In the latest installment of his ongoing series comparing Mormon doctrine to science, former LDS bishop and geneticist Dr. Simon Southerton brings on Cornell geochemist Bill White and Stated Clearly founder Jon Perry to hold what the Book of Abraham says about the cosmos up against what science actually knows about it, with John Dehlin and producer Gerardo Sumano moderating. Southerton opens by walking through Facsimile 2 of the Book of Abraham, the hypocephalus, and Joseph Smith’s own captions identifying God’s throne and other figures in the image, before handing things over to White for a guided tour of modern cosmology.
White covers the evidence for an expanding, and now accelerating, universe; how elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were forged inside stars and scattered by their deaths; how uneven distributions of matter after the Big Bang produced galaxies, black holes, and eventually planetary systems; and how the early Earth cooled and formed a solid crust within tens of millions of years. He dates the Earth using zircon crystals found in Western Australia at roughly 4.2 billion years old, and points to isotopically light carbon in 3.7-to-3.8-billion-year-old Greenland sediments as the oldest chemical trace of life. A video clip from Stated Clearly explains the RNA world hypothesis for how the first self-replicating molecules may have arisen, and White and Southerton close by discussing plate tectonics’ role in diversifying life and the search for planets and life beyond our own solar system. Throughout, the guests keep circling back to how these scientific timelines and mechanisms compare with Mormon scripture’s account of the earth’s creation and history, continuing threads from Southerton’s earlier episodes on Adam and Eve, the Creation, and Noah’s flood.
What’s covered
- 00:06:59 Mormon cosmology and the Book of Abraham overview
- 00:29:14 Book of Abraham facsimiles examined
- 00:45:22 The Big Bang and the expanding universe
- 00:56:00 Origins of elements and the age of stars
- 01:06:05 Galaxy formation and black holes
- 01:16:36 Formation of the solar system
- 01:31:57 Earth’s composition and early cooling
- 01:38:21 Origins of life and early Earth conditions
- 01:47:00 How life began on Earth
- 02:04:17 Video clip: the RNA world hypothesis
- 02:18:20 Early life, carbon isotopes, and first oxygen
- 02:28:44 Plate tectonics and continental drift
- 02:47:28 Planets beyond Earth and closing thoughts
Related episodes: The Creation – Mormon Doctrine vs. Science w/ Dr. Simon Southerton #01 | Ep. 1542 · Adam, Eve, and pre-Adamites – Mormon Doctrine vs. Science w/ Dr. Simon Southerton #02 | Ep. 1556 · Noah’s Flood w/ Dr. Simon Southerton | Ep. 1588
Episode Transcript
Host: John Dehlin · Co-host: Gerardo Sumano · Guests: Bill White, Jon Perry, Simon Southerton
This transcript is machine-generated and lightly edited for readability. The audio is authoritative. Please excuse occasional errors in names and spelling.
Introduction and Guest Backgrounds
Simon Southerton [00:00:00] Foreign.
John Dehlin [00:00:06] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is, is it June 2, is that right, Gerardo?
Gerardo Sumano [00:00:14] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:00:15] All right, it's June 2, 2022 and we are super excited to be continuing our series with Dr. Simon Southerton. He's former Mormon bishop and geneticist and he has been so gracious to, to be willing to participate in a multi episode series on Mormon doctrine versus science. We've covered, you know, Adam and Eve. We've covered Creation, Noah and the Flood. We've covered so many important topics and today is not going to disappoint. Today we are going to be talking about Mormon cosmology again with Dr. Simon Southerton. And we have with us of course, riding shotgun, Dr. Gerardo Sumano.
Simon Southerton [00:01:04] No, we'll see.
John Dehlin [00:01:06] Yeah, thanks.
Gerardo Sumano [00:01:07] We'll see one day.
John Dehlin [00:01:08] Thanks for joining us, Gerardo, and thanks for helping produce this.
Gerardo Sumano [00:01:10] Yeah, no problem.
John Dehlin [00:01:11] It's great to have you. Yeah. All right. And without any further ado, let's bring on our, our Additional co host, Dr. Simon Southerton along with a few special guests. So Simon, welcome back to Mormon Stories and welcome back to your series.
Simon Southerton [00:01:27] Thank you, John. I'm really pleased to be here. I'm very excited about today's episode. We're, we've got, I've brought in two scientists to support me today. Outstanding. We've got some outstanding guests who are joining us. First of all, Bill White. Welcome, Bill.
Bill White [00:01:47] Thank you. Glad to be here.
Simon Southerton [00:01:48] John and John Perry from the website stated clearly. I'm very excited to have them both here, both of you with us. I wanted just to give you a bit of around our two guests today. First of all, Bill is emeritus professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University.
Simon Southerton [00:02:09] And just this year he was given a very prestigious award by the European association of Geochemistry who the HC Urie Award. And they wrote a citation about Bill which I think is an outstanding citation. I just wanted to read that out to give you an idea of how outstanding it is as a scientist. So Bill White is a pioneer who shaped our understanding of chemical geodynamics of the deep Earth. He's made several fundamental contributions in many areas of geochemistry, but especially to our understanding of geochemical architecture of the mantle, the nature of crustal recycling in the mantle and the evolution of the mantle crust system.
Simon Southerton [00:02:51] Bill White is well known for authoring the two most widely used textbooks on geochemistry and isotope geochemistry. Through the generous sharing of his ideas, his influence goes far beyond his publications. And permeates all of geochemistry and earth science.
Simon Southerton [00:03:08] So it's fair to say that we've got an absolutely outstanding guest. Bill's welcome. It's really great. It's wonderful to have you here and thanks for your time. Our next guest is John Perry. Actually started out studying biology and illustration at byu, but he was so.
Simon Southerton [00:03:28] Some of the work that he'd done was so outstanding that it was. He was headhunted for a startup, so he left byu. And John is a science educator and he's the founder of Stated Clearly. It's a website and YouTube channel that produces animations. And we saw one of these animations earlier on in our podcast series on evolution, and it was amazing. And we're going to be showing one of John's animations today.
Simon Southerton [00:03:58] But these animations have been viewed, viewed by millions of people around the world and they're used a lot in classrooms and museums. So. So he began this project in 2012. I, I guess that was about the time you left byu.
Jon Perry [00:04:14] Yeah, yeah. As a little bit after. Yeah, A couple years after.
Simon Southerton [00:04:19] And, and you can go to his website and you can see that it's called what is DNA and how does it work? And it's, it is the best and most interesting description. Some really complicated material in science, but it is beautiful and, and DNA is such a. Certainly a molecule that I'm quite attracted to and it's been very important in my life. But yeah, John's an outstanding communicator and
Bill White [00:04:47] I knew about those animations back in the days when I was teaching about RNA World. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Simon Southerton [00:04:57] It's, it's, it's just the, it's brilliant the way extremely complicated things are very accurately described in such an entertaining way that pretty much anybody that's got any interest will be able to follow. And I think that's beautiful. I think it's John's work and the work of communicators like him is going to have a huge impact over the next few decades to bring to sort of break down these sort of barriers that ex. That have existed between academia and the, the general population. So, yeah, so anyway, it's great to have two very. I mean, we're very different. I mean, Bill's had an outstanding career, you know, very prestigious university and done outstanding science.
Simon Southerton [00:05:50] I've actually d. Dug into his academic record. He got a whole bunch of nature papers. These are very difficult to get papers into nature. He's got a paper entitled the Origin of Samoa. We might talk a bit about how Samoa came into existence later in the podcast.
Simon Southerton [00:06:09] But we're also going to talk about black holes. Just this year, they've discovered the black hole that exists in the Milky Way, our own galaxy, and it's just phenomenal and the sort of stuff that science is uncovering. So we'll talk about black holes. We're going to talk about some of the theories of how life emerged on the Earth.
Simon Southerton [00:06:33] But before we do that, we're going to dive straight into the doctrine. Okay. So we're going to spend a few minutes just talking about LDS doctrine that's related to events that took place leading up to the formation of the Earth. So basically, the science before, right up until the point until life emerged and then what, what are some of the, the things that scientists have learned that suggest how life may have emerged on the Earth, and then some of the signs of the earliest life on the Earth.
John Dehlin [00:07:08] So, Simon, I'm, I'm dying to ask Bill whether there's any chance the Earth's core is made of water, but I'm going to hold.
Simon Southerton [00:07:16] Oh, man, you're diving straight in. John,
John Dehlin [00:07:22] What are the odds the Earth's core is made of water? Is that in your presentation, Simon?
Simon Southerton [00:07:32] If you've read the show notes, obviously. Yeah, we're going to talk about, look, Phil's an absolute world leader on what the, the core and the mantle of the earth and the crust are made of and.
John Dehlin [00:07:45] Yeah, well, I don't want to steal your thunder, Simon, but Bill, we'll get to it. You're not getting away until you answer that question, Bill.
Bill White [00:07:54] I'm happy to tell you why, but let me tell you, it's zero chance.
John Dehlin [00:07:58] Okay?
Simon Southerton [00:07:59] Absolutely.
John Dehlin [00:07:59] We could end. We could end now.
Simon Southerton [00:08:02] Yeah. We'd be sitting on a bomb, I would imagine. All right, all right. So let's just dive into the science. And we were chatting before we went live about what's on the LDS website. If you move to that, the first slide, when you go onto the LDS website, all of the science articles are written by non scientists. I've got two examples on this first slide. And John, I might get you to John Dehlin, I might get you to read the first one there. And it's, it's an article by F. Kent Nielsen.
Mormon Doctrine and the Scientific Worldview
John Dehlin [00:08:42] Absolutely.
Simon Southerton [00:08:44] Written back in 1980.
John Dehlin [00:08:47] So this is science from the, the LDS Church's website. The article is called the website. It's called the Gospel and the Scientific View.
Simon Southerton [00:08:56] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:08:56] And the Mormon Church quotes Kent Nielsen, F. Kent Nielsen, saying God, quote, has the power to perform miracles to make what appears to Us to be temporary exceptions to the order of nature as we understand it, if it is his will to do so. Yeah, yeah.
Simon Southerton [00:09:17] And a similar sentiment if you go on. Perhaps John read the other one because they're sort of a similar, sort of an argument.
John Dehlin [00:09:23] So this is from the article the Flood and the Tower of Babel. This is Donald Perry, quote, because modern scientists observe geologic change to be relatively slow. Now many have naturally concluded that geological processes have always been slow. Yet uniformitarianism, a premise on which much of geologic science is based, is an idea, not a fact. All right, so what does that mean and why is that relevant?
Simon Southerton [00:09:55] Well, this, this is, this is what the current generation of Mormons are seeing on the LDS website. So the, it's, it's, there's nothing on the LDS website that the general membership is seeing that conflicts with young Earth creationism.
Simon Southerton [00:10:12] So it's basically Christian fundamentalism. And that's pretty much probably what you would have been exposed to, Bill, as a, a, a young member in the church. So it's pretty much anti evolution. And they interpret the, the Bible literally. So the earth is 6 or 7,000 years old. There was a global flood, Tower of Babel, all that sort of stuff. So, so in order to, to get around the challenges that scientists present, they're trying to con, they're basically given giving God free license to change the rules, change things up. So things that science tells us look like they took billions of years to take place, can all be jammed within a few thousand years.
Simon Southerton [00:11:03] So, you know, how do you speed up? Yeah, you might be able to move continents really, really quickly, but how do you change the rate of decay of isotopes which tell us how old rocks are and that sort of thing. So it's, yeah, it's a, it's basically
John Dehlin [00:11:21] orthodox Mormons don't like carbon, carbon dating. And so they, you know, don't like the, the ages and the dating that carbon dating tells us. And so they want to say that God's ways are higher than our ways and God can speed things up or slow things down as he needs to to make it so orthodox Mormon doctrine is still true.
Jon Perry [00:11:42] Basically get out of free jail. Get in a jail free card.
John Dehlin [00:11:46] Right, right, right.
Simon Southerton [00:11:48] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John Dehlin [00:11:49] Okay.
Simon Southerton [00:11:49] Yeah. But I should point out that everything
Bill White [00:11:53] that we've discussed, pretty perverse. God the foolish. And to think that geologic time was, and the decay of isotopes was, was could change. I, I just, that's, I think that's perverse.
Simon Southerton [00:12:11] I would agree. And there are geologists and life scientists at byu, right? Now, Bill, that agree with you entirely. So this is the double think that's going on in the Church right now. There are geologists, all of the, the most respected scientists of BYU pretty much accept all of the science we're talking about.
Simon Southerton [00:12:36] So there's just a complete disconnect between the Church's university, which is headed by the Prophet, and the. And what the, the brethren and the leaders are publishing on the. The Church's current website. So, so yeah, that's the sort of disconnect that I wanted to point out right in the beginning. But let's just, just dive straight into some of the, the doctrine that the Church has related to the, to the earth, our solar system in the universe. So the, the Earth is from the Doctrine Covenant 77, verse 6. This is where Joseph Smith held a question and answer session with basically with God and he'd been reading Revelations and he had a question.
Simon Southerton [00:13:27] So his question was, what are we to understand by the book which John saw, which was sealed on the back with seven seals, and this is the answer from God. We are to understand that it contains the revealed will, mysteries and the works of God, the hidden things of his economy concerning this earth during the 7,000 years of its continuance or its temporal existence.
Simon Southerton [00:13:49] And so many Mormons believe as a result of that, that the earth is 7,000 years old. Also, the teachings in the Bible concerning the creation of the Earth are repeated in the book of Moses, so in, in LDS scripture. And it confirms the, that the events in, in that took place during the creation of the Earth.
Simon Southerton [00:14:17] And I'm actually amazed that I had not noticed this in all my life in the church. But the earth and the planets were created on day three. The sun and the moon were created on day four.
John Dehlin [00:14:31] Oops.
Simon Southerton [00:14:34] The problem there, which I had never note, I, I just can't believe that I was in the church for so long and I didn't notice this problem. So the sun didn't exist before plants were created. So.
John Dehlin [00:14:49] Huh.
Simon Southerton [00:14:49] Anyway, it's funny what you learn when you sort of start, you know, really take.
John Dehlin [00:14:55] When you actually. It's, it's amazing what you learn when you actually read the Scriptures. Right. And pay attention.
Simon Southerton [00:15:00] Yeah. What were the plants surviving on? I don't know.
John Dehlin [00:15:05] Yeah.
Bill White [00:15:07] Contradict with Genesis. I mean, I think, you know, the first thing is let there be light. You assume that's the son of the stars, right?
Simon Southerton [00:15:13] Yeah, it, it does actually say let there be light on day one, I think. Yeah. But the fact that the sun is created after, after the light it's just, it's. Yeah, it's really puzzling.
John Dehlin [00:15:27] I mean, God is the. So maybe God was just standing there shining, and that's how the plants got there, you know, got the sun that they needed to do. Photosynthesis was just. God just kind of stood there and was their light source. Maybe. Maybe God sent Jesus to be the light source for the plants. Is that possible?
Gerardo Sumano [00:15:47] Probably what Mormons believe.
Simon Southerton [00:15:49] Okay, so another interesting little doctrine there that the earth revolves around the sun. This is really. This is actually revealed in Helaman, the Book of Mormon. And it's just sort of a throwaway line where he says, for surely it's the earth that moves around, that moveth and not the sun. So this is. This is actually Nephi, a prophet Nephi. Not the first Nephi, but. And a subsequent Nephi that made this statement. So he's basically 1500 years before Copernicus really, when everyone removed. Felt that the. The sun revolved around us. So I think that Joseph Smith might have been leaning on some of the science that he was aware of at the time. So we shift on to the next slide. There's a few other sort of cosmological doctrines that.
John Dehlin [00:16:43] Simon, can I just. What, really quickly. Just share one quick thing and I'm not gonna, you know, shame anybody or punch down, but there's a comment that just came in that I just want to share really quickly.
Simon Southerton [00:17:00] He basically.
John Dehlin [00:17:01] He basically says, I come in from lunch, sit down, and immediately what I get is this anti Mormon crap. That was the comment that one of our viewers or listeners made. And I just. I just want to say that this is just science and it's Mormon scripture. I don't think science is anti Mormon. I don't think the church would claim science is anti Mormon, and I don't think the Mormon Church would call its own scriptures anti Mormon. And that's literally. We haven't shared it. Right. So far.
Simon Southerton [00:17:33] We're fairly strict. In the first section when we talk about the doctrine, we're talking. We quote heavily from Scripture.
John Dehlin [00:17:40] Yeah, this is Randy Jordan and we
Simon Southerton [00:17:41] are quoting from the LDS website. Yeah, I don't. I'm not interested in quoting Mormon doctrine, which has now been. The church distances itself from Mormon doctrine. But I took. We focusing on the doctrine.
John Dehlin [00:17:57] Yeah, I just wanted to make sure.
Simon Southerton [00:17:59] So there are some other interesting. Yeah, there are other interesting doctrines that the. The church has. And we might just. We'll skip through these fairly quickly. There's worlds without number and there's a scripture in. In Moses. There it Actually refers to worlds in Hebrew.
Simon Southerton [00:18:20] So worlds as in there are additional worlds to this one is. Is hinted at in Hebrew in Hebrews in the Bible. But in the. In Moses, it refers to millions of earths like this that have been created and many have been destroyed. So there's this Mormon. The Mormons believe that they're.
Simon Southerton [00:18:42] They're being created and they pass away. It refers. Describes God's residence. He resides on a globe like a sea of glass and fire. Another doctrine that I've discovered is that it, and I think we're probably all familiar with this, that Mormons believe that matter is eternal. So in the Doctrine Covenants, it says for man is spirit, the elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fullness of joy. So there's some additional doctrines that the. That are fairly widely believed in the church, and there's some good references for those there.
John Dehlin [00:19:25] Some of those aren't so bad. Right. That there are worlds without end that would. That would be supported by this idea that there are infinite universes. So that's. That's a. A hit. Right? And also.
Simon Southerton [00:19:35] Yeah, I think that's probably a hit.
John Dehlin [00:19:37] And then also that matter is eternal. That's pretty cool, right?
Simon Southerton [00:19:41] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:19:42] His manners created nor destroyed. Right.
Simon Southerton [00:19:44] Yeah, I think there were quite a few. Certainly scientists by that time had a pretty good idea that matter couldn't be destroyed.
John Dehlin [00:19:52] Was Bob.
Simon Southerton [00:19:54] He may have borrowed that idea, but I don't know. We'll see.
Bill White [00:19:57] Yeah.
Simon Southerton [00:19:58] Bill. Sorry, Bill.
John Dehlin [00:19:59] Were you gonna say something? Bill?
Bill White [00:20:00] Well, it does turn out that you can turn matter into energy and energy into a matter that wasn't known in the 19th century. But the sum of the two do seem to be conserved.
Simon Southerton [00:20:11] Yes. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:20:14] Okay.
Jon Perry [00:20:15] I suppose another hit you can give to the theology is that God's goal seems to be reproduction. Right. In Mormon theology, he's making more gods, which put some square in there in the. That's what all biological life forms are doing. So maybe that. That's something you consider to be a hit.
John Dehlin [00:20:35] Yeah.
Simon Southerton [00:20:36] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:20:37] All right. Well, we're willing to acknowledge hits when. When the church gets them. Right.
Bill White [00:20:42] Right, Gerardo?
Gerardo Sumano [00:20:43] Sure.
John Dehlin [00:20:43] Yeah.
Gerardo Sumano [00:20:43] Bullseye.
John Dehlin [00:20:44] Good job. Joseph Smith.
Simon Southerton [00:20:48] Yeah. So if we move on to the next slide, we can talk about Kolob. So if you've been to the Book of Mormon musical and there's a slight correction that God doesn't actually live on Kolob. It's the nearest star to God's residence. It's also a. And. And all of the doctrine related to Kolob comes from the Book of Abraham. In fact, most of Mormon cosmological theology sort of stems from the Book of Abraham in, in particular. And also the, the facts facsimile too in the Book of Abraham. So Kolob is a governing star that's close to where God resides and it governs the Earth and similar planets. And the sun borrows its light from Kolob through the medium of K. Van Reschedule. So I don't know what that is, but that's, that's how it's spelled out in the. The Book of Abraham.
Mormon Cosmological Theology and the Book of Abraham
John Dehlin [00:21:55] Sounds fancy.
Simon Southerton [00:21:57] Yeah.
Gerardo Sumano [00:21:58] It's not a joke.
Bill White [00:21:59] I don't think so.
Simon Southerton [00:22:00] There's a. The reckoning. So according to Abraham, one day a revolution of Kolob is equivalent to 1000 years on Earth. So effectively 1. Yeah. So one year at Kolob would be equivalent to about roughly 365,000 years on Earth. And this particular part of Abraham, I found it very, very confusing because it talks about set time and the time of reckoning. And this goes on for quite a few verses in this chapter. And I, I just couldn't really figure out what it was all saying and I couldn't really find any sort of apologetics that really made an awful lot of sense from it. And it's, it's not talked about very much in the church, so I don't know exactly what those things mean.
John Dehlin [00:23:02] Really quickly, Simon, can you. Most Mormons aren't going to know what the word cosmology means. Can you just define what the word cosmology means? And then I have a follow up observation.
Simon Southerton [00:23:13] We've got an expert. Bill. Bill, you can perhaps define basically sort of astronomy, I guess
Bill White [00:23:22] I would say cosmology is the study of how the entire universe has evolved.
Simon Southerton [00:23:29] Yeah.
Bill White [00:23:29] And how we've gone from a singularity through multiple galaxies. So it's somewhat, you know, it's astronomy at the very, very large scale. It's the way I'd express it, you know, and incorporating everything about physics. Okay. And trying to understand the way the universe is based on what we know about physics into some sort of grand theory.
Simon Southerton [00:24:03] And I think it's, you know, it's fair to say that Joseph Smith really did. He was trying to grapple with these sorts of things when he had these revelations or was inspired, you know, by the facsimiles. And we're going to talk about a facsimile in a minute. But. So he was trying to get a sense of what's out there, this grand picture. And, and put it into doctrine to, to make sense of it.
John Dehlin [00:24:30] I'm gonna ask, Can I ask Bill a quick question? Simon? So, Bill, what does it mean? So one, what would it mean that that sort of an uneducated farm boy in the 1830s is naming the existence of a planet that happens to be God's residence?
John Dehlin [00:24:51] I'm not trying to be sarcastic and I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but I do. Let's just take Joseph Smith seriously for a second. Here's a, here's a uneducated, you know, you know, 20 something in the 1830s claiming that he's identified a planet called Kolob that is the nearest, I don't know, star to God's residence. And then it's a thousand times bigger than the Earth. And that one day on Kolob is a thousand years on Earth. Is there anything that you can observe or analyze from those sorts of claims? I'm not asking you to kind of validate it or even disprove it, but do you have any scientific observations about those claims?
Bill White [00:25:40] No, not really. But a thousand times the size of the Earth, it's still probably not big enough to be a star.
John Dehlin [00:25:47] Wow, that's interesting because I was gonna ask you how many times bigger is the sun in the Earth, But I didn't want to put you on the spot.
Bill White [00:25:55] Yeah, you know, it's, I, I forget, but the, the sun is more than a thousand times larger than, than the, than the Earth star. You got to have a lot of mass to make a star. You know, I just say, I mean, Christian and most theologies think heaven is somewhere up there. Would be specific. I, I, you know, it's not, I don't think there's any sort of specific scientific basis for, for that, but it's somehow consistent broadly with lots of religious theologies.
John Dehlin [00:26:36] Right.
Simon Southerton [00:26:37] How about.
Gerardo Sumano [00:26:37] Bill, I, I have another question. How about the idea that one day on Earth can be, or a thousand years on Earth can't count for 24 hours in another planet.
John Dehlin [00:26:50] Yeah. Do, do stars, do stars rotate around an axis like the Earth would?
Bill White [00:26:56] Absolutely. They rotate around their own axis. Absolutely. And, well, you, Mercury doesn't rotate at all. Okay. Because it's, it's in tidal lock with the, with the sun. So planets rotate at very different rates and they orbit stars at very different rates. So a day on any particular planet is not a day on another planet. Mars is, you know, the day is about an hour longer than on Earth. Also, the Earth is the moon's entitled lock with the, with the Earth. One side's always facing the Earth. So that basically that means it's day. It does in fact radio rotate such that it's always fasting the Earth. So it's days about a month long. Yeah, sure. Every planet's going to have a different length of a day.
Simon Southerton [00:27:52] Yeah.
Gerardo Sumano [00:27:53] Awesome.
Simon Southerton [00:27:53] But it's hard to comprehend how the Earth would be revolving around something that's way outside of our galaxy or that our sun is rotating again around something outside of our solar system.
Bill White [00:28:09] Well, the sun itself is orbits around the center of the galaxy. Okay. Not only do planets orbit around the sun, but stars orbit around the galactic center and groups of galaxies in gravitationally influence each other. Now, I'm not quite sure what degree they rotate around. I'm sure there's probably examples that they do. But we live in what's called a local group of galaxies and they gravitationally influence each other. So gravity governs all these motions.
Simon Southerton [00:28:51] Yeah. Oh, that's cool. I'd give that a little bit of a hit as well.
Gerardo Sumano [00:28:58] Yeah.
Simon Southerton [00:28:58] With his doctrine. All right, let's just move on to.
Gerardo Sumano [00:29:02] But it's not original to Book of Abraham because it's mentioned rotational period of
Bill White [00:29:08] the sun around the galaxy is something like, oh, I think it's a hundred thousand years, but I might. A hundred thousand years or is a hundred million? I can't remember. But it's very long. So.
Simon Southerton [00:29:17] Yeah. Okay, thank you.
John Dehlin [00:29:20] Thanks, Bill.
Book of Abraham Facsimiles and Hypocephalus
Simon Southerton [00:29:23] Okay, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the facsimiles. Now, facsimile 2 doesn't get an awful lot of attention. And on this slide we've got facsimile 2 from the book of Abraham. So this is a.
Simon Southerton [00:29:41] Claims to be a, an Image originally produced 2000 in 2000 BC. And I've highlighted some of the parts of this facsimile that Joseph Smith in the accompanying text. So in chapter three and also in the, in the footnotes for the, for this particular facsimile, I've highlighted some of the images that Joseph Smith identifies that are relevant to our discussion. First of all is God on his throne and the upper right hand side of the hypocephalus. So this is a, I should say up front, this is a hypocephalus. This is a, A, a sort of a fabric disc that has this image written drawn on it that is placed under the head of the deceased.
Simon Southerton [00:30:36] So hypo meaning under encephalous head. So this is placed under the head of the deceased. And there's several hundred of these that have been recovered. And so they're, they're inside the mummy. And so Joseph Smith obtained, when he purchased the, the Egyptian, the mummy and the papyri also purchased a hypercephalus.
Simon Southerton [00:31:02] And so this, in this image you can see there's God and sitting in his throne, there are two stars that are receiving light from Kolob. You've got Kolob in the center and then below it you've got the sun receiving light from Kolob. And then there's the earth with its four quarters.
Simon Southerton [00:31:22] Well, I did a bit of Googling and Gerardo, if you click the mouse again, the other side of the slide will open up and show you another hypercephalus. Yeah, and you can do this yourself. You can go online and look for other hypocephali, I guess that's what you call the plural.
Simon Southerton [00:31:43] And you can see all of this, virtually all of the same elements that are in facsimile 2 appearing in hypocephalus that have been, that are dated to between 3 and 400 years BC so in this one you can see in the top hand side, you can see all of the elements that I've highlighted in the facsimile two from the book of Abraham also appear in this hypercephalus that appears in the British Museum. And I want to attempt to pronounce that guy's name.
Simon Southerton [00:32:16] And this is what the real translation of these components are. So you've got the top right hand side is the sun God Ra. Then you've, in this element, you've got, in the British Museum hypercephalus, you've got baboons, four baboons that are adoring Ra, and it's the God Amun Ra in the center that there that the baboons are adoring.
Simon Southerton [00:32:40] Below Amun Ra, you've got the Hatha cow. And then to the left of the Hatha cow, you've got the four sons of Horus. Now these are the Canopic jars. And these actually appear in another one of the facsimiles in much larger detail.
Simon Southerton [00:32:58] And the Canopic jars, they carry the, they carry the, the lungs, the liver, the stomach, and the intestines of the person who's been buried. In this particular, in facsimile two, Joseph Smith interprets those as being the four quarters of the earth. In the other facsimile, I think it's facsimile one, but I could be wrong.
Bill White [00:33:25] Yeah.
Simon Southerton [00:33:25] One, they're the, the four jars are interpreted as different idolatrous Gods. So there's actually the same image in both of the facsimiles is interpreted differently. Yeah, so that's, that's the real translation on the right. And I was. I was just really fascinated. And so I. I decided to have just a little bit of a closer look at some of the elements in this. So if we go to the next slide, we have a text that accompanies the facsimile. And I've highlighted, I've expanded the hatha cow and the baboons that are adoring Ra.
Simon Southerton [00:34:10] And then in the text accompanying these, the facsimile, it says that the hatha cow is the Egyptians, is the sun. And it borrow its light from Kolob through this medium of K. Van Rash. And in the lower side there, the stars. So the baboons are represented by numbers 22 and 23.
Simon Southerton [00:34:35] And they're receiving light. So they're stars and they're receiving light from the revelation revolutions of Kolob. So it's just really interesting how Joseph is seeing these images and interpreting these images in this way. Excuse me. So I did a little bit of digging and I.
Simon Southerton [00:35:00] Into why baboons. I was quite interested in why baboons appear in the facsimiles. And it turns out that the. If we move on to the next slide is the Egyptians worship baboons because they were an exotic animal. Baboons don't naturally occur near Luxor where the.
Simon Southerton [00:35:29] Where the Egyptian, the major Egyptian civilization occurred and where most of the Egyptian mummies are found. And the reason that they worship the baboons is they. I mean, they're just such a striking animal. You can see the. The male Hamadryas baboon there on the right.
Simon Southerton [00:35:50] And that's the species of baboon that the Egyptians used to worship. And one of the reasons they used to worship them was because baboons are well known for sitting upright and watching the rising sun. So they warm themselves very early in the morning sun.
Simon Southerton [00:36:06] So in some ways they look like they're sort of a worshiping. They're worshiping the sun God Ra. And that's probably why they sort of began to deify them. In fact, they worshiped them for about 3,000 years. There are images of baboons in the Egyptian.
Simon Southerton [00:36:25] In Egyptian ruins. So. But scientists have even. And one. Sorry, they've even discovered why the baboons do that. And one of the reasons is these. This species of baboon eats a lot of grass. So it's got a lot of. It's Almost like a, a cow and that it eats a lot of grass. And, and in order to digest that, it needs the bacteria in its body to multiply. And by warming up in the morning, that helps to the bacteria in their stomachs to multiply so they can digest the plants better.
Simon Southerton [00:37:01] It's really fascinating, but scientists have also been able to. In this image you can see a mummified baboon. And they extracted strontium from the teeth of these baboons. And Bill will know all about this sort of science. And they were able to determine roughly where that baboon came from because the strontium in the teeth reflects the isotope ratios in the soil where that baboon was basically born or where it grew up in its early in its life.
Simon Southerton [00:37:43] Whereas the bones reflect the strontium levels in the surrounding area where the baboon live most, most of its life. So they were able to determine this baboon came from about, probably about 1,300 km away down on the, at the end of the reds at the bottom of the Red Sea.
Simon Southerton [00:38:02] So even sort of two and a half thousand to three thousand years ago, the Egyptians were trading extensively all the way along the Red Sea and they brought this baboon back and that's sort of how they got into the facsimiles, which I thought was really fascinating.
Gerardo Sumano [00:38:24] Yeah, certainly.
John Dehlin [00:38:26] And so if I, if I were to summarize, at least part of what you're saying is, is that Joseph Smith got these papyrus saw, these facsimiles and took a lot of, interpreted a lot of Egyptian symbols that we now know exactly what they mean and they have to do with, with Egyptian deity, with, with, with Egyptian funerary texts, you know, baboons symbolism, symbolism and symbology around death and, and Egyptian religious worship etc. And basically he interpreted it to be a bunch of celestial objects or beings or planetary phenomena that had, has no basis in reality, is that what you're saying?
Simon Southerton [00:39:18] Well, yeah, it's, it's just hard to imagine, you know, over such a long period of time. I mean the Egyptians have been worshiping burn for 3,000 years. Right. The hypocephalus is, were start. I think they weren't, they weren't produced over that length of time. But there was a, certainly it was a, it wasn't in Abraham's time when Hypercephalus were being produced. But they worship him and, and clearly yes, he's, he's, he's imagining this cosm, cosmology and you know, perhaps Mormons would argue that he's inspired by, to, to. By these images to come up with this cosmology. But, but yeah, our listener was very critical of us and, and calling us anti Mormons.
Simon Southerton [00:40:07] Well, you move on to the next slide. It's, it's. We're not alone. There are some very respectful scholars who would fall into the same category as, as us. And I think there's, there's really is quite a push now amongst scholars, earlier scholars, to distance themselves from the facsimiles, because the facsimiles are clearly not.
Simon Southerton [00:40:33] He just has. Anything that Joseph Smith identifies in the facsimiles is always incorrect. So there's a number of very powerful quotes here from, you know, Royal Scouse and Terrell Givens. Brian, how good all of these? Perhaps. I mean, John, do you want to. Do you want to read some of those out?
Gerardo Sumano [00:40:56] Yeah, this one is from Royal Skouson and this I think came from an email. Yeah, it says email.
Bill White [00:41:03] And where he.
Gerardo Sumano [00:41:04] Royal Scouston is a retired BYU professor and he said, I definitely do not hold a positive view of Joseph Smith's interpretation of the facsimiles. The facsimiles are shameful reproductions and have been so from the 140s when first published in the Times and Seasons.
John Dehlin [00:41:23] 1840s, yeah, 1840s, yep.
Gerardo Sumano [00:41:26] So basically denouncing the facsimiles, Terrell Given said in the case of the facsimiles, Smith was apparently wrong. And in the case of the Book of Abraham narrative, he may have been as well. And this was 2019 on their book. On his book with that he wrote with Brian Haglick on the pearl of great price, the pearl of greatest price. And then in 2018, we have Brian Hoglett, retired BYU professor, saying, I no longer agree with Guy or Muelstein. And for people who don't know, Guillem are both BYU professors who try to save Joseph's translations of the facsimiles. So how good is saying he doesn't agree with them anymore and find their apologetic scholarship on the Book of Abraham abhorrent?
John Dehlin [00:42:19] Yeah, that's kind of three strikes and
Simon Southerton [00:42:21] very, very, very strong language from three highly regarded scholars. Yeah. Brian Hagler's published books on the Book of Abraham under the. Under the BYU banner.
John Dehlin [00:42:40] Yeah. Brian was one of the leading Book of Abraham apologists for many, many years. But Tarot Givens is still at the Maxwell Institute as probably the Mormon Church number one apologist. He's saying he realizes the Book of Abraham is a false translation. And Royal Skousen, he's been really Important in. In studying the Book of Mormon, the printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon and analyzing the Book of Mormon text. So these are heavyweight Mormon scholar apologists acknowledging that. Joe, I've heard Terrell Givens has recommended removing the Book of Abraham from the Mormon scriptural canon. That's how much. That's how little Tarell Givens confidence he has in. In the Book of Abraham.
Simon Southerton [00:43:28] Yeah.
Gerardo Sumano [00:43:28] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:43:28] Anyway.
Simon Southerton [00:43:29] Yeah. And a common theme he's here is that these men retire. A couple of these have retired. So they're now safe to talk.
John Dehlin [00:43:39] Yeah, yeah.
Simon Southerton [00:43:41] And Terrell is now. Terrell's 65. And I think he's all safe now.
Bill White [00:43:46] Yeah.
Simon Southerton [00:43:48] Look, I think we've probably spent a little bit more time than I wanted to on. I want to get into the science. So let's just dive. Get out.
John Dehlin [00:43:57] You broke up for a second. Okay, Simon, you broke up for a second. Can you repeat that?
Simon Southerton [00:44:04] Yes. So let's move into the sign.
John Dehlin [00:44:08] Okay. All right.
Simon Southerton [00:44:13] So, yeah, we're going to get back to. This is where this is what I'm really most looking forward to is talking about science. And hopefully today we're going to talk about some things that, you know, we're just not. That are new to us and that we're really interesting. I'm absolutely sure with our guests that we're going to do to get into some new territory. But I thought I'd start with this Hubble ultra deep field image, which I think is just some of the most stunning stuff that's been photographed in the last. Just only in the last few years.
Audience Questions and the Expanding Universe
Simon Southerton [00:44:48] But I thought a good way to kick off would be, as I mentioned to you earlier, I. I put out a call for questions from post Mormons in several of the Facebook groups. And I wanted to ask some questions from.
Simon Southerton [00:45:05] Ask some of the questions that people proposed. So I'll ask this one to you, Bill. This is from Cody Stocks. How about laying out the evidence behind how we know there was a Big Bang? How do we know that the universe is expanding from a singular point and what empirical evidence show that shows that fact?
Bill White [00:45:30] First of all, we start with the fact that it appears that distant objects are receding away from us. So in that slide, you see these little red dots. Those are really, really distant galaxies. And the fact that they're red and not white means that they're receding away from us because the wavelengths of light are expanding. It's the Doppler effect that you can tell a train whistled. Whether the trains approaching or receding because the Frequency changes. And what's happening is the frequency is changing in those red spots because they're receding from us.
Bill White [00:46:17] They're getting further and further away. And so this was the initial idea that the Earth, excuse me, the universe is somehow expanding. And if you extrapolate back, you find that it all ends up in a singularity. So that was Hubble's work in maybe the 1930s, first introducing that idea of an expanding universe.
Bill White [00:46:43] Since then, we've learned a lot of things. And the high energy physics that people do in these accelerators like cern, where they crash particles together with enormous energies, begins to tell us things that might have actually happened. When you crunch the universe down into this tiny little singularity, if you want, it turns out that that works out pretty well with actually what we see. For example, you start out, once you crystallize matter from energy, what you start out producing is a whole lot of hydrogen and helium and a wee tad of lithium and Berlin. And that's what we see.
Bill White [00:47:32] So the physics sort of works here. And I'll tell you something else. You know, the question is, how do we know that the universe is 13.8 billion years old? When I first started teaching at Cornell, I was teaching that. Well, we don't really know. It's somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years.
Bill White [00:47:50] The 20 billion years came from the apparent age of the oldest stars, and the 10 billion years came from the Hubble constant, the rate at which things seem to be receding. And then these different astronomers sort of came together and realized, you know, tweaked their physics in each case, tweaked their observations and coalesced around this number. About 30.
Bill White [00:48:27] Stars. Well, it's about that. How long does it take to bring the universe back into a singularity? Well, it's about that. The other thing we have is this cosmic background radiation, which was discovered when a couple of radio engineers, or physicists from, I think it was Bell Labs started pointing their radio antennas around different directions and always heard the same buzz.
Bill White [00:48:51] It turns out this is the cosmic background radiation, which in fact was predicted by the Big Bang hypothesis. And what that was, the universe was so hot for the first, roughly 400,000 years that electromagnetic radiation, light couldn't penetrate it through it because everything was ionized. And so light would just strike an ionized particle.
Bill White [00:49:19] And, and that also, if you figure out. So that is now radio waves, but it used to be light. And so if you figure out how long it would have taken, what's the, you know, how, how long would it take and how much expansion you have to do to get that from light waves to radio waves. Well, that works out too. So we have a whole bunch of things that work out that you put together that sort of work with this Big Bang hypothesis.
Bill White [00:49:55] And it's an hypothesis, and the thing is that it explains a whole lot of things quite well, and nobody's figured out a better way to explain those things better. That's the way it is in science. You take, you take the hypothesis that explains the most things in the most simplest way, and that's what you accept. And you're always willing to wait and see if somebody comes along with a better idea. Yeah, well, we'll maybe accept that, but in the last, you know, nearly 100 years, nobody's come along with a better idea.
Simon Southerton [00:50:30] Yeah. So Bill, it's. So it's not just one line of evidence that is pointing to know, it's. It's several lines of evidence. So I hadn't heard that one about the radio waves, the light sort of the wavelength changing, and, and they can tell from the rate of the change of that wavelength, they can extrapolate back to that time point.
Bill White [00:50:53] Right. Yeah, right. And this background was predicted by the theory before it was discovered. That's always good sign for a theory that can actually predict new discoveries.
Simon Southerton [00:51:07] Yeah. So it's fair to say then that this, the age of the universe is just sort of widely, very widely accepted in the scientific community amongst experts, people who know enough to, to appreciate the science.
Bill White [00:51:24] Yeah, there's not much debate about it anymore.
Simon Southerton [00:51:27] Yeah, yeah.
Bill White [00:51:29] You know, there was a comment I saw this morning here too, that asked me, or asked specifically about the question of is the universe expanding at a speed greater than the speed of light? And the answer is no, not right now. If it were, we couldn't see anything. At least we couldn't see back to the earliest universe, but, but in the very earliest universe. And this is where, you know, things get kind of interesting. That is, in the first 10 to the 32, 10 to the minus 32 seconds. Okay. Unimaginably short amount of time, the universe went through something called inflation and did suddenly rapidly expand.
Bill White [00:52:16] Okay. And, and that's at a rate much, much greater than the speed of light. That was so early in the universe, there wasn't any matter anyway. And I'm not a cosmologist, I'm a geochemist. So the Big Bang theory gets only interesting once you start making matter from my perspective, and that's way before there was any matter. Matter only comes along after a Microsecond into the history of the universe, which is for these Cosmo Cosmopolitan, that's a long time because a lot of things were happening before the first Microsoft.
Simon Southerton [00:52:56] So thank you. In my reading I could find that there are some people that believe the big, the big bang was the beginning of and there was nothing before the big Bang. Do you, what's your sense, Bill? Is it is could there be more big bangs that are going to take place or you know, were there potentially big bangs before this one?
Bill White [00:53:18] Or there's a bunch of theories all over the place and, and you know, I, I, the answer is nobody really knows. I mean I, this is one of the great mysteries. Okay. So infinite time is for the human mind, or at least my mind, incomprehensible. On the other hand, if time is finite and there was a beginning, then what came before it? You know, either, either of those problems, you know, turns my head to spin and I really don't know the answer. And the fact of the matter is, while there are various ideas, the cosmologists and physicists don't know the answer to that either. But there's various ideas.
John Dehlin [00:53:58] Well, I mean if there's multiple universes, then, then clearly there were ones that existed prior to ours and there will be ones that exist after ours dissipate.
Bill White [00:54:12] Is that if, if you buy into the multiple universes, which is possible, but
John Dehlin [00:54:16] you know, well, that's not, science doesn't accept multiple universes as kind of an accepted consent, kind of a consensus agreement.
Bill White [00:54:25] I think it's debatable. You know, I don't know. Not sure there's a consensus either way. Okay, it could be but you know, we, we only have this universe that we're living in to deal with this at least for, for a down to earth person like me who actually deals. Okay. And isotopes, that's the only really one that matters. If there are other universes, we're not able to observe them, so. Oh, doesn't matter.
John Dehlin [00:54:51] So we've never observed outside our universe?
Bill White [00:54:54] No. Okay. No, I mean that, I mean there might be multiple ones, but we don't know about them.
John Dehlin [00:55:00] Got it. Didn't know that.
Simon Southerton [00:55:05] Before I forget, I want that image we were looking at of the gap of the, from the Hubble telescope. It's very easy to think that we're looking at stars there, but that's just galaxies. So there's not a single star there. That's, that's just entire galaxies. Whereas we look up in the sky, we don't see galaxies, we see stars. Yeah, I just. That's just something I just dawned on me for. I'm sure, Bill, you've known that for years, but. Yeah, and it just dawned on me.
The Big Bang and the Chemistry of the Early Universe
Simon Southerton [00:55:38] I'm interested in your comments about the chemistry of the universe, Bill. We've got a slide here that illustrates the periodic table at the right after the Big Bang, and then the periodic table that we're all familiar with underneath it, which is pretty much right now.
Simon Southerton [00:56:01] Perhaps, Gerardo, you can grab that slide. Move down. That's the one. Do you want to talk us through? This was really fascinating to me. So right at the Big Bang, there's only just a couple of. A handful of elements.
Simon Southerton [00:56:19] And now we've just got this incredibly incredible array of elements that have been formed. Do you want to take us through what sort of events have. Have caused that sort of massive explosion in the variety of elements that are. That are around us?
Bill White [00:56:39] Right, right. So at about. So according to the current cosmology, at about a microsecond after the Big Bang, that's really short time. Things had finally cooled to the point where you could start to get protons and neutrons. And a hydrogen, of course, is just a proton, or there's a hydrogen, two. There's a proton and a neutron. A helium is two protons plus one or two neutrons.
Bill White [00:57:10] Lithium is. Is three protons plus three or four neutrons. Beryllium is four protons plus five or ten neutrons, five or six neutrons. Anyway, so you start to get protons and neutrons, and, and. And then things cool enough so they can begin to associate and you can begin to make helium.
Bill White [00:57:40] But after about the universe was expanding so rapidly and cooling so rapidly that after about three minutes, it was not possible to sort of fuse these elements together anymore forth. So you're left with 99% hydrogen and helium and really only a very weak head of lithium and even less beryllium.
Bill White [00:58:01] Okay, so that's the early universe. Every other element in the periodic table was created in stores. And so right now, the sun is, of course, fusing hydrogen to produce helium. And over the entire history, You know, like, the sun hasn't changed the ratio of hydrogen to helium very much. What really gets interesting is when stars get geriatric, when they get old, when they convert. And the other thing to understand about a source, only in the very core, the very interior part of the store star, where this fusion's going on, where hydrogen is being fused together to form helium, eventually a star fuses all the hydrogen in that core to helium.
Bill White [00:59:00] Okay, now the other thing you have to understand now too, is that the stars have enormous gravity and they just want to collapse on themselves. And what's resisting that collapse is the energy created by that fusion. So once the stars created all the, transformed all that hydrogen into helium in its core, it's out of gas. So what happens is the core and gravity now wins. The core collapses. But what happens is the rest of the star expands into what we call a, a red giant.
Bill White [00:59:35] And that collapse then allows hydrogen, or, excuse me, helium, to be fused into carbon and oxygen. Now we're on our way. And by the way, lithium and beryllium aren't maiden stars. They're just skipped. They're actually consumed. So they're skipped. But then we start making carbon and oxygen. In the meantime, the outside of the star is swelled up. When this happens to our sun and other different 4 in 5 billion years, it will swell up to swallow the Earth.
Bill White [01:00:06] And then for a normal sized star like the sun, once it's converted its core into carbon, it's really out of gas. It'll never have the energy to produce higher fusion energy reactions. It will just dwindle away. It was what he called a white dwarf, just slowly cooling, pushing out energy.
Bill White [01:00:27] But it's, it's an ember for bigger stars. Once they've converted their, their cores into carbon, they collapse further and they create bigger and heavier and heavier elements up to iron. Okay. And for a store basically of a mass of about eight or more, once it's created its core, its core into, into iron, you can't produce energy by fusion anymore for heavier elements. It actually takes energy to make heavier elements. So what happens is now the star collapses and it rebounds and explodes in a supernova. And everything in the core is compressed into neutrons. And these neutrons spew out and are captured. And that's how you make the elements heavier than iron.
Bill White [01:01:22] So, you know, to make a planet like Earth, you needed stars to be around. Stars live through their lives and die. And one other thing to say about this is that about the lives of stars is that, you know, doctors tell us that obesity shortens life. Well, it's nothing like obesity shortens life in a storm.
Bill White [01:01:48] The smallest stars, which are about a tenth the size of the sun, basically can live the entire history of the universe. They'll live for many tens of billions of years. The Earth has a light, the sun has a life expectancy 9, 10 billion years.
Bill White [01:02:04] The biggest possible stars have life expectancies of a few million years. They quickly consume. And the reason for this is the, the pressure and temperature in their cores are such that the fusion reactions go very fast. They quickly consume and fuse everything into heavier elements until they run out of gas and explode as supernovae.
Bill White [01:02:28] And so there's a very clear correlation between the mass of a star, its life expectancy, how bright it is, and what color it is. Big stars are bright, they're hot, blue in color, and they're very short lived.
Simon Southerton [01:02:45] Yeah. I'm interested in how scientists are able to, by looking at stars, determine what the chemical composition of them of the stars is. I'm familiar with spectrophotometry in, in some of the labs that I worked in. I know if you're a, if a drug cheat, if you walk past somebody who's taken drugs, you know, Olympians, if you walk past somebody that's got drugs in them, they can detect extremely tiny amounts of chemicals. But I think it's. Is it the same sort of chemist technology that's used to determine the chemistry, the elements that are in these stars?
Bill White [01:03:27] Yeah, I think you had a slide there. And, you know, it's a question of elements. Elements absorb specific wavelengths of light and you can look at this absorption spectrum and see what elements are present in the, in the store. So, and, and you know, at least for this, how we know everything's mostly hydrogen, helium, we can even detect, you know, very minor elements in the spectroscopy. We can't detect very accurately what their abundances are though. For the most uncommon elements, for the least abundant elements, and trying to understand the composition of our solar system anyway, we rely on meteorites, certain classes of meteorites, but basically that's it. You see that dip? Those dips? That's the light being absorbed by specific elements. Okay.
Simon Southerton [01:04:30] In the hydrogen molecule.
Bill White [01:04:32] Okay. They're being excited, they're capturing the photons and, and not letting them pass through.
Simon Southerton [01:04:38] So let me know if I'm interpreting this right. So there's a couple of things you can learn from that curve. The, the position of the curve on the, on the wavelength spectrum. There's that sort of the, the peak there, does that tell you the age of the, of the star?
Bill White [01:04:57] Oh, no, that doesn't. Yeah. One other thing I should have added is that, is that you, you can. Stars grow brighter as they age. Okay. And this is because as they're converting hydrogen in their cores, the helium, the hydrogen is more dense. This allows them to collapse a little bit and diffusion reactions to run a little bit higher, so they actually run a little bit brighter with age mostly.
Bill White [01:05:33] You know, we look at the relationship, the theoretical expectation between mass and temperature and the age of stars. And we also know stars are kind of. They're not produced individually. They're produced in stellar nurseries. Okay? So we can look at groups of stars and look at the age distributions and basically tell how old that distribution of stars is. Because if it's an old distribution, all the big stars would have died away. So if you see a group of stars and they're all small, you know, that's a very old group.
Galaxy Formation and Black Holes
Simon Southerton [01:06:14] Okay, well, that's probably a good point to jump into talking about galaxies. So I'm interested in why galaxies form, which are basically large groups of billions of stars, I guess, aren't they? Most galaxies have got billions of stars or hundreds of millions of stars in them. So what is. Why is that the galaxies form?
Bill White [01:06:39] Well, when. When matter. When, you know, when the Big Bang happened, matter was distributed unevenly. Okay. And it means that there was more matter in some regions and more gravity. And so gravity just sort of began to pull things together. Now, there's some specific theories that I'm not that familiar with as to this heterogeneity and distribution of matter after the Big Bang, but basically, you get some constant concentration of matter, which is just hydrogen, helium, really, in certain areas, and that's greater gravity. And then they begin to pull things together, and you begin to form, you know, high concentrations of gas. And then you begin to find high content, you know, and.
Bill White [01:07:25] And high enough that things collapse to form stars. And. And you get a bunch of these, and you get a galaxy. So. So that's how they form. Oh, the other thing that relates to this, and there were questions on black holes, too.
Simon Southerton [01:07:44] How do you make a slide that we can put up there to help you perhaps talk through this?
Bill White [01:07:50] So we talked about how stars explode in supernovae if the star is big enough. And also as it evolves through its red giant phase, each of the. In that phase, they're throwing out enormous amount of gas and matter. And sometimes they throw enough away that they never will collapse into a supernova. But if you have a really big star and it survives this red giant phase, the star can collapse into a black hole.
Bill White [01:08:30] Light can't escape. And so that's the easiest way to make a black hole, is to have an extremely large star basically run out of glass, have its core collapse into density, matter of density so great that light can't escape.
Bill White [01:08:49] And, you know, it turns out that most galaxies seem to have black holes at their center. And these are really massive black holes. Not too massive to be created by a single star. But once you have a bunch of black holes, they can then attract each other and also pull in stars and they'll naturally grow over time.
Bill White [01:09:10] It turns out that the, the greatest concentration of matter is in the greatest concentration of light, as you can see in that slide, is in the galactic center. There's plenty of stars for these black holes to feed on, to pull in, rip apart, and become part of their, their, their black holes. But you can start this whole process by making one just with an exploding large star.
Simon Southerton [01:09:37] So it's fair to say that it's more. Is it more than likely that every galaxy has a black hole?
Bill White [01:09:44] Yes, that's the consensus among astronomers.
Simon Southerton [01:09:48] It's just that they haven't, haven't done the hard work of finding the black hole.
Bill White [01:09:53] They're very difficult to image. I mean, you know, we suspected for a long, long time there's a black hole at the center of the galaxy, of our galaxy, in a milky way. But this image is very recent. It's a radio image. You can't see it with light. There's just too much stuff in the way. Look at it with visible light. So there's, that's a whole bunch of radio astronomy images they've strung together, produce, I think.
Simon Southerton [01:10:21] So I think the, the original black hole photograph that we all saw a few years ago was a black hole that was like a billion times the size of this one was just massive compared to this.
Bill White [01:10:32] Oh, yeah.
Simon Southerton [01:10:32] Our own black holes. So it was easier to see.
Bill White [01:10:35] Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, there's billions of stars in the galaxy. So, you know, the fact that you have a billion. A black hole. Actually there's hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy. If I have a black hole, it's a billion stars or so. Billion solar masses. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Simon Southerton [01:10:53] This is fascinating. This image that we're showing here on the right. Is it like. It's only like about two weeks, three weeks or a month old? I think it's only when I, when a whole bunch of telescopes all over the world basically combined their power and then with some very sophisticated software, they were able to come up with this image. So this is very historic moment to find the black hole in our own galaxy. Yeah. So I, I don't. Is there a simple explanation for what a black hole is or where? I mean, it's drawing in all of this matter. Where does it go?
Bill White [01:11:39] Yeah, the, the explanation is, is, is that, you know, line goes back to Einstein. Light has, has mass and it. Light responds to Gravity. Photons respond to gravity. And you can have so much gravity that light simply can't. Can't escape.
Bill White [01:12:01] And what you see in that black hole is in the center. Nothing. That's because light's not coming out, but everything's really hot around it. Stuff is swirling around, being sucked into it. So the outside of the black hole is going to be pretty bright because of all the energy releases. Things are being sucked in. But once the matter gets in there, it can't escape. Well, sort of. Now, now you take this gets beyond my understanding, but at least according to Stephen Hawking, you know, there can be some evaporation of matter from a. From a black hole, but it's just. It's so much mass and so much gravity that light can't escape. That's a black hole.
Simon Southerton [01:12:44] Yeah. That's fascinating.
Bill White [01:12:51] And then they. They organize, you know, these, they organize the rotation of the galaxy around them. So that's where the center of mass, the Garrett Galaxy, is. And that's, you know, you can see the spiral arms, things rotating around the. Around the center.
Simon Southerton [01:13:09] I had a question there, but it's just popped out of my head. Anyone else got any questions about black holes?
John Dehlin [01:13:14] Well, I was gonna. I was gonna kind of make a semi joke. One. One of our. Our viewers said, okay, so. So doctor, you know, Dr. White, you know, where's Kolob? But I mean, for me, for me, like, listening to Bill White talk about our, the cosmology, our universe, it's so inspiring. Like, it's, it's not easy to follow, but it's deep and it's rich and it's profound and it's fascinating and it deserves so much respect.
John Dehlin [01:13:49] When I taught, when I asked Bill White about Kolob and Joseph's mistranslations of the Egyptian papyrus into the equivalent of religious psychobabble, you know, it's. It's disrespecting a discipline that is serious and profound and has had really important implications for all of us in this human existence. And so I just have to say it's silliness. It's, it's complete absurdity to compare the wisdom and the knowledge of Bill White with kind of Joseph Smith's rambling gibberish about things he knows really nothing about. But I'm sorry, I digress, but that.
Simon Southerton [01:14:34] Well, no, you've given me time to remember what I'd forgotten.
John Dehlin [01:14:37] Well, that was my question. Dr. Bill White,
Bill White [01:14:40] you didn't tell us.
John Dehlin [01:14:42] That was great, Bill White. But where's Kolob? I'm sorry.
Bill White [01:14:49] Oh, yeah. But, yeah, I'll tell you a couple of things about stars. You look up in the night sky, and those are all giant stars. The ones you see with your eyes are the really big ones and they're really rare. You don't see all the little stars, the stars that are smaller than the sun, they're not bright enough. Oh, you need a telescope to see them. You see them with a telescope. But those are all bright stars.
Bill White [01:15:16] Yeah. Right. So there's. And, and those are. The bright ones are a very small fraction of the total number of stars. And we talk about the sun being an average star. Not really. Two thirds of the stars in the galaxy are smaller than the Earth or maybe even more than that. And the Earth one solar mass. Stars can get up to maybe 10, 100 solar masses. So we're on the small end of the range. But on the other hand, we're bigger than most stars in terms of our sun.
Jon Perry [01:15:54] Yeah, the Earth's sun is bigger than most stars.
Bill White [01:15:58] Yes. Okay.
Simon Southerton [01:16:00] Okay.
Bill White [01:16:01] Most stars are little and they'll live practically forever.
Simon Southerton [01:16:08] Yeah, the, the thing that I'd forgotten was that and, and Bill mentioned this briefly that, you know, Einstein predicted this, so black holes, Einstein was smart enough to predict these things before that even observed them. Okay. So that's. These guys know what they're talking about. I mean, it's absolutely brilliant that the scientists can, based on all of the evidence, come up with and all the laws that they've discovered, can predict things that they should be seeing and then find these things.
Dark Energy and the Fate of the Universe
Bill White [01:16:46] There was another question that, that I noticed this morning that probably should be answered, and that is about whether the, you know, what's the ultimate fate of the universe? It's expanding now, but will it continue to. It turns out that the rate of expansion is actually increasing again. When I first started teaching 30 some years ago, we were wondering if gravity wouldn't slow it down. In particular, these numerous tiny particles called neutrinos, whether they were sufficiently massive to make the universe collapse on its own.
Bill White [01:17:30] So that was the thinking. It turns out that careful measurements show that actually the universe is. Expansion is accelerating. And it's, it's interesting because this is the dark energy hypothesis. And so. And the ultimate fate of the universe is to expand and expand and expand. And, and as it does, it will use up all, all the matter will be condensed into stars and will all be convert. Everything will be converted into either black holes or white dwarfs, like the fate of the sun. There'll be no more energy.
Bill White [01:18:14] The universe will be dead and that's you know, like a million years down the road. So it's not really we have to worry about it, but actually it. The rate of expansion is increasing.
Simon Southerton [01:18:27] Yeah. Move on and talk about the
Bill White [01:18:38] equation. Put in a what he calls a cosmological constant to ex account for an expanding universe. He called it a great mistake. Well, it turns out he was right by putting that in.
Simon Southerton [01:18:55] Okay, for those who are really interested in. Before we move on to talking about our solar system, for those who are interested in learning about black holes and anything astrophysics related, I can recommend Becky Smith's. Her Smith. Her Smith Hurst website. She's an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford and she has her own little YouTube channel. And she's just absolutely fantastic to listen to. Very enthusiastic and just a really great communicator. A lot like John Perry, really good at communicating very complex scientific stuff. So Harada will put the link to her website in the notes at the end of the. So let's move to our solar system. Bill, do you want to describe how the solar system came into existence? Okay. What it's composed of. Sort of how this, you know, we started this, the planet started coalescing around the sun, rotating around the sun.
Formation of the Solar System and Earth
Bill White [01:20:02] Right. So, so interesting to hear that story. Mars form in gas rich regions, one of which at least in the. If you're in the northern hemisphere and in the winter sky you can see Orion. The constellation Orion at night looks like a kite, but it's actually a saber. But I think of the tail and its kite. If you look down the second star down, it's fuzzy because it's not a star, it's a nebula. It's a region of dense gas where stars are forming. So you get these regions of dense gas and then that are sort of semi stable because the gas is turbulent and these sorts of things.
Bill White [01:20:45] But somehow the gas is a whole lot of gravity in here. So parts of the gas start to collapse in under themselves under gravity and, and as they do because there's, you know, this is spinning and, and random motion in the galaxy that begins this. The gas begins to spin, pulls itself tighter and tighter into a star and also with a. Basically you could think of it sort of as a ring, sort of like Saturn about it, except not really a ring. It's actually a disk of gas at that point. And we can see with Hubble Space Telescope looking into that Orion Nebula, you can actually see these stars being born, these regions with this gas disc and then in some cases a star just beginning to peek out, let it slide out through that dense disk of gas.
Bill White [01:21:51] And, and, and the inner parts of these, of this disk get very, very hot. And almost all the matter in this, in this spinning disk of gas gets ultimately pulled in to form the star, but not all of it. And the leftovers form planets.
Bill White [01:22:12] And in some cases, don't hold me to this. I think it's the star Beta Pictoris. We can actually see a planet. Looks like it's beginning to carve out a clearing in the disk. Probably a giant planet like Jupiter that's forming from the gas and the dust within this disk.
Bill White [01:22:35] And the inner parts of these disks are very hot because they're being compressed. As the gas is being pulled out, there's radiation from the new star starting to heat everything up too. So they're very hot. Planets in the inner part of these disks, like the Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, end up with not very much gas. Remember that everything in the universe is mostly hydrogen, helium, and then following that's oxygen and carbon, things that form gases.
Bill White [01:23:10] Inner planets don't get their share of these gases. So they're mostly rocky and iron. All four of the terrestrial planets consisted mostly of rock and iron. The outer ones, where things were cooler, you could get water ice to condense out around the orbit of Jupiter. That allowed those planets to grow more rapidly because the ice particles are basically dust. They're solid. They pull together the gas and you form these outer planets much earlier. So, so basically that's how it happens.
Jon Perry [01:23:51] I have a question about that. So the, the, the sun itself is mostly hydrogen and helium. Is that because those particles have less inertia, so they're able to collapse into the star while the other things get left behind? Or is the sun itself also made of the same stuff that Earth is, but also just a bunch of gas?
Bill White [01:24:09] Okay, so the reason is that hydrogen and helium don't condense very well. Okay. It's not a matter of momentum. The, the, the basic ingredients of everything in the solar system is the same. And, and it, the, the gas, the cloud and gas and dust that ultimately formed the solar system basically had the composition of the Sun. Because almost all the mass of the solar system could in the sun, it's just in the inner planets. Because these gases don't condense into solids. Things like hydrogen, helium, carbon is mostly carbon monoxide.
Bill White [01:24:49] Most of the oxygen, well, the oxygen actually does condense to form silicates, but nitrogen doesn't condense either. So we end up with not our share of these gaseous things, these elements and we're ended up with things like silicon and, you know, silicates and calcium, magnesium, all these iron, these heavier elements that like to form solids on the outer part of the solar system where things are cooler. Jupiter almost has the same composition of the Sun. It's a little richer in the Sun, It's a little richer in some of the heavier elements, but it's got almost its full share of the gas, the nebular gas that was warm. But the inner planets, we just got the things that condense at high temperature.
Jon Perry [01:25:40] That's interesting. And. And we're still leaking off helium and hydrogen that escapes, right?
Bill White [01:25:47] Yes, particularly helium hydrogen. Most of the hydrogen in the atmosphere is tied up as oxygen. Oxygen is waters. We don't leak much of that, but we are leaking helium, as it turns out. And Mars leaked most of its hydrogen and most of its water. We have enough gravity to hold on to most of it, but probably we may well have lost a lot of it in the inertial stage of Earth's formation when it was very hot, probably hot enough for the entire planet to be molten as it formed.
Simon Southerton [01:26:27] Right. So we've actually got a slide that shows just to sort of illustrate how composition is of the sun compared to just the Earth. But obviously there's a considerable difference in the chemical composition of all of the planets, going from the rocky ones out through to the gaseous giants or out further. It is remarkable, the chemical difference between the sun and the Earth, as you can see in that slide.
Bill White [01:26:57] Yeah. Most of what the Earth is in that little slot of the 1% of the sun, and that's the Earth's crust. If you took the whole composition of the Earth, you'd see a lot more magnesium and a lot more iron. But otherwise, in the iron being in the core. Right. Well, not only the core, but a lot of it.
Simon Southerton [01:27:22] Yeah. So that's where the water is.
John Dehlin [01:27:24] John, I was just gonna ask. I didn't see water, but that's the crust. So I want to see the. The chem. The. The breakdown of the core and see how much HTO H2O is down there in the core.
Bill White [01:27:38] I don't think anybody thinks there's much water in the core.
John Dehlin [01:27:41] Well, we know. We know a few tens of thousands of people that do, but that's another.
Bill White [01:27:45] How do we know that the core consists of wire? First of all, we know what the mass of the Earth is. This was discovered, oh, about in the late 1700s. And they calculated the mass of the Earth, so. And we know what its volume is. So we know what its density is, and it's pretty dense. It's about 5 grams per cc.
Bill White [01:28:14] Density of water is 1 gram per cc. And no matter how much you condense water, you're not going to get it up. You know, squeeze ice, you're not going to get up to that high density. The other thing we know is how that mass is distributed in the Earth. First of all, the.
Bill White [01:28:34] Density of the crams per cc. So you can't make an entire Earth out of material in the crust. It must be some more dense, greater dense stuff at depth. The other thing we know about the Earth is its moment of inertia.
Bill White [01:28:51] Okay? And basically the more mass you have concentrated in the outer part of a, of a spinning body, the greater its moment of inertia. Probably people who first invented wheels figured this out. It's better to have spokesperson and all the mass on the wheel on the outside than a solid wheel because it makes it more stable, because it's more angular momentum or in moment of inertia. Anyway, we know what the moment of inertia is. That's telling us mass is concentrated in the summer in the center of the Earth. We know what elements are available to make the Earth and that would have that density. When you get down to what's possible, what's available in this solar nebula to make stuff that's dense enough to make the interior of the Earth, turns out that you have to have a core that's about 90% iron, 5% nickel, and then a few percent of some lighter element.
Bill White [01:29:58] And there's lots of debate about what that is. We have quite figured that the light element out, but actually it could be hydrogen. But let me also say that, yes, there's no water in the core. It's just not going to have the density. But there's a lot of water in the mantle. Actually, there's probably at least an ocean's worth of water in the mantle.
Bill White [01:30:22] The problem is not that there's not that there's not water in the Earth's interior, but in terms of creating a flood, it's how do you get it out? Suddenly if when volcanoes erupt, the principal gas that's driving those explosive eruptions is water.
Bill White [01:30:41] There's plenty of water in the interior of the Earth. I mean, not enough to make things wet, but. And the water is present not as water molecules, but as hydrated minerals. So things like micas have water intrinsically in their structure. Clay minerals have water intrinsically in their structure. So the water is structurally contained within minerals in, in the Earth's interior.
Gerardo Sumano [01:31:08] Right.
Simon Southerton [01:31:09] Okay.
Gerardo Sumano [01:31:10] They answer your question, John.
John Dehlin [01:31:11] Okay,
Simon Southerton [01:31:14] I'm looking to move on now to. To looking at the. What you mentioned that the Earth was molten, likely to be molten in early history. Do you want to go through what science suggests has how the Earth shifted from the point where it was just first formed to a point where, you know, life emerged on the Earth? We. It's not too many million years after the Earth formed that there are signs of life on the Earth. So can you talk us through how the Earth shifted from a point where it was just a molten ball to when oceans started appearing and where that water might have come from, rain clouds, that sort of thing. When did those sort of events start occurring?
Bill White [01:32:06] Okay, well, it turns out to actually have cooled the Earth down to being pretty much solid, would not have taken all that long. Certainly you would have a solid crust within millions or tens of millions of years. So this is not a long time in geologic history.
Bill White [01:32:24] Now, it turns out that we, you know, we know very well, very accurately the age of the solar system is 4.567 billion years. We don't know the age of the Earth so accurately. We think it's probably maybe even 100 million years younger than that. That would be the maximum amount younger because we have nothing to date. Nothing survives from that time. The oldest thing we have are actually zircon minerals in rocks in Western Australia. And these go back to 4.2 or so, or even a little older, 4.2 billion years old. Zircons are like time capsules because they're rich in uranium, have hardly any lead, and uranium decays lead.
Bill White [01:33:12] So by measuring the amount of lead and its isotopic composition, we can date these things very accurately. Now, the other thing about these, about those, some of those zircons is there's some evidence that it looks like they might have crystallized in the presence of water, something about the trace element compositions.
Bill White [01:33:34] So that's the first evidence that maybe back even before 4 billion years old, maybe as old as 4.2 or 4.3, we began to have oceans present on the Earth. In terms of real solid evidence, we go back to about 3.8, 3.9 billion years. And there's sedimentary rocks that is composed of minerals that fell and settled out of water. So we have oceans at least, let's face it, more than 4 billion years ago.
Simon Southerton [01:34:06] Right. So sedimentary rocks are ones that have formed from the, I guess, the metamorphic or the igneous rocks that would have been present.
Bill White [01:34:16] Yeah.
Simon Southerton [01:34:16] In other words, water's Acted on those and eroded them. And then this formed another rock.
Bill White [01:34:20] Yeah. What happens is minerals, igneous rocks break down by, In. In the atmosphere between rain and, and, and, and other chemical reactions into, in a, say, clay minerals. These clay minerals then settle out to form, to form sedimentary rocks layer by layer. And so we. The first sedimentary rocks we know about are about 3.8, 3.9 billion years old.
Simon Southerton [01:34:49] Right. So there's definitely water by then.
Bill White [01:34:51] Yeah.
Simon Southerton [01:34:52] We've got a. You've provided me a lovely slide of a. I think it's a. It's a meteorite. Yeah. We might get you to talk through that slide, Bill. This is the oldest object. So this is something that's on the Earth, but it's older than the Earth, is that right?
Bill White [01:35:07] Yes, this is the media. The meteorite Yende that fell in, in Mexico in 1969. It's a carbonaceous chondrite kind of mineral. Now, it, it probably came from a small. It's a piece of a small asteroid, let's put it that way.
Bill White [01:35:27] But it's composed of a bunch of different things. You pointed out the chondrules. So these were once molten droplets. They're partly glass, they're partly crystallized, but they're droplets. The dust in the solar nebula at one point, places, at times and places got so hot that the dust melted into droplets. That's what those chondrules are. Now, you pointed out the calcium aluminum inclusions. These are even more interesting.
Bill White [01:35:58] These have the composition that if you take the composition of the solar nebula, which again is sort of the sun, you heat it up to the point where almost where basically everything evaporates, everything turns into a gas. It's so hot. And then you let it condense. You lower temperature and let things condense. What you get is the composition of calcium aluminum inclusions.
Bill White [01:36:26] So they match condensate from very high temperatures. And it turns out, because they're rich in uranium and poor in lead, because uranium is one of those elements that will condense at very high temperatures, but lead is not. It condenses very low temperatures. So you can date these things by uranium lead extremely accurately. And that's where we get that free 4.5678 number on the age of the universe. Everything else after that's a little older. The chondrules, a lot of the chondrules can be dated as well. They're a million or 2 million years older.
Bill White [01:37:08] By 2 million years, we begin to get evidence that there were already asteroids. Vesta may have formed as early as 2 million years after those. We call them CAIs, calcium aluminum inclusions. They're the oldest things we know about in this, in the solar system. And, and they're, they define, as far as we're concerned, time zero in solar system history.
Simon Southerton [01:37:34] And so the, the sun, sun is that age? Pretty much,
Bill White [01:37:40] yes. Yes. So I mean the, the, the, the nebula that began collapsing, man, that may have begun, you know, millions or maybe a couple million years before that. But the time when we, the first datable thing is that 4.567 at this point we already have some, some sort of proto sun, though admittedly we probably have a sun that's forming a proto sun by which I mean it hasn't reached the density to ignite nuclear fusion in its, in its core. It's giving off energy only because it's collapsing.
Jon Perry [01:38:21] That, that's really neat. So you're saying that the sun hadn't yet turned on when some of these meteorites would have been forming?
Bill White [01:38:30] Yeah.
Jon Perry [01:38:31] Wow, that's really cool.
Bill White [01:38:32] Yeah.
Jon Perry [01:38:34] What would that take
Bill White [01:38:38] in terms of nuclear fusion?
Gerardo Sumano [01:38:40] Right.
Bill White [01:38:41] But they still, and we see these stars and they're still shine in the sky because of the energy. They're the gravitational energy they're releasing from the, from, from their collapse. But it takes a few million years before the cores can collapse and actually ignite nuclear fusion.
Jon Perry [01:39:03] Okay.
Bill White [01:39:04] The other thing that's. I know there was another question about. That could be answered by that slide. This is a carbonaceous chondrite, has a lot of carbon in it. And among those carbon containing molecules are, although not necessarily in the case of this Allende, but particularly in the case of another meteorite merchants and which fell in Australia, and I figured it was 1959 or 1969, including amino acids.
Organic Molecules, Meteorites, and Early Earth Conditions
Bill White [01:39:42] Okay. And lots of other organic molecules, things we normally think of as being only possible to make through, through life. I just, you know, throw in this statement that amino acids are not so tricky to make. They consist of a carboxylic acid group and an amine group, which are sort of common kind of semi molecules, if you want.
Bill White [01:40:12] The trick is, and you guys know a lot more about this than I do, the trick is stringing those amino acids into, you know, into chains that make proteins. That's the real trick.
Simon Southerton [01:40:22] We've got a slot here, meteorites.
Bill White [01:40:25] We find the amino acids.
Simon Southerton [01:40:27] Yeah. Might get Gerardo to put up that slide of glycine. So this is a very common amino acid. We've all got heaps of glycine in us.
Bill White [01:40:36] Yeah. Glycine is the simplest Amino acid. And so that, that blue is a nitrogen. It's bound to two whites which are hydrogen. The blacks are carbon, the reds are oxygen. That's a pretty simple thing to make. So the fact that we find it in meteorites is not so astounding. But I should tell you one thing again and again. Simon and John know more about this than I do, but turns out that all the amino acids, and some not glycine, but most amino acids can be either left handed or right handed, depending how you orient them. But all the ones in life are left handed. In meteorites, some are left handed, some are right handed. Yeah.
Simon Southerton [01:41:21] Okay, so there was a, there's a critical point in, in the evolution of life when they went one direction. Yeah, we, I thought, oh, just to
Jon Perry [01:41:34] point out why this is so interesting for life, that it was once thought that amino acids, which are the building blocks of life, some of the building blocks of life, it was once thought that they could only be created by cells because cells have this complex metabolic that produces these. And we found that all sorts of amino acids can be found in meteorites. So they're, they're forming abiotically just in our solar system, as well as sugars and all sorts of things. And we'll probably talk about that more here in a little bit. But it, yeah, this was actually a prediction made by scientists that in the Miller Urea experiment that, oh, this, these things should be easier to produce and abiotically outside of biology than we previously thought. And then these things were found in meteorites. So it's a really nice example of prediction followed by observation.
Bill White [01:42:24] Yeah, the military experiment. Yuri is the guy for which my metal is named after. I would just point that out. I mean, he was a great scientist. Incredible what he did. Anyway.
Simon Southerton [01:42:38] Well, Bill, can you just, in a minute just describe what the Earth was like when. I mean, we've got a rough idea when life emerged on the Earth, which we can argue over 100, 500 million years or whatever. But what were the conditions like on the Earth at about the time that life emerged? And then we'll get. I'd like to invite John Perry to come in and talk about some of the ideas that scientists are tossing around about the earliest events that have taken place in, in that shift from being an abiotic world to a biotic world. So what was the Earth like? What were the conditions like?
Bill White [01:43:18] Okay, well, well, first of all, in terms of the surface of the Earth, we probably didn't have as much continental volume as we did. So there was a Lot more ocean and a lot less land. Oh,
Simon Southerton [01:43:34] You there?
Bill White [01:43:35] Somehow I lost. Can you hear me?
Simon Southerton [01:43:38] Yes.
Bill White [01:43:40] I lost video. I don't know why, but my screen's all black anyway. A lot less land. I'll just keep talking.
Simon Southerton [01:43:48] We can see you.
Gerardo Sumano [01:43:55] Actually, I think we might have lost. I think we lost him.
Simon Southerton [01:44:00] Yeah, I've just got a frozen, Frozen. Bill?
Gerardo Sumano [01:44:05] Yeah. Where do you want to go next, Simon? We can wait for him on the background if he comes back.
Simon Southerton [01:44:15] If it only takes a minute or so. I'd probably rather wait for him to come back in if. Can we do that? Yeah, I don't. Something's happening.
Gerardo Sumano [01:44:27] No, he just went black.
Simon Southerton [01:44:29] I know, I know. Bill is very interested in hearing John talk about some astrobiology.
Bill White [01:44:40] John Perry.
John Dehlin [01:44:41] You're muted. John Perry.
Jon Perry [01:44:44] Yeah, let's just talk about some of the things that he was, he was mentioning here because there's, there's, there's a ton of stuff that he went over. One of the things that's striking to me is how so when he was talking about what the Earth is made of.
Jon Perry [01:44:59] This is all pieced together by understanding physics, by understanding the density of different, you know, different types of atoms, different types of molecules, understanding how those would react under pressure. And it's a very complicated story that people have been debating about, testing, experimenting with for a long time to give us this model of what's inside the Earth and how that works. And there's a bunch of different, you know, subfields that are testing those ideas and double checking things. I mean, you have, there are, I don't even know what the field is called, but there's, there's a way when there's an earthquake that you can track how those vibrations are ricocheting off things inside the Earth.
Jon Perry [01:45:44] And that actually, that kind of gives you a way to image what's inside the planet. So you have a bunch of different stations around the Earth that are measuring these vibrations. And you can actually kind of get sonar of the Earth that way. And you've got people that are modeling this just from an understanding of physics and just crunching all the numbers and figuring out what, what, what, what do we know from the periodic table? What are the densities of these things?
Jon Perry [01:46:10] What must the core of the Earth be made of? And then, of course, we can test things that are spewing out of the Earth during volcanoes. And so it's this really cool combination of all these observations plus math and our understanding of physics, combined with all sorts of clever ways to, to double check ourselves.
Gerardo Sumano [01:46:29] Yeah.
Jon Perry [01:46:30] And the Way this works in science is everybody is motivated to publish papers and to make a name for themselves by discovering something interesting. And other people are motivated to argue with them if. If what they published has errors in it. And it's this beautiful mess, this ongoing fight really, in science that gives us these clearer and clearer images of something even that's invisible to us, like the center. What's in the center of the Earth. It's just an amazing process how that all works.
Simon Southerton [01:47:03] Right. Yeah.
Origins of Life and Early Evolution
Gerardo Sumano [01:47:06] Simon, where do you want to go next?
Simon Southerton [01:47:09] How. What are the chances of getting Bill back?
Gerardo Sumano [01:47:13] I don't. I don't think he's gonna. It's gonna happen. He's not. He's not on the back room anymore either.
Simon Southerton [01:47:20] Okay.
Jon Perry [01:47:20] I suppose we sent him a link to it when it's done, huh?
Simon Southerton [01:47:24] I think so. Okay. Yeah, look. Okay, so we. We got up to the point where the Earth is ready. The conditions. I was hoping that Bill was going to be able to tell us what, you know, what was the conditions in the atmosphere. There was no oxygen. Okay. You would have died instantly. And in the conditions back then. So we're talking about, you know, 4 billion years ago on the Earth. So it. So what science is now trying to do is to reproduce those conditions and using chemistry, try to come up with ways in which theories about how life could have emerged on the Earth. And this is where I'm really keen to. To bring John Perry into. To talk about, you know, how complicated this story is. I mean, the most. The simplest forms of life currently on the Earth are extremely complex.
Jon Perry [01:48:28] Yeah.
Simon Southerton [01:48:29] Aren't they? So it's a. It's very difficult to. To work back to something when you don't have terribly much evidence to work with.
Jon Perry [01:48:39] Yeah. Can we bring up the slides? Because those slides have the. I've got a model of a cell on there. So. Yeah, this. This cell here, this is Mycoplasma mycoides. This thing is one of the simplest organisms on the planet. This is an illustration by David Goodsell, and he does these amazing illustrations where he. He's. He's showing you all of the macromolecules.
Jon Perry [01:49:05] So, like water molecules and stuff he ignores. But so these. We're seeing the. The DNA is in yellow here, these yellow strings. You have the ribosome, which is the thing that translates genes into protein. Those are the globs in pink there. And then there's little. Little pink strings coming out of those globs. Those are going into those globs. Those are chains of rna.
Jon Perry [01:49:29] And so you Know, this is, this is one of the simplest organisms on our planet. Now you have, you have other things that a lot of people consider to be alive, like viruses and even viroids, which are far simpler than this. But they depend on a cell that's at least this complicated in order to reproduce.
Jon Perry [01:49:49] Kind of cheating to say that they represent truly simpler forms of life. I mean, this is basically as simple as we can go. This is an independent living organism. So the, the viruses cheat by hacking into these cells and exploiting their inner workings. So.
Simon Southerton [01:50:05] Yeah, so Covered Covet is not a. It's a cheating organism.
Jon Perry [01:50:09] Right, right.
Simon Southerton [01:50:10] It's not. It can't reproduce itself.
Jon Perry [01:50:12] Yeah, yeah. It needs, it needs us to, to reproduce. I suppose you could say we're, we're cheating too, because we, we have to eat stuff. We have to eat other organisms to survive. But plants, there are lots of plants that are, you could say, nearly fully independent because they're photosynthesizing. They do, they do need, like, nitrogen fixation, which they get from bacteria and so on, but that. The big mystery for the origin of life is how on earth did you get something this complex with all of these cooperating parts from the chaos, far more chaotic chemical reactions and so on that we see elsewhere in the solar system.
Jon Perry [01:50:51] And if you look at a cell, so far as we can tell, everything it's just a chemical system. Everything is physics and chemistry just interacting in a very specific way. But it's physics and chemistry. Well, how do you get the more chaotic physics of the universe that we see elsewhere and to form something this insanely complicated? And if we can zoom in on the slide there, again, I just kind of list some of the complexity here. So even the simple, even simple modern cells are far too complex to have come about by chance or just through the normal processes of physics and chemistry. They possess and maintain hundreds of essential genes.
Jon Perry [01:51:34] An essential gene is one where, if you knock it out, the whole cell will die. They control thousands of distinct chemical reactions in their metabolism. They're actively controlling those chemical reactions. They sense, and they respond appropriately to many environmental cues. They build and depend on complex proteins and ribozymes. These are molecular machines, and they use the genetic code. We go to the next slide.
Jon Perry [01:52:01] We do know of two hypothetical processes that are capable of generating complexity like this. So an engineer or a team of engineers could hypothetically produce something like this. It's never happened yet, actually. We've, we've been able to reproduce cells from scratch, but we haven't been able to, like, design them on our own from the bottom up and get them working.
Jon Perry [01:52:26] And then the other process is evolution by natural selection. On the next slide, I kind of dive into what that is. So Darwinian evolution or evolution by natural selection is you need something that can replicate and you need something that can have variation when it replicates, and that variation needs to be heritable. So replication plus heritable variation plus selection equals open ended Darwinian evolution.
Jon Perry [01:52:55] You know, I think you guys talked about this in one of your earlier podcasts, so I want, I don't want to go too much over this again, but the, the process of evolution can generate incredible complexity. The problem is in order for evolution to get going, you need something that can replicate with heritable variation. And I've simplified things a little bit here in order to get open ended Darwinian evolution, the amount of variation that you have per generation or per replication, there's kind of a sweet spot. And that sweet spot depends on how complex the replicator is. So if it's a really complex replicator, if you get too much variation, the thing can completely break.
Jon Perry [01:53:36] If there's too much variation in each generation, each replication event, the simpler it is, the more variation it can withstand. But, so there's some complications here, but essentially we need to start, our starting point has to be a replicator with heritable variation that can then be acted upon by natural selection. Once you get that, you can get Darwinian evolution to spiral out of control and create all sorts of complex things like cells and eventually people that have podcasts and so on. But yeah, it starts out you need a replicator to start with. So on the next slide, the, the ultimate goal in origin of life research.
Jon Perry [01:54:21] This is the white whale that everyone's after. We want, we want to be able to find the simplest possible chemical systems that are capable of open ended evolution. And how simple do those systems need to be? They need to be so simple that we could consider them to be prebiotically plausible that they could have gotten kickstarted on the early Earth without any other sort of guiding thing. Right.
Jon Perry [01:54:51] We talked about amino acids being simple enough to be produced in meteorites. We're finding them in meteorites. We're also finding all sorts of sugars and nucleobases, other building blocks of life that we used to think were so complex that only cells could build them. We're finding those in meteorites. And there are, there's a, a new little field of, of physics that's budding right now. I'm not sure that'll actually take off. But it's called assembly theory. Assembly theory is where people are trying to look at the complexity of a molecule or a system and determine how likely that is to, to pop, to pop up by chance, how likely it is to be generated in a specific environmental condition.
Jon Perry [01:55:37] And you know, the, the systems that most scientists are studying right now for the origin of life appear to be still, they're a lot simpler than modern cells, but they're still a little bit too complex to, to say like, like we figured it out. So there still is quite a bit of mystery on how life originated. But there are two main candidates that I'm going to show on the next slide.
Jon Perry [01:56:08] We have cyclical reactions or protometabolism. So these are, these are reactions that are similar to what we find inside of cells. So you've got molecule A that interacts with molecule B to produce molecule C. And then molecule C turns around produce and interacts with molecule B to produce molecule A. So you have this cyclical reaction where the molecules are cooperating to build each other.
Jon Perry [01:56:34] There are many examples of these types of reactions that are prebiotically plausible. And one of the ideas being investigated and you know, some people think this is a really promising line of research, others are more doubtful. But is some suspect that you could actually get these metabolic reactions to undergo a form of Darwinian evolution and eventually give rise to open ended evolution?
Jon Perry [01:57:05] The other big, most promising candidates are polymers. And this is a lot of researchers in the field have been studying polymers. Polymers are chain like molecules. So we saw that amino acid earlier. It was that, that, that one fairly simple molecule. Well a bunch of those can be linked together into a chain, what we call a polymer. And you can have different types of amino acids linked into a chain. And, and that polymer can do all sorts of complicated things.
Jon Perry [01:57:36] RNA is another chain like molecule. It's, it's made of little building blocks that we call nucleotides. And there are four different types of nucleotides in modern RNA. There are four different types of nucleotates as well in modern DNA. In the past there might have been more types of nucleotides that were in these, these polymers. But this is a very promising field or direction of research. These are, polymers are very promising for candidates as the first replicators because they can do really, really amazing things. And so we do have an animation to watch, but it looks like Bill is back on. So he's back online. Ah, hello.
Simon Southerton [01:58:26] Oh, brilliant.
Bill White [01:58:28] Apologies. Battery went in. I should have had before this thing started. Okay, so I'll just. So what were things like. Here's the most important thing. There was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Look at our neighbors, Venus, Mars, both atmospheres at 90% CO2, 10% nitrogen. That's what the Earth's atmosphere would have been like.
Bill White [01:58:56] Okay? And another important ingredient in the atmosphere, although a trace gas even then, was probably methane. I mentioned earlier that suns grow brighter as they age, just like people would. So here's the thing. When the Earth formed, the sun was like 30% less bright than it is today.
Bill White [01:59:24] In the absence of anything else, the Earth would have been frozen. So that Greater amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the amount of methane produced enough greenhouse effect to keep temperatures above freezing. So we had liquid water at least 3.8, 3.9 billion years ago because we had a big greenhouse effect. Lots of CO2 in the atmosphere, probably some methane, no oxygen.
Bill White [01:59:58] Oxygen in the atmosphere is completely and totally due to photosynthesis to life. Right? So early life comes along before there's oxygen and it's. But before we get. It's not until all those hints of oxygen Whiffs Going back 3 billion years and more, it's not until about 2.4 billion years ago that the atmosphere becomes oxidizing.
Bill White [02:00:35] Real significant amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. And there's lots of evidence of that. Just one example, when we look at paleosols, that means ancient soils older than 2.4 billion years old, they have no iron paleo soils. Now, you can think of a red red soil. Old soils are red. That's because the iron is in its oxidized state and is insoluble. It doesn't wash out of the soil. It's the last thing that comes out of a soil. Just about that and the aluminum in reduced state in the absence of oxygen, iron is soluble.
Bill White [02:01:18] And so it would have washed out of those ancient Archean soils. Another very interesting thing about this time, about 2.4 billion years ago, we see these things called banded iron formations. Okay, they're huge in some cases. Well, some, there's small ones. But some of them around, particularly around 2 point billion years ago, are huge layers of alternating, basically silica or quartz and iron oxides.
Bill White [02:01:51] And they actually. These things actually supply most of the iron that society now is uses. One of the very biggest is the Hammersley deposit in Australia. The way we think these things happen was photosynthesis was happening in the surface water of the ocean.
Bill White [02:02:11] So organisms had evolved to produce photosynthesis. So we had oxygen in the surface water in the ocean. But the deep water, there still was no oxygen. The deep water would upwell near coast, come to the surface, and the iron would be oxidized and precipitate out. And they're banded. We think probably because this was a sort of seasonal thing, just a seasonal upwelling occurs in the modern ocean. Lots of evidence that the Earth, that life made the atmosphere oxidizing. The other interesting thing about this time, about 2.4 billion years ago, is there was a giant climate crash.
Bill White [02:02:54] Okay. What may have been a snowball. Earth, the Earth entirely frozen. The surface of the ocean almost entirely frozen over. And there's another event like that about 600 million years ago. And we think what probably happened was we begin to get enough oxygen in the atmosphere that all the methane is oxidized, or most of it anyway, and that reduces the greenhouse effect, and things just get cold and ice and ice over. So oxygen, life all closely tied together. The Earth is the way it is today, mainly because of life.
Simon Southerton [02:03:38] Yeah, Bill, while you were offline, we. We had sort of lost hope. We didn't think we were going to get you back, so we carried on. And we're just about to show the.
Bill White [02:03:50] The video of John for a while before you guys.
Simon Southerton [02:03:56] Yeah, what we'll do is we'll show the video and then we'll talk a little bit about it, and then we may go back. If you've got questions for John about the, you know, some of the ideas about how life first emerged, but, Gerardo, you can click get that video. That'd be great.
Gerardo Sumano [02:04:13] The video is about seven minutes. Simon, do we want to play the whole thing?
Simon Southerton [02:04:18] Yeah, I think. I think so. Okay.
The RNA World Hypothesis Explained
▶ Video Clip 1Video Clip 1 [02:04:26] Stated clearly presents what is the RNA world hypothesis? If you were to go back in time 120 million years, you'd find yourself in a dinosaur world. 500 million years ago was a world of trilobites and other strange sea creatures. 8.4 billion years ago was the world of the first living cells. And if you were to go back further still, scientists suspect that chains of a chemical called rna, or something similar to rna, kickstarted this entire beautiful mess
Video Clip 1 [02:05:01] that we call life.
Video Clip 1 [02:05:05] RNA is thought to have given rise to life for several reasons. Chains of RNA are found abundantly in all living cells today. RNA is a close chemical cousin to DNA. And with very little help from researchers, RNA chains can replicate, evolve, and interact with their environments.
Video Clip 1 [02:05:23] While many details have yet to be worked out, the RNA world hypothesis is the simple idea that somewhere on our early planet, perhaps in a tide pool or hot spring, The Earth's chemistry was producing random chains of rna. Once formed, they began replicating, evolving and competing with each other for survival. As these chains evolved and diversified, some eventually began cooperating to produce the genetic code, a wide array of complex proteins and even living cells, which, from the perspective of rna, can actually be thought of as houses or survival machines for RNA to live inside.
Video Clip 1 [02:06:00] To understand how RNA chains can interact with their environments, replicate and evolve, we first need to understand the simple process of base pairing. Chains of RNA are made of nucleotides, small molecules that come in four different types, labeled A, C, U and G. The backbone atoms of a nucleotide, shown here as a yellow bar, can form strong chemical bonds with the backbone atoms of any other RNA nucleotide.
Video Clip 1 [02:06:27] This means that different chains can have completely different sequences. From left to right, the parts we call the bases of nucleotides, the colored sections labeled A, C, U or G, are attracted to other bases, sort of like a magnet, but they're selective about who they will stick to. G selectively pairs with C, A selectively pairs with U. When bases find their matches and stick together, we call it base pairing.
Video Clip 1 [02:06:54] Researchers have found that with a little bit of assistance, base pairing allows chains of RNA to replicate and evolve. Here's how it works. When a long chain of RNA is suspended in cool water with high concentrations of free nucleotides, the chain can act as a template for its own replication. Nucleotides automatically base pair with their partners on the existing chain if their backbone atoms form chemical bonds with each other. And by the way, this is the part that currently requires assistance from researchers. We're not yet sure how this would have happened in the wild. A complementary RNA strand is born, one with the exact inverse sequence of the original.
Video Clip 1 [02:07:30] If the water is then heated, paired bases lose their grip, allowing both chains to act as templates when the cycle repeats. The great thing about this process is that every other RNA chain produced is a copy of the original. But sometimes mutations slip in.
Video Clip 1 [02:07:47] This means that as chains compete for survival and reproduction, true evolution descent with modification acted upon by selection can operate on chains of rna. As amazing as replication is, base pairing also gives RNA chains a second special ability. When placed in water cool enough for base pairing, but without enough free nucleotides for replication, chains will fold up and base pair with themselves.
Video Clip 1 [02:08:14] The end result is a complex shape with certain sticky bases pointing outward. Because they weren't able to find partners. These sticky outward facing bases can cause unique chemical reactions by interacting with other molecules in their environment. A folded chain of RNA capable of guiding a specific chemical reaction is what we call a ribozyme.
Video Clip 1 [02:08:36] Some ribozymes break certain molecules apart. Others join certain molecules together. A ribozyme's specific function is determined by its specific shape, and its shape is determined by its sequence. If a mutation changes a ribozyme sequence, the shape can be modified, and so can its function.
Video Clip 1 [02:08:55] When ribozymes were first discovered, scientists wondered how difficult it would be for random chains of RNA to evolve legitimate survival functions. Imagine, for example, a ribozyme that could build nucleotides out of molecules it finds in its environment. Across multiple generations, natural selection could promote and refine this ribozyme because the chain would tend to have access to more free nucleotides than its rivals, allowing it to replicate more often.
Video Clip 1 [02:09:21] To explore this idea, researchers at Simon Fraser University produced a large group of random RNA chains and examined them to see if any happened to be able to make nucleotides. Surprisingly, some actually could, but they weren't very efficient. Researchers selected out the successful chains and then used a lab technique called PCR to quickly replicate them with slight random mutations.
Video Clip 1 [02:09:45] After just 10 rounds of PCR followed by selection, highly efficient nucleotide building ribozymes evolved. These are molecules with a lifelike ability to actively participate in their own survival. These ribozymes and many others produced through similar experiments are beginning to blur the line between living things and simple chemistry.
Video Clip 1 [02:10:09] So to sum things up, the RNA world hypothesis is the simple idea that the first things to replicate and evolve on our planet may have been chains of RNA or something similar to them. While the basic idea of the RNA world does seem to give us a promising pathway to the origin of life, it's still very much a work in progress.
Video Clip 1 [02:10:28] As mentioned, one of several unsolved problems is how did nature get backbone binding to function without the special enzymes or lab techniques we use today? While many researchers continue to focus on rna, others are investigating alternative molecules, chemical systems that might replicate and evolve without assistance and could have given rise to rna. Continual breakthroughs are being found in both avenues of research. Hi, I'm John Perry, and that's the RNA world hypothesis stated clearly.
Video Clip 1 [02:11:04] This video is funded by the center
Video Clip 1 [02:11:05] for Chemical Evolution, the National Science foundation and NASA.
Jon Perry [02:11:10] Though we do receive grants from time to time, we don't need to listen to the credits. Ok. Financial contributions from viewers like you to support us. Yeah. All right, so that's. Simon, you're muted, but I think you have a question.
Gerardo Sumano [02:11:30] There we go, Simon.
Simon Southerton [02:11:31] Okay, I'm unmuted now. Yeah, no, it's good to see that you're supported by such respectable institutions as NASA. And so. Yeah, that's, that's beautiful. I, but you do make a very important, important point. Science has certainly not figured it all out. There's a, It's a huge puzzle and we're only getting little bits of pieces of that puzzle being resolved step by step.
Jon Perry [02:11:56] Pretty neat pieces. I mean, that the things that that RNA can do is. It's spectacular that it's so capable. You had, had in your slides, you, you, you listed a couple of papers that are really interesting. We actually have found that chains of rna, when they're evolving, they can actually evolve the ability to cooperate with each other. And this is, this just happens automatically. You get these things replicating, you throw problems at them so that it's hard for them to replicate. And because they're this process of Darwinian evolution, it's a very, it's, it's, it's very similar to learning these molecules essentially learn how to deal with the struggles that are, that are put in their environments.
Jon Perry [02:12:40] And there's, We've, we have these experiments now showing that they'll actually end up forming alliances with other types of chains of rna, other lineages of, of RNA chains to solve these complex problems. It's so interesting that all you have to do is put a replicator, feed it, you know, what it needs to replicate, and it will start evolving and solving actual problems. It's super fascinating. But.
Simon Southerton [02:13:09] Yeah. Without knowing.
Jon Perry [02:13:11] Right, right. It has no, has no.
Simon Southerton [02:13:13] Without being conscious. And that's what virtually all of evolution is, is. There's no, nothing consciously driving it. It's just survival of the thing that works.
Jon Perry [02:13:23] Right.
Simon Southerton [02:13:24] The best. Yeah. So it's really interesting how there's that, you know, in that video you show the capacity to replicate and then. Capacity? The. Well, I don't know if you call it capacity, but the fact that every now and then mistakes appear in the sequence which generates the variation, and then you have selection that occurs on it. But yeah, I pulled out just from the last couple of years, some research papers that are pulling that are looking at this, all of the different elements that would be required for this, for the RNA hypothesis to have occurred, including the fact that as we've talked about earlier, there's, you know, if you create the conditions of the early world, the RNA sort of pops into the, into existence.
Jon Perry [02:14:17] Yeah.
Simon Southerton [02:14:18] So it's, yeah, it, it.
Jon Perry [02:14:21] We do get rna, so we find, we find RNA bases. Remember, the bases are the parts that pair with each other and then we find the RNA sugars. We find all of that in meteorites. All of that is there. The catch is that it's in extremely, extremely low concentrations. So that whatever the chemical reactions were that were producing those, they were also producing tons of garbage. Well, garbage in our case because we're interested in rna. This is called the TAR paradox and origin of life research.
Jon Perry [02:14:49] And so you either need to find a different reaction than the ones we've been studying so far, or you need to find some sort of natural sorting mechanism that pulls RNA out of that, that mess. So there's, this is what I say when I say there's a lot of. It's still very much a work in progress.
Jon Perry [02:15:07] I, in that video I talked about the RNA world hypothesis. I said RNA or something similar to rna. Some people in the field, like you'll read papers where they say the RNA world hypothesis is dead or that's been, you know, we've moved past it. What they're talking about is they're talking about how that they're not using strict RNA or not RNA only.
Jon Perry [02:15:34] So the way that I've defined the RNA world hypothesis would actually include what, what they're doing. So you'll see like the RNA peptide world hypothesis where you're, you're mixing amino acids with RNA and some other types of molecules. But the, it still is, I mean the basics of the RNA world that that RNA was, or something very similar to it was the first thing to reach true Darwinian evolution that is still very much alive. And it's a very fruitful field, fruitful line of research right now it seems
Simon Southerton [02:16:13] to me, it just seems so compelling because obviously rna, DNA and protein or amino acids are, are in every living organism.
Jon Perry [02:16:23] Right.
Simon Southerton [02:16:25] It's just central. So that seems to be obviously a very intuitively, a very good place to start.
Jon Perry [02:16:30] Yeah, especially I mean the, we're basing that on modern life. And of course the first life forms could have been dramatically different and gave rise to things like DNA and RNA and protein. So there is that problem. So it's very good that we, we still do have researchers that are just going on wild goose chases basically just looking at completely different sets of chemistry. But the, we can approach this from, from two ways. We can approach it from what sorts of chemical reactions happen abundantly in the types of environments that that Dr. White was talking about.
Jon Perry [02:17:12] So that's like the, you know, the ground up way to look at the origin of life. The other way is to look at modern cells today and Try and simplify them as much as possible and see if we can get those two, this, those two sides to reach each other in the middle and actually get a model that works start to finish completely in a prebiotically plausible scenario. And that's, that's really what we're looking for.
Simon Southerton [02:17:38] Probably many, many, many years away from figuring that out, I'd imagine.
Jon Perry [02:17:43] Yeah, it's hard to say.
Bill White [02:17:44] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Simon Southerton [02:17:46] Well, I should say that you've got a few, you've got a couple of other YouTube clips, I think, that deal with the metabolism and a few other RNA videos that folks can encourage them to go to your website stated clearly to have a look at those. But let's move on now to Bill. Unless you have any more comments or questions for John. Let's talk about what we do actually know for certain about life. And that is when the first life appeared. Well, the first clear evidence of life on the Earth. And that's okay.
Bill White [02:18:29] Yeah. The first evidence of life is not really fossils at all, but rather it's, let's call it isotopically light carbon found in sedimentary rocks that are roughly 3.7 to 3.8 billion years old in Greenland. These are these oldest sediments and they, and, and, and they have this signature of life, of isotopically light carbon. Maybe you can throw up the slide on carbon isotopes. I can talk a bit about further down, Gerardo.
Simon Southerton [02:19:14] It's slide 37.
Bill White [02:19:18] It's basically two versions of, of two stable versions of the carbon atom. Both have six proteins, protons, but one seven neutrons, the other has. The other has six. It turns out that the heavier carbon, the one with the seven neutrons, form stronger bonds.
Bill White [02:19:44] And so when photosynthesis happens that it's the carbon 12, the light version that tends to be the bond between carbon and oxygen and CO2 is easier to break. So that's what life does. I like to think about this as trees are lazy. They have a choice between, you know, making organic molecules out of carbon 12, that's easy because the bonds are weak, or make it out of carbon 13. That's harder because the bonds are stronger. So obviously they do the easy job. Well, it turns out this carbon in these 3.8 billion years old is about 2, 2.5% richer in carbon 12 than typical carbon. And the only way we can figure this out, the only good explanation for the only way anybody's convincingly explained it, is because it was produced by life, either chemosynthesis or photosynthesis.
Bill White [02:20:50] So that, and that discovery was made 25 years ago or so. And it's been debated, but. And nobody's come up with a better idea than life. I mean there's, you know, alternative ideas. Just have not. Nobody's been able to knock down the idea that this was life.
Simon Southerton [02:21:09] Yeah. So these obviously weren't trees. These were the very, very earliest organisms that could photosynthesize.
Bill White [02:21:17] Absolutely, absolutely. They're, they're unicellular. Probably something vaguely vague familiar to cyanobacteria. Whether they're even that advanced, we don't know. But they were, they were doing photosynthesis or chemosynthesis. They were making organic matter out of CO2, which is the basic thing that life does, you know.
Simon Southerton [02:21:40] Yeah.
Bill White [02:21:41] Plant life does. And without plant life, the rest of us would start. Right. So.
Simon Southerton [02:21:48] And then that's fascinating because I've always thought, you know, the, I haven't really thought about isotopes being, being able to use isotopes to determine the earliest forms of life. You know, we always just tend to think about fossils. But you're saying that the. So I guess one question I have is there's carbon 12 and carbon 13. They're both stable forms of carbon.
Bill White [02:22:14] Yes.
Simon Southerton [02:22:15] Are they, is it. Does there the proportion like. It's like 99 is carbon 12 and 1% is carbon 13. Is, is that ratio in. Go right back to in the stars when the carbon is formed and then they're just stable from then on.
Bill White [02:22:33] But it does vary. You know, we can actually measure this ratio in, in stars approximately spectroscopically and different stars have different ratios. But this ratio is about the same within a few percent in our solar system. Okay. It does very. That organic matter in Murchison, that's heavy. It's about 4% richer in carbon 13. So you know, that wasn't made by life. I mean at least that would not be consistent with being made by life. But yeah, within a. Because these so called fractionations because they're chemically slightly different, several percent variation in our solar system. You go to other stars and there's bigger variations depending on the nucleosynthetic processes that are the nuclear reactions going on in stars. But yeah, it's pretty much fixed by what's happening. And carbon, carbon 14 is radioactive. That's created by cosmic rays in the atmosphere.
Simon Southerton [02:23:37] That's, that's, that's quite different.
Bill White [02:23:39] That's quite different. You know, it's a half life, 6,000 years that carbon 14 is not relevant to this, this discussion.
Simon Southerton [02:23:47] Yeah, yeah. So carbon 13 is not radioactive in. It's not Decaying to anything. It's a very stable molecule of carbon. Yeah.
Bill White [02:23:57] Stable, yes.
Simon Southerton [02:23:59] Yeah. Oh cool. Because I mean it's, it's almost. Well, it makes sense that there was life on the Earth 3.9 billion years ago because it's not long and much later, like 3.5 billion years ago, that we have very widely accepted evidence of life. And that's in the fossils. And I think they're in Western Australia, in the Pilbara. I think. Yes, that'll be. I think. Yeah. Where those earliest. So all, pretty much all the scientific community agrees that these are life forms. I read, I did a bit of reading. And they've actually drilled into the fossils and been able to extract carbon from that layer where. Which has been laid down. And, and I suspect they probably looked at the carbon 12, carbon 13 ratios of those.
Bill White [02:24:54] Yeah.
Simon Southerton [02:24:54] Bill,
Bill White [02:24:57] by the way, stromatolites, we have modern analogies of them. They're very distinctive in their wavy form and this also is quite light carbon in them. It's like 3% lighter than what we have in the oceans. That's a dead giveaway. But this. And produced by photosynthesis or chemotherapists, probably photosynthesis. These stromatolites build up in very shallow water bays like Shark Bay in Western Australia. They're built by cyanobacteria, which are. People also call them blue green algae. They're not algae, they're bacteria, but they do photosynthesis. And the modern ones are produced by the cyanobacteria.
Simon Southerton [02:25:41] Yeah, cool.
Jon Perry [02:25:43] Yeah, we don't, we don't know that the original ones or the old, you know, multi billion year old ones were doing photosynthesis, but we don't know that
Bill White [02:25:54] they were doing photosynthesis or chemosynthesis. But yeah, 3.5. We had. There might have been whiffs of oxygen, but it's still pretty much not much oxygen in the atmosphere back then.
Simon Southerton [02:26:06] Yeah, yeah.
Jon Perry [02:26:08] It's really interesting to note that even, even that far back in time, living organisms had to deal with their neighbors and they were likely evolving to cope with, with each other and probably evolving forms of cooperation. So very, very long, long ago. But we didn't get multi celled animals for billions of years later. So it's.
Simon Southerton [02:26:27] Yeah, it was, it was. Right. You could go back to that slide that we looked at previously, the geological. We can talk about some of the events. So it's 31. 31.
John Dehlin [02:26:42] What's the title, Simon?
Simon Southerton [02:26:45] Geological Evidence of Life on Earth.
Gerardo Sumano [02:26:47] That one.
Bill White [02:26:49] Right, yeah.
Simon Southerton [02:26:52] So, yeah, we're starting. So we've been talking about the isotopic evidence, which. 3.9 billion years. Yeah. Earlier you talked a little bit about rising oxygen levels, Bill, and that seems to have occurred because of cyanobacteria, is that right?
Oxygen, Plate Tectonics, and the Evolution of Life
Bill White [02:27:14] Yes. Yeah. So true. Algae does the slide shows. They don't come along till about 1.7 billion years. That's the earliest so called. So one distinction between bacteria and you and I, we're eukaryotes, they're prokaryotes. We actually have a nucleus, the nuclear matter inside a membrane. Bacteria don't.
Bill White [02:27:42] So up until, you know, about 2 billion years, 1.7 billion years ago, the world's totally dominated by bacteria and their cousins, the archaea. But there are bacteria that do photosynthesis and there are ones that do chemosynthesis. And so those are really the ones that produced the first oxygen in the atmosphere. It was a bacterial world. And even these, you know, we get to 1.7, we're still talking about mostly unicellular organisms. Oh, the other thing I should say is, well, show another slide is. So there's this pulse of oxygen around, of around 2.4 billion years ago, but not enough to support you and I. So it's still talking about lower amounts of oxygen than in the modern world. Modern amounts of oxygen don't come along until forests come along, which is much longer down the road.
Simon Southerton [02:28:47] Yeah. All right. I'm, I'm keen to hear you talk about tectonic plate tectonics, Bill, because I think you've done an awful lot of research in that field. I was reading that the, the emergence of plate tectonics had a quite a significant influence on the evolution of life on the Earth because it created. Is it true that it created a lot more niches for evolution to occur when you started getting the separation of the continents?
Bill White [02:29:23] Yes. Well, so there's, first of all, there's no debate about whether plate tectonics happens in the Earth and we understand how and why it happens. There's a lot of debate about when it began, actually. Interestingly so some people think it began, you know, almost right away from four, four and a half billion years ago. Other things maybe not till two and a half billion years ago.
Bill White [02:29:48] Maybe there was some sort of other convection. Plate tectonics is a result of convection in the Earth's interior. And that is a result of the Earth trying to lose its heat. Hot inside, hot material rises up, cold material sinks down. This drives the movement of plates. Maybe there was some other convective style earlier in the Earth, the really important thing about plate tectonics and early on in Earth's history, when there's only microscopic life, is it provides nutrients, particularly phosphorus. You need to have erosion.
Bill White [02:30:32] You need to have weathering and erosion that delivers things like phosphorus to the ocean where life is, or wherever else it was, it was in these pools as well. And you know, and in order to have erosion, you need to have uplift. And the way most uplift works today is by plates colliding together. And, you know, things get pushed up or by volcano, which builds high mountains, then they get rotted down by water.
Bill White [02:31:02] Phosphorus and other nutrients, including, for example, iron. All the other things that life needs get washed into the ocean that supports life. Once you flatten out the surface of the Earth and you don't have any erosion anymore, the organisms in the ocean use up all the nutrients, all falls to the bottom, gets buried in sediment, you don't have any life anymore. So you got to have tickets, chronic activity to have to continue to have life. Oh, and we think too, I should say that this may have played a particularly important role in when we get these increases in atmospheric oxygen.
Bill White [02:31:45] We think that was somehow related to plate tectonics and feeding a lot of phosphorus into the ocean, allowing a lot of, a lot of photosynthesis and, and, and a lot of production of oxygen. So. So plate tectonics in that sense plays into that important role. Yeah, and the other thing is, you know, is how much shallow ocean you have, as opposed to deep ocean. Shallow ocean provides niches for organisms that want to attach themselves to the, to the bottom, but yet be have sunlight.
Bill White [02:32:26] So, yes, in the sense of creating niches. And if you get too much shallow ocean, in some cases, maybe you can have too much photosynthesis. One of the ideas about climate crises, you get too much photosynthesis, you create a lot of oxygen, but you pull all the CO2 out of the air. Not all of it, a lot of it. And you don't have a greenhouse effect and things freeze over.
Simon Southerton [02:32:53] We do actually have a slide that shows that illustrates tech plate tectonic. Just two. Yeah, you got that one, that one. The next slide, the next slide. It shows the sort of how it sort of happens. Right? I mean, you talked a little bit about this, but can you sort of just describe the major driving force there of plate tectonics?
Gerardo Sumano [02:33:21] Bill?
Bill White [02:33:22] Okay, so this illustrates an ocean plate being pushed down under a continental plate. And this happens because the ocean plate is basically denser. It's made of denser rock and Forms at mid ocean ridges, but then it cools and it cools, it's relatively dense rock and eventually gets so dense that it just sinks back into the mantle because it's cold. And as it's pushed down, what happens is that, oh, the other thing that happens to this ocean crust is it reacts with water and you form these water bearing minerals because it's pushed down, as it subducts into, into the mantle, the pressure causes these water bearing minerals
Jon Perry [02:34:12] to
Bill White [02:34:14] break down, release their water. That water then migrates into what we call the mantle wedge, the region in the overlying plate. And one thing, if you have hot rock, you have rock hot enough, if you add water to it, it'll melt. So adding water to that hot rock in the overlying plate causes it to melt. And that's what causes these volcanic island arcs like you know, Tonga and the Aleutians and South America, Caribbean. Is that, is that water being added in the mantle beneath is causing that rock to melt and producing, producing these volcanoes?
Simon Southerton [02:35:03] Okay, I have some good friends who live in Hawaii and shout out to Ryan and Elaine, I'm really fascinated to hear you talk about. Is, is Hawaii sort of the same sort of thing going on? There is a, what's the, what's driving the formation of the Hawaiian Islands?
Bill White [02:35:27] Okay, well this is, yeah, this is where that sort of thing is actually. Where it, I think it's different, isn't it? Yeah, it is different. Okay, so Hawaii is, I think you had a slide you might want to bring up. Hawaii is a product of what we call a mantle plume.
Simon Southerton [02:35:44] The next slide illustrates the mantle plume. This is straight off my phone. Okay. So anyone that's listening who's interested can go into Google Earth or Google Maps, zoom in on Hawaii, select the satellite view and you'll be able to see what we're talking about. That's a copy straight off the Google Maps. Yeah.
Bill White [02:36:06] What's relevant here is a chain of volcanoes. Okay. And the active ones are all in the southeast end. As you go to the North American west, the volcanoes get older. Eventually they sink beneath the sea and we've only got seamounts left. You can ask, why do they sink beneath the sea? Well, first of all, they get eroded, but second of all, they cool and they contract. Okay. So they actually are slowly but surely sinking because they're contracting.
Bill White [02:36:38] But so this idea, so how do you form these chains of volcanoes? It turns out that direction from the youngest volcanoes, the old dead ones, is the direction the Pacific plate is moving. So the first idea was it's moving over a hot spot.
Bill White [02:36:59] And then the question is, why is there a hot spot there? It's a melting spot. The plate is moving over a melting spot. Well, how do you get, you got a convecting mantle, how do you get a stationary melting spot?
Bill White [02:37:12] That's where this idea of a mantle plume came along. We have a column of hot rock rising and eventually now it's pretty clear we can image these things seismically. They're rising from the base of the mantle all the way down from the core mantle boundary, which is about 300 km, 3,000 km.
Bill White [02:37:34] So there's this column of rock, it's probably 100 km wide. It's solid all the way, it's not liquid. So this is solid state convection. It's solid, it's rising because it's hot. It gets to within 100, 200 km of the surface and starts to melt, producing volcanoes.
Bill White [02:37:54] So when I was a graduate student, this idea was new and highly controversial. In the last decade now, as I said, we've been able to actually image seismically these hot columns of rock that are these mantle plumes and they explain a whole bunch of different observations. Among other things that I'm involved in is that some of what my work's been is these, these, they're quite distinctive in their, in their compositions, these metal plume related volcanoes, quite distinctive in their compositions, quite distinctive in their, in their isotopic compositions.
Bill White [02:38:44] And sort of what my contribution was on this was to sort of figure out that they're distinctive because they contain stuff that was once at the surface of the earth and subducted all the way to the, back to the bottom of the mantle. It's coming back up in these, in these, in these mantle plumes. That was a highly controversial idea as well.
Simon Southerton [02:39:11] So you're saying you're a fairly controversial scientist.
Bill White [02:39:17] I mean, we've, in the mean. I mean. Yeah, so that was, I wrote a paper in 1982 about that and yeah, it wasn't. Well, it's just, you know, one more crazy idea. But it's turned out over the past, you know, four decades or so. It's just absolute clear evidence, mostly coming from isotopes that places like Hawaii. Hawaii?
Simon Southerton [02:39:43] Yeah.
Bill White [02:39:44] The rock that's melting has been way into the deep mantle, but it has stuff that was once at the surface of the Earth.
Simon Southerton [02:39:57] Can I, can I ask a question about that image of Hawaii there? It looks like there's a, there's a clear line going up to the left and then a kink, it goes north. Is that where the Continental plates have sort of the direction shifted slightly. Is that what's going on there?
Bill White [02:40:15] Clear line? I can't see it all that well. That clear line is the Emperor Seamount chain. Okay, so that chain of volcanoes goes well beyond. Yes, okay. Yeah, I can see it well beyond. Up into that corner, the kink where the illusions end and Kamchatka begins. And that's making a. Those are subduction zones. That's where the Pacific plate is going down. That kink is there. The Hawaiian mantle plume is creating thicker crust that doesn't want to go down. Okay. So it's just putting an indentation in the subduction zone where the Pacific Plate is sinking down into the back end of the mantle. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's what that is. So that, that and that's like. That's a good 60 million years. Is it even older? The oldest volcanoes in that chain. So that plume's been there stationary more or less for that long.
Simon Southerton [02:41:25] Yeah, for how is that, how long is that? Is that hundreds of millions of years or.
Bill White [02:41:32] We don't know when the Hawaiian plume started because chain ends up in a subduction zone. But I think the oldest volcanoes there right up in the corner are 60 million years old. We have another chain in the Indian Ocean where the active volcano is Reunion, which is like Kilauea, one of the more active oceans volcanoes on the planet. We can step back also to,
Jon Perry [02:42:02] to
Bill White [02:42:02] about 65 million years ago to what's called a flood basalt or plateau basalts. In India, the decant flood basalts were an enormous amount of. I mean there's this huge pile of volcanic rock. Enormous amounts of basalt float out. Think that was the starting point for this, for that particular Reunion mantle plume. So we think these things start with. You can sort of imagine big bulbous head that it needs to have the buoyancy to fight its way up through the mantle and then followed by a more or less thin column. So why is a thin column Reunion? Is volcanism a thin column? But that a can trap 65 million years ago would have been this big bulbous head getting to the surface and producing this enormous pulse of volcanism. And there's other examples of that too.
Mormon Doctrine on Earth's Division and Closing Thoughts
Simon Southerton [02:43:02] Yeah, I, at this point I might just sort of interrupt that to talk about, go back and talk about some doctrine that's actually some beliefs that are quite widely held in the church and that is that the continents were only became divided after the flood.
Simon Southerton [02:43:21] And these are reference, these are scriptural references that are taken from the, the earliest website, the Doctrine covenants says that the earth shall be so this is the second coming of that the earth shall be like as it was in the days before it was divided.
Simon Southerton [02:43:38] And there's a footnote there on the word divided which takes the reader to Genesis where it talks about the days of Peleg, where this is, I think he's the grandson of Noah. So it was in the days of Peleg when the, the earth was divided. So there's actually quite a widespread belief amongst Mormons that the, the continental drift did take place, but it took place very rapidly after the flood.
Simon Southerton [02:44:08] But I guess Bill, you'd have a hard time believing that that sort of took place in all that continental roof you're talking about took place in the last four and a half thousand years.
Bill White [02:44:20] Yeah, well the last time all the continents were together they've been, you know, we've had what we call supercontinent episode episodes every once in a while. It's sort of like scum on the surface of the ocean all gets pushed, you know, together. A surface of the lake or upon gets pushed together in one place. So the last time that happened was Pangea, what we, the supercontinent we call Pangea. That was just about 250 million years ago. And they were superconduct before then. But so I don't, you know that's, that's long before there were humans around the last time the, the continents were all more or less or less together and you know they're now they're drifting apart. How fast? Centimeters per year. Right. So the off stated analogy, about as fast as your fingernails grow.
Simon Southerton [02:45:20] So we actually talked about this in an earlier episode and some of the clearest evidence is the fact that like Australia is moving north fast northeast, fast enough that if they didn't update the GPS we'd still, we'd find out we're driving ourselves in the next two decades. We'd find ourselves in the almost in the next lane. So I mean that's just such compelling evidence that these things are happening at such a snail
Bill White [02:45:49] you think you got to say speeds up to 10 centimeters a year. You know, after 10 years, you know that's, that's 100 centimeters, that's, that's a meter you're off the road. If you're on.
Simon Southerton [02:46:06] Over, over the range from Yosemite to I can't remember the name of the town. Over driven over the range. And that's one of the narrowest roads I've ever been on. And I've seen being behind Winnebagos that have only got 20cm on either side of the. The vehicle. And, and yeah, if you didn't adjust gps, you'd be.
Bill White [02:46:29] Yeah, we did gone a little bit longer.
Simon Southerton [02:46:31] Sorry, we've. We've gone a little bit longer than I. It's absolutely fascinating. It's been wonderful to have you here, Bill and John, but I thought we'd just finish off by sort of coming
Gerardo Sumano [02:46:42] back to slide 40.
Simon Southerton [02:46:46] I think slide 40 and we'll just sort of quickly run through and. Okay. I think it's fair to say, you know, given that we have very many respected who now are distancing themselves from the claims that the church has made in the. The Book of Abraham, I think it's fair enough to refer to the things that Joseph Smith was including in the Book of Abraham as guesses when it comes to the cosmos. But when you guess, you get some things right. And I think one of those is if we run through these world without number, would it be fair to say, Bill, that there could well and true. Well and truly be worlds without number?
Bill White [02:47:36] Yeah, I mean, sure. Just plain planets. You know, we already know about thousands of them. In terms of planets with life. Well, we don't know of any specifically, but, you know, we have some candidates and we've only examined a very, very, very, very small fraction of the stars on our neighborhood. Yeah, there's worlds without.
Simon Southerton [02:48:04] It's basically technology has been the limitation there. But when it seems like all of. I mean, they're talking now about getting radio telescopes on the, on the Moon so they can ex. Expand, you know, join up with the ones on the Earth to get even greater power. So it's, it's going to be amazing to see what they come up with in the next few decades.
Bill White [02:48:24] Next generation is a Spitzer Spitzer. The, the Webb telescope, which is out there and it's an infrared telescope and it's still cooling it, you know, it needs to be really cold to work. And so I think they're talking about August when it really starts to work. These, the telescope is, is designed to image, first of all, the most distant galaxies which are no longer in the visible part of the spectrum. They're in the infrared part of the spectrum. And also the planets which are going to be in the infrared part of the spectrum. So we're going to learn a lot more about planets when the Webb telescope is up and running.
Simon Southerton [02:49:07] Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Okay. The next one sun created after the Earth. I'm going to put a big note on that one sun was Formed before the Earth or around about the same time, you know, what's a few million years? But yeah, Earth revolves around the sun. I think that's a. I think that's a direct hit, but I think it's fairly obvious that it was probably common knowledge, I think, by the time of Joseph Smith, that many, many scientists believe that the Earth revolved around the sun.
Gerardo Sumano [02:49:47] I think
Simon Southerton [02:49:50] Copernicus's ideas would have been fairly widely accepted by then.
Gerardo Sumano [02:49:56] Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask.
Simon Southerton [02:49:59] Yeah.
Gerardo Sumano [02:50:01] Right.
Simon Southerton [02:50:02] But I think he certainly got a direct hit with matters eternal. I think we can give them that one. In terms of sun receiving light from Kolob, I'm going to say, nope, I don't think that's correct. I think it's pretty well established that the light derived from the Earth is from nuclear fusion. It's hydrogen fusing into helium. Would that be right, Bill?
Bill White [02:50:28] Yes, absolutely. The Earth's makeup, the sun is making its own light.
Simon Southerton [02:50:33] Yeah. So have we been reasonably fair there, John?
Jon Perry [02:50:42] Yeah, I'd say. I'd say that works.
Simon Southerton [02:50:45] Yeah. John D. I think we're. I think we're done.
John Dehlin [02:50:52] All right. Well, Bill White and John Perry.
Simon Southerton [02:50:55] Fantastic to have Bill and John,
John Dehlin [02:50:59] you do Mormon stories. A real honor to. To join us for this episode of Bill and John, and I hope we can learn more from you both in the future.
Gerardo Sumano [02:51:11] Great.
Jon Perry [02:51:11] Yeah.
Bill White [02:51:13] And.
Simon Southerton [02:51:13] And John. John has. Perry has just. He said he's happy to come on and do a whole episode on his. His story.
Jon Perry [02:51:23] Yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be fun.
Simon Southerton [02:51:25] Yeah.
Jon Perry [02:51:26] I was like, you know, I was a missionary in Brazil.
John Dehlin [02:51:32] John, we'd love to have you on to tell your story. That'd be amazing. And to promote your amazing work.
Simon Southerton [02:51:36] Oh, cool.
Jon Perry [02:51:37] Thanks.
John Dehlin [02:51:37] Yeah.
Jon Perry [02:51:38] Yeah, Just give me a heads up.
John Dehlin [02:51:41] Okay.
Simon Southerton [02:51:42] Yeah, we'll.
John Dehlin [02:51:43] We'll make sure and include a link to your YouTube channel in our. In our show notes.
Jon Perry [02:51:49] Great.
Bill White [02:51:50] Cool.
Simon Southerton [02:51:50] Yeah. And, yeah, sorry, Bill, about losing you for a little bit there, but you can always go back and watch the YouTube clip and. And listen to. To John.
Bill White [02:52:07] Okay. Always a pleasure to talk about science.
John Dehlin [02:52:09] Thanks, Bill.
Simon Southerton [02:52:10] No, it was wonderful. Thanks very much. Yep.
John Dehlin [02:52:12] Bill.
Simon Southerton [02:52:13] Okay. See you guys.
Gerardo Sumano [02:52:15] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:52:16] Thanks, Simon. Thanks, John. And thanks. Thanks to everyone for joining us today on Mormon Stories podcast. We appreciate your support. We appreciate Simon for organizing this panel and Gerardo for helping Simon out. We appreciate all of you who tune in. Please give us your feedback on today's episode. We'd love to hear it. Email us@mormonstoriesgmail.com or you can comment in the on the YouTube channel, on the Facebook channel. We take your comments seriously. We value it and it will help shape future episodes and future content. You guys be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care.
Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.
One Response
Joseph Smith was more educated that John give him credit. He did not have much formal education but the Smith family was competent enough to see that he had an education better than most 19th century country boys.
And He undoubtedly under stood Newtonian physics. But he had no idea that the sun shines because of nuclear fission. Therefore no much of a Prophet on that issue.