CREATION-EVOLUTION ENCYCLOPEDIA

Home / Science VS Evolution / PDF /Encyclopedia  /Pathlights Home / Bookstore

SCIENTISTS SPEAK ABOUT STELLAR EVOLUTION: 1

Scientists have a lot to tell you, which is not printed in the newspapers and popular magazines. The evolutionary theories of origins cannot explain how the stars and galaxies were formed. Evolutionary theory is a myth. This is science vs. evolution—a Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia, brought to you by Creation Science Facts.

CONTENTS: Scientists Speak about Stellar Evolution: 1

Introduction: Both the Big Bang and stellar evolution are without scientific foundation
Star Formation: Gas clouds cannot form into stars, and stars cannot by accident begin rotating or organize themselves into galaxies
Binaries: Stars could not randomly form themselves into binaries
Galaxy Formation: Galaxy formation and maintenance is not possible by evolutionary principles

This material is excerpted from the book, ORIGIN OF THE STARS.
An asterisk ( * ) by a name indicates that person is not known to be a creationist. Of over 4,000 quotations in the books this Encyclopedia is based on, only 164 statements are by creationists.

You will have a better understanding of the following statements by scientists if you will also read the web page, Origin of the Stars.

INTRODUCTION

Origin of matter and origin of star theories lack scientific evidence.

"Few cosmologists [theorists about the origin of matter and the universe] today would dispute the view that our expanding universe began with a bang—a big hot bang—about 18 billion years ago. Paradoxically, no cosmologist could now tell you how the Big Bang ultimately gave rise to galaxies, stars, and other cosmic lumps.

"As one sky scientist, IBM's Philip E. Seiden, put it, `The Standard Big Bang model does not give rise to lumpiness. That model assumes the universe started out as a globally smooth, homogeneous expanding gas. If you apply the laws of physics to this model, you get a universe that is uniform, a cosmic vastness of evenly distributed atoms with no organization of any kind . .

"How then did the lumps [the galaxies, stars, planets, moons, and asteroids] get there? No one can say, at least not yet and perhaps not ever."—*Ben Patrusky, "Why is the Cosmos Lumpy?" in Science 81, June 1981, p. 96.

"If stars did not exist, it would be easy to prove that this is what we expect."—*G.R. Burbidge, quoted by *R.L. Sears and *Robert R. Brownlee (editors: *L.H. Aller and *D. McLaughlin) Stellar Structures (1963), p. 577.

"These `theories' amount to nothing more than the statement that protogalaxies have a cosmological origin, and their origin cannot be understood any better than can the original baryons and leptons in an evolving universe . . Probably the strongest argument against a big bang is that when we come to the universe in total and the large number of complex condensed objects in it [planets, moons, stars, galaxies, etc.] the theory is able to explain so little."—*G. Burbidge, "Was There Really a Big Bang?" in Nature 233 (1971), p. 184.

"The big bang theory holds that the universe began with a single explosion. Yet as can be seen below, an explosion merely throws matter apart, while the big bang has mysteriously produced the opposite effect, with matter clumping together in the form of galaxies . .

"Instead of matter all the time becoming colder and more spread out, we often see it clustering together to produce the brilliant light of swirling galaxies and stars."—*Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe (1983), pp. 184-185.

STAR FORMATION

Gas clouds cannot press themselves together into stars, which then begin rotating, and thence by accident form themselves into galaxies.

"There is no reasonable astronomical scenario in which mineral grains in space gas clouds can condense."—*Fred Hoyle and *Chandra Wickramasinghe, "Where Microbes Boldly Went," in New Scientist (1981), pp. 412-413.

"The greatest difficulty is that we have no idea what induced the formation of the first bound objects in an expanding Universe [those objects bond together by gravity, such as planets or stars] . ."—*James Binney, "Oddballs and Galaxies Formation," Nature, 255:275 (1975).

In 1875, J.C. Maxwell wrote:

" `In the heavens we discover by their light . . stars so distant that no material thing can ever have passed from one to another; and yet this light . . tells us also that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds that we find on earth . .! No theory of evolution can be found to account for these similarities of the molecules . . On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it . . the essential character of a manufactured article and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent.'

"The mere fact that the hydrogen conversion process can be seriously threatened by a marginal experiment of this kind emphasizes the precarious status of a hypothesis that rests almost entirely on the current absence of any superior alternative."—*Dewey B. Larson, Universe in Motion (1984), p. 11.

"So far as we know, the result is still the same as Maxwell inferred; all electrons are everywhere the same, all protons are the same, and so on. We should expect a sufficiently sophisticated theory to tell us why this is so."—*W.H. McCrea, "Cosmology after Half a Century," in Science, June 2, 1968, p. 1298.

"One of the chief problems in cosmology is to explain why, in an expanding universe, matter becomes aggregated into galaxies . . A spherical region that is part of an expanding gas cloud will become unstable when the expansion velocity at its surface is greater than the velocity of sound. When the region becomes unstable, its density increases as compared to the mean density. But the rate of this increase is extremely slow. An expanding universe in fact is not dramatically unstable; and this has led to an impasse in the study of galaxy formation." —*E. Harrison, "Universe, Origin and Evolution of," in Encyclopedia Britanica, Vol. 18, pp. 1007-1008 (14th ed., 1974).

"The process by which an interstellar cloud is concentrated until it is held together gravitationally to become a protostar is not known. In quantitative work, it has simply been assumed that the number of atoms per cm3 has somehow increased about a thousand-fold over that in a dense nebula. The two principal factors inhibiting the formation of a protostar are that the gas has a tendency to disperse before the density becomes high enough for self-gravitation to be effective, and that any initial angular momentum would cause excessively rapid rotation as the material contracts. Some mechanism must therefore be provided for gathering the material into a sufficiently small volume that self-gravitation may become effective, and the angular momentum must in some way be removed."—*Eva Novotny, Introduction to Stellar Atmospheres and Interiors (1973), pp. 279-280.

"The universe we see when we look out to its furthest horizons contains a hundred billion galaxies. Each of these galaxies contains another hundred billion stars. That's 1022 stars all told. The silent embarrassment of modern astrophysics is that we do not know how even a single one of these stars managed to form."—*Martin Harwit, "Books Reviews," Science, March 1986, pp. 1201-1202.

"Basically there does not appear to be enough matter in any of the hydrogen clouds in the Milky Way that would allow them to contract [into stars] and be stable. Apparently our attempt to explain the first stages in star evolution has failed."—*Garrit Verschuur, Starscapes (1973), p. 102.

"Contemporary opinion on star formation holds that objects called protostars [newly born stars] are formed as condensation from interstellar gas. This condensation process is very difficult theoretically, and no essential theoretical understanding can be claimed; in fact some theoretical evidence argues strongly against the possibility of star formation. However, we know that stars exist, and we must do our best to account for them."—*J.C. Brandt, The Sun and Stars (1966).

"A scientist can discover a new star but he cannot make one. He would have to ask an engineer to do it for him."—*Gordon L. Glegg, quoted in *Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), p. 79.

BINARIES

There is no way that stars could accidentally position themselves to carefully revolve about one another, yet over half of the stars are so arranged.

"Over half of the stars in our part of the universe are binary or multiple star systems. By studying the motion of binary stars, much can be learned about the stars considered individually."—Jon K. West, "A Pre-main-sequence Stellar Model Applied to Close Binary Star Systems" in Creation Research Society Quarterly, June 1981, p. 15.

GALAXY FORMATION

Galaxies are immense, carefully organized collections of stars. Most are arranged into a disk shape. Evolution can account neither for their formation, nor how they hold together without crashing into one another or flying apart.

"Despite the optimism of the preceding chapters, there are a great many things that the cosmologist not only does not know, but finds severe difficulty in envisaging a path towards finding out. Even if we beg the question of how the universe started, how did it become as it is now? In particular, how did the galaxies form? The encyclopedias and popular astronomical books are full of plausible tales of condensations from vortices, turbulent gas clouds and the like, but the sad truth is that we do not know how the galaxies came into existence."—*Laurie John (ed.), Cosmology Now (1976), p. 85.

"The other urgent task in cosmology [the producing of stellar theories] is to understand how in the more recent past great masses of gas collapsed to form galaxies and clusters of galaxies."—*James Binney, "Oddballs and Galaxy Formation," Nature, 255:275 (1975).

"Now some writers have discussed the possibility that some irregularity of density was present in the universe from the outset and that this led ultimately to the occurrence of galaxies. This idea has not achieved any success, since it assumes practically all that is to be inferred."—*Laurie John (ed.), Cosmology Now (1976), p. 92.

"Nor is it understood why elliptical galaxies seem to have many more globular clusters per unit of mass than spiral galaxies. The observation is of particular significance because it argues against a popular theory of how the ellipticals formed. Alar Tommre of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other investigators have proposed that the elliptical galaxies are formed when spiral galaxies collide and merge. The strongest evidence against this hypothesis is the higher proportion of clusters in the ellipticals."—*Ivan R. King, "Globular Clusters," Scientific American, 252:79, June 1985.

"There is much doubt, however, that galaxies evolve from one type to another at all."—*George Abell, Exploration of the Universe, 2nd Ed. (1969), p. 629.

"Our conclusions, then, are that the sequence of the classification of galaxies is not an evolutionary sequence."—*Paul W. Hodge, Physics and Astronomy of Galaxies and Cosmology (1966), p. 122.

"A completely satisfactory theory of galaxy formation remains to be formulated." —*Joseph Silk, The Big Bang (1980), p. 22.

"The problem of explaining the existence of the galaxies has proved to be one of the thorniest in cosmology. By all rights, they just shouldn't be there, yet there they sit. It's hard to convey the depth of frustration that this simple fact induces among scientists."—*James Trefil, Dark Side of the Universe (1988), p. 55.

"It turns out that in almost every case the velocities of the individual galaxies are high enough to allow them to escape from the cluster. In effect, the clusters are `boiling.' This statement is certainly true if we assume that the only gravitational force present is that exerted by visible matter, but it is true even if we assume that every galaxy in the cluster, like the Milky Way, is surrounded by a halo of dark matter that contains 90 percent of the mass of the galaxy."—*James Trefil, Dark Side of the Universe (1988), p. 93.

"The array of observational facts must be explained by a satisfactory theory [on the evolution of the solar system], and the theory must be consistent with the principles of dynamics and modern theory if properly applied."—*Fred L. Whipple, Earth, Moon, and Planets (3rd Ed., 1968), p. 243.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

To the NEXT PAGE to conclude what you are now reading (Scientists Speak about Stellar Evolution: Part 2 of 2)