ALCHEMY IN THE STARS

If the world's finest minds can unravel only with difficulty the deeper workings of nature, how could it be supposed that those workings are merely a mindless accident, a product of blind chance?
Paul Davies, Professor of Theoretical Physics 1

Scientists are in general agreement that, on the basis of calculations, the Big Bang took place about 17 billion years ago. All the matter making up the universe was created from nothingness but with the wonderful design that we talked about in the first two chapters. Nevertheless, the universe that emerged from the Big Bang could have been much different from the one that did emerge ours.

For example, if the values of four fundamental forces were different, the universe would have consisted of only radiation and become a tissue of light with no stars, galaxies, human beings, or anything else. Thanks to the extraordinary perfect balance of those four forces, "atoms" the building-blocks of that which is called "matter" came into being.

Scientists are also in general agreement that the first two simplest elements hydrogen and helium began to form during the first fourteen seconds after the Big Bang. The elements were formed as a result of a reduction in the universal entropy that was causing matter to scatter everywhere. In other words, at first the universe was just an amassing of hydrogen and helium atoms. If it had remained so, again there could have been no stars, planets, stones, soil, trees, or human beings. It would have been a lifeless universe consisting of only those two elements.

Carbon, the fundamental element of life, is a much heavier element than hydrogen and helium. How did it come into being?

Searching for an answer to this question, scientists stumbled upon one of the most surprising discoveries of this century.
 

The Structure of the Elements

Protons are subatomic particles that carry a positive electrical charge in the nucleus of an atom. Helium, with two protons, occupies the second place in the periodic table. Carbon has six protons and oxygen has eight. All the elements differ in the number of protons that they contain.

Another particle present in the nucleus of an atom is the neutron. Unlike protons, neutrons do not carry an electrical charge: they are neutral in other words, hence their name.

The third basic particle of which atoms are composed is the electron, which has a negative electrical charge. In every atom, the number of protons and electrons is the same. Unlike protons and neutrons however, electrons are not located in the nucleus. Instead, they move around the nucleus at a very high speed that keeps the positive and negative charges of the atom apart.

The differences in atomic structure (the numbers of protons/electrons) are what make the elements different from one another.

A crucial rule of (classical) chemistry is that elements cannot be transformed into one another. Changing iron (with twenty-six protons) into silver (with eighteen) would require removing eight protons from the nucleus. But protons are bound together by the strong nuclear force and the number of protons in a nucleus can be changed only in nuclear reactions. Yet all the reactions that take place under terrestrial conditions are chemical reactions that depend on electron exchange and that do not effect the nucleus. 

In the Middle Ages there was a "science" called alchemy the forerunner of modern chemistry. Alchemists, unaware of the periodic table or the atomic structures of the elements, thought it was possible to transform one element into another. (A favorite object of pursuit, for reasons that should be apparent, was trying to turn iron into gold.) We now know that what the alchemists were trying to do is impossible under normal conditions such as exist on Earth: The temperatures and pressures required for such a transformation to take place are too enormous to achieve in any terrestrial laboratory. But it is possible if you have the right place to do it in.
And the right place, it turns out, is in the hearts of stars.

Red giants are huge stars about fifty times bigger than our sun. Deep within these giants, an extraordinary process takes place.

The Universe's Alchemy Labs: Red Giants

The temperature required to overcome the reluctance of nuclei to change is nearly 10 million degrees Celsius. This is why "alchemy" in the real sense takes place only in stars. In medium-sized stars like the Sun, the enormous energy being radiated is the result of hydrogen being fused into helium.

Keeping this brief review of the chemistry of elements in mind, let us return to the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. We mentioned that only helium and hydrogen atoms existed in the universe after the Big Bang. Astronomers believe that solar-type stars (of which the Sun is one) are formed as a result of nebulae (clouds) of hydrogen and helium gas being compressed until the hydrogen-to-helium thermonuclear reaction gets started. So now we have stars. But our universe is still lifeless. For life, heavier elements oxygen and carbon specifically are required. There needs to be another process whereby hydrogen and helium can be converted into still other elements. 

The "manufacturing-plants" of these heavy elements it turns out are the red giants a class of stars that are fifty times bigger than the Sun.

Helium nucleus	Carbon nucleus	The extraordinarily unstable isotope of beryllium that is formed in red giants.	Normal beryllium as found on Earth.

Red giants are much hotter than solar-type stars and this characteristic enables them to do something other stars cannot: They convert helium into carbon. Nevertheless, even for a red giant this is not easy. As the astronomer Greenstein says: "Even now, when the answer (as to how they do it) is well in hand, the method they employ seems astonishing."2

Helium's atomic weight is 2: that is, it has two protons in its nucleus. Carbon's atomic weight is 6. In the fantastically high temperatures of red giants, three helium atoms are fused into a carbon atom. This is the "alchemy" that supplied the universe with its heavier elements after the Big Bang.

But as we said: it's not easy. It's nearly impossible to persuade two helium atoms to join together and quite impossible for three. So how do the six protons needed for carbon get together?

It's a two-step process. First, two helium atoms are fused into an intermediary element with four protons and four neutrons. Next, a third helium is added to this intermediary element to make a carbon atom with six protons and six neutrons.

The intermediary element is beryllium. Beryllium occurs naturally on Earth but the beryllium that occurs in red giants is different in a crucially important way: It consists of four protons and four neutrons, whereas terrestrial beryllium has five neutrons. "Red-giant beryllium" is a slightly different version. It's what's called an "isotope" in chemistry. 

Now comes the real surprise. The "red-giant" isotope beryllium turns out to be incredibly unstable. Scientists have studied this isotope for years and discovered that once it has formed, it breaks down again in just 0.000000000000001 second.

How is this unstable beryllium isotope, which forms and disintegrates in such a short time, able to unite with a helium atom to become a carbon atom? It is like trying to lay a third brick on two other bricks that shoot away from each other in 0.000000000000001 second if they chance to come atop one another, and form a construction in this way. 

How does this process take place in red giants? Physicists scratched their heads over this puzzle for decades without coming up with an answer. The American astrophysicist Edwin Salpeter finally discovered a clue to the mystery in the concept of "atomic resonance".

Resonance and Double Resonance

A simple example from ordinary experience will give us an idea of what physicists mean by "atomic resonance". Imagine yourself and a child at a playground where there are swings. The child sits on the swing and you give him a push to get him started. To keep the swing moving, you have to keep pushing it from behind. But the timing of these pushes is important. Each time the swing approaches you, you have to apply the force of the push just at the right moment: when the swing is at the highest point of its motion towards you. If you push too soon, the result is a collision that disturbs the rhythmic momentum of the swing; if you push too late, the effort is wasted because the swing is already moving away from you. in other words, the frequency of your pushes must be in harmony with the frequency of the swing's approaches to you.

Physicists refer to such a "harmony of frequencies" as "resonance". The swing has a frequency: for example it reaches you every 1.7 seconds. Using your arms you push it every 1.7 seconds. Of course if you want, you can change the frequency of the swing's motion, but if you do, you have to change the frequency of the pushes as well, otherwise the swing will not swing right.3

Just as two or more moving bodies can resonate, resonance can also occur when one moving body causes motion in another. This type of resonance is often seen in musical instruments and is called "acoustic resonance". It can occur, for example, among two finely-tuned violins. If one of these violins is played in the same room as the other, the strings of the second will vibrate and produce a sound even though nobody is touching it. Because both instruments have been precisely tuned to the same frequency, a vibration in one causes a vibration in the other.4

The resonances in these two examples are simple ones and are easy to keep the track of. There are other resonances in physics that are not simple at all and in the case of atomic nuclei, the resonances can be quite complex and sensitive.

Every atomic nucleus has a natural energy level that physicists have been able to identify after lengthy study. These energy levels are quite different from one another but a few rare instances of resonance between atomic nuclei have been observed. When such resonance occurs, the motions of the nuclei are in harmony with one another like our examples of the swing and violin. The important point of this is that the resonance expedites nuclear reactions that can affect the nuclei.5

Investigating how carbon was made by red giants, Edwin Salpeter suggested that there must be a resonance between helium and beryllium nuclei that facilitated the reaction. This resonance, he said, made it easier for helium atoms to fuse into beryllium and this could account for the reaction in red giants. Subsequent research however failed to support this idea.

Fred Hoyle was the second astronomer to address this question. Hoyle took Salpeter's idea a step further, introducing the idea of "double resonance". Hoyle said that there had to be two resonances: one that caused two heliums to fuse into beryllium and one that caused the third helium atom join this unstable formation. Nobody believed Hoyle. The idea of such a precise resonance occurring once was hard enough to accept; that it should occur twice was unthinkable. Hoyle pursued his research for years and in the end he proved that his idea was right: there really was a double resonance taking place in the red giants. At the exact moment two helium atoms resonated in union, a beryllium atom appeared in the 0.000000000000001 second needed to produce carbon. George Greenstein describes why this double resonance is indeed an extraordinary mechanism: 

Fred Hoyle was the first to discover the amazing equilibrium of nuclear reactions taking place in red giants. Although an atheist, Hoyle admitted that this balance could not be explained by chance and that it was a deliberate arrangement.

There are three quite separate structures in this story-helium, beryllium, and carbon-and two quite separate resonances. It is hard to see why these nuclei should work together so smoothly=85Other nuclear reactions do not proceed by such a remarkable chain of lucky breaks=85It is like discovering deep and complex resonances between a car, a bicycle, and a truck. Why should such disparate structures mesh together so perfectly? Upon this our existence, and that of every life form in the universe, depends.6

In the years that followed it was discovered that other elements like oxygen are also formed as a result of such amazing resonances. A zealous materialist, Fred Hoyle's discovery of these "extraordinary transactions" forced him to admit in his book Galaxies, Nuclei and Quasars, that such double resonances had to be the result of design and not coincidence. 7 In another article he wrote:

If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just about where these levels are actually found to be=85A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.8

Hoyle declared that the inescapable conclusion of this plain truth should not go unnoticed by other scientists. 
I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars.9

This plain truth was expressed in the Qur'an 1,400 years ago. Allah indicates the harmony in creation of the heavens in the verse: Do you not see how Allah created seven heavens in harmony=85 (Surah Nuh: 15)
 

2. George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe, p. 38 
3. Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, 1995 
4. Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, 1995 
5. The resonance mentioned here occurs as follows: when two atom nuclei fuse, the new emerging nucleus both takes on the total of the massive energy of the two nuclei forming it and their kinetic energy. This new nucleus works to reach a particular energy level within the atom's natural energy ladder. However, this is only possible if the total energy it receives corresponds to this level of energy. If it fails to correspond, then the new nucleus decomposes at once. For the new nucleus to attain stability, the accumulated energy in its body and the level of natural energy it forms should be equal to each other. When this equality is attained the "resonance" occurs. However this resonance is a highly rare harmony with a very low probability to be achieved. 
6. George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe, p. 43-44 
7. Paul Davies. The Final Three Minutes, New York: BasicBooks, 1994, p. 49-50 (Quoted from Hoyle) 
8. Fred Hoyle, "The Universe:Past and Present Reflections", Engineering and Science, November 1981, pp. 8-12 
9. Fred Hoyle, Religion and the Scientists, London: SCM, 1959; M. A. Corey, The Natural History of Creation,