may not be the best choice, but given he said it in the 1830’s he can’t be faulted for not knowing words we don’t yet know ourselves.

A wimp-universe makes a lot of sense. And while we call it dark, I suspect it’s anything but. We call it that for the same reason a blind man calls a sun-lit room dark — he can’t see the light. Now maybe, as we learn more about “dark matter” this understanding will change. Time will tell. For now, I think the “spirit world,” where we lived before coming to mortality, is this wimp-Earth. The universe it’s in is the “real” one. And the baryon-universe we can see is the temporary test environment.

Stretch your brain….