Genesis Series

Genesis 1 of 5 – Singularity

Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning”

My painting Singularity shows an abstract representation of The Beginning of the universe. The point of Creation is the divine golden dot at the touch point of the Red-Green-Blue (RGB) circle and the Cyan-Magenta-Yellow (CMY) circle. In accordance with nomenclature in quantum chromodynamics (CRD) theory in particle physics, RBG represents the sub-particle (quark) elements of matter and the CMY those of anti-matter. Other particles (mesons) can be formed between quark / anti-quark pairs of opposite colour (e.g. R-C, G-M, B-Y) – shown in the painting as opposites. In the bottom left circle (anti-matter), the symmetry is broken as shown by the black segment. The broken circle symbolises a net excess of matter over anti-matter that allowed non-annihilated matter particles to coalesce under gravitational forces to form over two trillion galaxies in our universe. The amazing point is that the magnitude of disturbance in symmetry during the earliest moment of the universe was only 1 part in a billion. In other words: of each billion anti-matter particles in the early universe, there were a billion plus one matter particles. That imbalance was sufficient to create the universe we see today with us in it. The black segment also represents so much of the physics that we still do not understand, or have predicted but have not yet observed. The universe is thought to consist of 69% dark energy and 25% dark matter. However, neither of these has been observed to date. The particles that we know and see comprise a little over 5% of the universe only. It appears that the more we come to know, the more we realise that we know much less. The third circle on top in heavenly blue has a physics formula in it that is a shorthand form of the Lagrangian (components of potential and kinetic energy) under the four fundamental forces in the universe. The blue circle depicts that completion of understanding (and inspiration) only comes with inclusion of the divine, over and above the elements that science gives us. Of the realm of the divine, we are probably only able to ever experience a small part depicted by the abstract form for the Holy Trinity (white, silver, gold).

For those interested in the amazing convergence between science and scripture, that inspired me to make this artwork, I invite you to read on:

The mystery of the birth of the universe (and similarly the birth of life) has critical complexities that have not been solved by science. I believe that the bible offers clues to these dilemmas and these clues are very consistent with the latest observations in science. First of all, and perhaps the biggest mystery, there should be no matter in the universe, just pure energy.

Just after the birth of the universe, say the first one trillionth of a second, there was no mass at all, just pure energy. In perfect symmetry, elementary particles would have formed and annihilated back into radiation, until the universe cooled and expanded to energy levels too low for these particle events to occur and only radiation would remain. There should have been no matter, no particles, no atoms, no molecules, no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no life.

But something had happened, in the earliest fractions of time, a quantum mechanical disturbance occurred, a small but critical anomaly, a flutter, a little ripple effect, a very small, one-part-per-billion anomaly .... and everything changed.

From our current scientific understanding of how the Big Bang might have progressed in the very earliest fractions of time, general relativity theory (Einstein) proposes a gravitational singularity that breaks the perfect symmetry that existed among the four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force and gravity). Up to that moment, each of these forces are postulated to have had the same strength, and were possibly even unified into one fundamental force. The tiny universe was held together by a perfect symmetry, like a sharpened pencil standing on its point… i.e. too symmetrical to last. Then the gravity force separates from the other fundamental forces (which remain unified), and the earliest elementary particles (and antiparticles) begin to be created.

The opening sentence of the old testament is profound: “In the beginning”. From a scientific, mathematical and philosophical point of view, an eternal universe that has always existed and will forever exist, would be a much easier model to work with. Options for a universe model that forever pulsates between Big Bangs and Big Shrunks, or a universe model that spontaneously and continuously creates have been disproved by latest observations in astronomy as well as by theoretical (entropy) models. This leaves only one model that predicts that there was a single starting moment of the universe. This leads to a scientifically uncomfortable realisation, how did the boundary conditions at time zero came to be? There had to be an energetic state that was defined at that moment. These perspectives come remarkably close to Creation and a Creative Force that defined the absolute start from which everything else followed ….

Genesis 2 of 5 – The Matter of Lambda’s Beauty

Genesis 1:12 “1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

In this second painting in the Genesis series, I have depicted a recreation of a broken-symmetry event, similar to the one that allowed an imbalance of matter particles over anti-matter in the very first moments in the universe. The ripple (m'rahaphet in ancient Hebrew, see below) in the high-energy plasma is shown as a wave disturbance, affecting the outcome of the disintegration of a ultra-heavy neutron (Lambda-b) particle into four other particles (two negative pions , a positive pion and a proton). The pions are shown as pawns in a chess game (pion or peon in French means pawn). The positively charged proton particle is presided over by a King, alluding to a Higher Force (or Order) that rules over the anti-symmetry observed in this particle reaction in the high-energy particle collider at CERN. Divine gold floats in the space above, hinting that more facets of the Divine are likely to be revealed through science.

The title of my painting reflects the importance of the broken symmetry of matter over anti-matter through the Lambda-b particle, where the -b stands for beauty, a particle identifier. One cannot help but finding beauty in how an unseen divine flutter (a quantum tremble) of such subtle proportions (an imbalance of only one in a billion particles) can be cause of everything we see.

Please read on if you are interested in how scripture and science are increasingly aligned:

The opening sentences of the Genesis book in the bible appear completely in line with modern scientific interpretation of the creation of the universe. In the beginning, there was matter (‘earth’) and non-matter (‘the heavens’). The non-matter consisted of pure energy (divine) and anti-matter (the annihilator) - how is that for strong metaphors? The matter (‘earth’) was without form (particles hadn’t clumped together yet under the forces of physics). The matter was void (literally so, the particle constituents were there but because of the extremely high energy just after creation these particles were in thermal equilibrium and they behaved as radiation - hence the elements of matter had been created but had not taken their identity yet... hence matter was void). Indeed, there was darkness despite the omnipresence of high energy radiation. The reason for this was that all photons were continuously created and absorbed by particles. Therefore, ‘light’ was not able to escape freely but bound to particles. The universe was opaque, no light could move freely, it was dark. The state of this early universe is best described as a rapidly expanding high-energy plasma, a dark hot fluid that held the secrets of the unknown (‘the deep’). A modern physicist cannot fault the above biblical description of creation.

Then follows a very strange sentence about a hovering Spirit. Why was it doing that? Practically all the sections that describe creation are about God did this and then that, but here, and only here the Holy Spirit is mentioned and partaking in creation by ‘hovering’, why? This word ‘hovering’ is from the ancient Hebrew m'rahaphet, which most precisely means to tremble or to flutter. In a later section in the bible (Deuteronomy 32:11) the same word is described to explain how m'rahaphet is done by birds that are brooding to keep their nest at exactly the right temperature so that eggs can hatch and their young are protected. This is a beautiful metaphor because it is this slight imbalance, this tiny tremble offsetting perfect equilibrium with one part in a billion, that favoured creation of matter over anti-matter in our universe. And yet, this flutter is what caused two trillion galaxies to be created with billions of stars each and uncountable more planets. Without this flutter, this quantum tremble, matter and anti-matter would have completely annihilated each other into only pure energy and no stars would exist to give light, no planets to live on and we would have no bodies to materialise in ... there would only be radiation in an otherwise empty universe. It is still unknown by science to date why this symmetry between matter and anti-matter got broken.

When the universe was three minutes old, most of the hadrons (but not all) and anti-hadrons had annihilated. The hadrons that remained are the building blocks of all the chemical elements that were formed subsequently. It is a daunting idea that all these particles were formed in the first three minutes of the universe that is now 13.8 ± 0.2 billion years old. All the action that happened in this very early and extremely short time period predestined all the galactic bodies that would form and disintegrate in what we now call history and future. It is therefore right that we speak of the birth of the universe as a creation event.

Since the 1960’s, particle physicists including those in CERN, have relentlessly sought with their high energy particle beams to re-create these so called ‘broken symmetry’ events, that favour matter over antimatter. A few indirect breakthroughs were made including the discovery of the Higgs Boson (misnamed as God’s particle) that is part of the symmetry breaking of the electroweak force separating into the weak force and the electromagnetic force. It is also the particle that is responsible for giving mass to all fermion particles. It had been predicted by Higgs in 1960s and was finally detected in CERN experiments in 2013 . But although broken symmetry events were discovered a number of times by ‘force carrying particles’ (bosons) it had not been seen by the building-block particles of everyday matter (fermions) and this is necessary to explain why during creation there was more matter than antimatter created. This was the situation up until 2017.

In 2017, for the first time a heavy baryon particle called Lambda-b (basically an ultra-heavy neutron) was observed to have a decay path that significantly favours the decay of the ‘matter’ equivalent over its anti-matter equivalent. The decay path disintegrates a Lambda-b particle into two negative pions , a positive pion and a proton. The subscript ‘b’ of the Lambda particle stands for its mass-identifying name ‘Bottom’ or ‘Beauty’. Without particles like Lambda-b and others like it, created moments after the Big Bang, the universe would have remained void – no matter what.

Genesis 3 of 5 – The Eyes that Light a Thousand Skies

Genesis 1:3-4 “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw the light, that is was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.

In this third painting in the Genesis series, I have shown my visualisation of the creation of light in the universe, again combining scripture and the latest insights from science. Depicted is a the moment that light is able to escape for the first time the opaque primordial soup of particles that was the universe. When electrons started to be bound to ionised atoms, it marked the point that for the first time radiation could escape the high energy plasma and the world became transparent to light. It was as if a dark veil came down and photons (light particles) were able to travel freely into the expanding space. The early particles are shown to be transitioning from individual quarks and anti-quarks into baryons (3 quarks) and mesons (2 quarks) according to rules defined by quantum chromodynamics (CRD) theory about what quark colours are able to combine into larger particles. Electrons are shown as wave fields surrounding the particles, with a remarkable resemblance of eyes, looking at you as you look back into the Divine. I wanted to communicate with this painting the realisation that every particle of our physical body was seeded in the particle creation during the first three minutes of the universe. When we are looking at the universe lighted up by stars, we are actually looking at ourselves. We are made out of stardust after all.

Please read on if you are interested in how light as we know it was created in the universe:

The periods that follow the Lepton Epoch (from 1 second to 3 minutes into the life of the universe) are called Nucleosynthesis (to 20 minutes) and the Photon epoch (to 240,000 years). During nucleosynthesis the universe continues to expand and temperature falls to about a billion degrees. At this point, atomic nuclei can begin to form as protons and neutrons combine through nuclear fusion to form the nuclei of the simple elements of hydrogen, helium and lithium. After about 20 minutes, the temperature and density of the universe has fallen to the point where nuclear fusion cannot continue. In the subsequent Photon epoch, a long period of gradual cooling takes place while the universe is filled with plasma, a hot, opaque soup of atomic nuclei and electrons. After most of the leptons and antileptons had annihilated each other at the end of the Lepton Epoch, the energy of the universe is dominated by photons, which continue to interact frequently with the charged protons, electrons and nuclei.

And so darkness prevailed for the first 240,000 years of the expanding and cooling universe. Despite the omnipresence of high energy radiation no light could escape the energy plasma that made up the universe. A hot minestrone of charged particles captured all the light (radiation) in a continuous process of particle creation and annihilation.

The universe continued to expand and cool as this dark soup, until the temperature fell to around 3,000 degrees (about the same as the surface of the Sun). As its density and temperature declined below this critical point, ionized hydrogen and helium atoms were able to capture the free electrons (a process known as “recombination”), thus neutralizing their electric charge. With the electrons now bound to atoms, the universe finally became transparent to light, making this the earliest epoch observable today. It also released the photons in the universe which have up till this time been interacting with electrons and protons in an opaque photon-baryon fluid (known as “decoupling”), and these photons (the same ones we see in today’s cosmic background radiation) can now travel freely. By the end of this period at 300,000 years of age, the universe consists of a fog of about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium, with just traces of lithium.

Genesis 4 of 5 – Elemental Waters

Genesis 1:6 “Then God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters”.

In this fourth painting in the Genesis series, I have yet again sought to align wisdom from scripture with knowledge from science. And as is often the case, scripture reveals its meaning delicately. What is described by Gen 1:6 is what physicists would call a phase transition. As mentioned at the earlier two works in this art series, the breaking of symmetry in the early universe was perhaps The Critical Event (and still not understood why it happened) that gave shape to earth (matter) and life. The scientific description of broken symmetries follows closely the theory and mathematics to describe phase transitions. When a substance solidifies (a phase transition), it moves from a state of symmetry (a particle is free to move anywhere in a liquid) to a state of broken-symmetry (a particle is fixed in its position within a solid mass). An analogue process happened in the very early universe when the four elemental forces of the universe (gravity, electro-magnetism, the weak force and the nuclear strong force) were interchangeable and perhaps combined into a single unified force of nature. Then a sequence of phase transitions happened, first separating out gravity from the other forces, followed by the strong force and then finally also the electro-weak force solidified into the separate electro-magnetic force and the weak force. Separating water from water is a beautiful analogue of the above process of bringing structure into our universe.

As we look at the further evolution of the universe after the creation of light, we see a period where the high energy plasma (the primordial soup) has been replaced by the two principle constituents we experience in our universe: matter (particles) and non-matter (radiation). ‘Dividing the waters under the firmament from the waters above the firmament’ reflects the separation of dense energy (particles condensing into matter) from scattered energy (radiation in the ‘heavens’).

In my painting I have visualised the division of the waters as a phase transition between an sparse vapour and a dense liquid phase. Photons and neutrinos (shown as silver trajectories) occupy the vapour and early atoms (hydrogen, deuterium, helium) settle into the dense phase. This universe is still very fluid, with lots of particle / radiation interaction visualised in a liberal interpretation of Feynman-like diagrams. An electron-positron pair production out of a photon is shown on the right, just above the interfase (firmament), while on the left a free neutron (green) is decaying into a proton (red), an electron (gold) and an anti-neutrino (silver).

Genesis 5 of 5 – Fusion

Genesis 1:9-10 “Then God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into 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 He called Seas. And God saw that it was good.”

This fifth painting in the Genesis series depicts the next step in the maturation process of the universe. The gathering of the waters under the heavens into one place represents the coalescence of free particles (waters) into heavier elements and ultimately bound together as solid molecules (dry land). This fusion process is the seeding process of what ultimately will be the creation of stars (Genesis 1:16-18). The radiating centre of the fusion is shown as God’s eye out of which shapes and internal structures appear to form, as tears streaming into space. God’s eyelashes appear to catch the floating particles to bring them into fusion.

Please read on if you are interested in how stars and planets are formed according to science:

According to our current scientific understanding, a star and its planets form out of a collapsing cloud of dust and gas within a larger cloud called a nebula. As gravity pulls material in the collapsing cloud closer together, the centre of the cloud gets more and more compressed and, in turn, gets hotter. This dense, hot core becomes the kernel of a new star. Meanwhile, inherent motions within the collapsing cloud cause it to churn. As the cloud gets exceedingly compressed, much of the cloud begins rotating in the same direction. The rotating cloud eventually flattens into a disk that gets thinner as it spins, kind of like a spinning clump of dough flattening into the shape of a pizza. These "circumstellar" or “protoplanetary” disks, as astronomers call them, are the birthplaces of planets. As a disk spins, the material within it travels around the star in the same direction. Eventually, the material in the disk will begin to stick together, somewhat like household dust sticking together to form dust bunnies. As these small clumps orbit within the disk, they sweep up surrounding material, growing bigger and bigger. The modest gravity of boulder-sized and larger chunks starts to pull in dust and other clumps. The bigger these conglomerates become, the more material they attract, and the bigger they get. Soon, the beginnings of planets — “planetesimals,” as they are called — are taking shape (ref www.hubblesite.org).

The Tree of Life

Genesis 2:8-9 "The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."

This sixth painting in the Genesis series depicts the creation of life. It shows the Tree of Life as an intelligent design, with knowing eyes looking out from all directions. The Tree is filled with fruits and friendly spirits protect the Life it represents. As we climb higher on the Tree, we become One with It. The female at the base of the Tree leans back, simultaneously grasping for the fruit as well as preparing to receive new life, symbolised by chromosomes that feed through the roots of the tree. The stag, deer and roe symbolise fertility and the new life that is yet to be. In the background, galaxies are created in a continuing process across the realms of the universe.

Proverbs 13:12 “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.”

Tree of Life

When scientists talk about the ‘tree of life’ they refer to the evolutionary path connecting all species to the original ancestor. The greatest genetic diversity is observed among bacteria indicating that these have had the longest period to form genetic mutations and therefore are among the oldest lifeforms on earth. By isolating common genes among bacteria, scientists have sought for clues on the genetic make-up of the common ancestor and thereby homing in on the constituents that have been responsible for the birth of life. There has been considerable effort to re-create the origin of life through lab experiments. In the end, how difficult would this be? We know from the evolution of the earth and from the latest science of fossils that life is likely to have occurred 3.5-3.7 billion years ago, while the earth itself was formed 4.5 billion years ago. By replicating the then prevailing elements and conditions in a lab, it should be possible to mimic the processes that caused life to be. If life was created by ‘accident’, the conditions for its occurrence should be reasonably robust. The fact that life exists, means that there needs to be a reasonable envelope of parameters for the building blocks of life to be created and assembled.

Yet, the balancing of the magic mixture has proven to be so delicate and complex, that scientists to date have not been able to artificially create a single living cell. Even if in the future a cell can be artificially generated, a key question remains whether this is really the same process that happened in those early days on earth? All the learning from artificial cell creation shows that the process of cell creation is incredibly complex, delicate and by inference a far cry from being robust. Rather than a more ad hoc approach of mixing ingredients and conditions, it has proven to require a high dose of intelligent input to finely balance the equations to generate cell life. Does this in itself not prove that life can only be created through an intelligent orchestrator?