Monday, May 19, 2014

Pastor Jim Mumme is an idiot

In a guest editorial, Pastor Jim Mumme made some of the more gross misunderstandings of physical science I recall reading. What is sad is that I suspect Pastor Jim thinks he is advancing a reconciliation between science and religion.

"Pastor" Jim claims to love "science, and ... Christianity’s doctrine of creation." Yet he showed very little understanding of either. His scientific errors begin almost immediately when he wrote, "Energy is defined as the capacity to do work." That would be a crude definition of "entropy." He goes on to say, "Energy is actually invisible, and only its use or result can be seen." Just what does Pastor Jim think his eyes see with? The rest of us use photons which are a form of energy. In fact they are the "pure light" he confused with a weird unorthodox doctrine conflating light and the Divine. When Pastor Jim wrote, "Man can change matter to energy, and an example would be burning gasoline to run an automobile or coal to warm a building," his 'scientific' credibility left the room entirely. Burning gas, or coal does not convert mass into energy; burning releases chemical energy stored in the fuel.

Mr. Mumme weirdly links the notion that mankind cannot generate matter from light, that Genesis opens with a command "let there be light," and concluded that God "actually made the material world out of His personal energy."

We can create matter from energy. One way used massive particles and one could quibble that this was not "pure light" energy. But a new paper published just today (Pike, Mackenroth, Hill & Rose) shows how we can actualize the experimental results predicted in 1934 by Breit and Wheeler. This is the direct generation of electrons from photons; matter from pure light. This also reduces "Pastor" Jim's theology to rubble.

Breit, G. & Wheeler, J. A.
1934 "Collision of two light quanta" Phys. Rev. 46, 1087–1091

Pike O. J., Mackenroth F., Hill E. G., Rose S. J.,
2014 “A photon-photon collider in a vacuum hohlraum” Nature Photon
05/18/online

1 comment:

khms said...

When Pastor Jim wrote, "Man can change matter to energy, and an example would be burning gasoline to run an automobile or coal to warm a building," his 'scientific' credibility left the room entirely. Burning gas, or coal does not convert mass into energy; burning releases chemical energy stored in the fuel.

Actually, you're wrong there. I do not know what he meant (and thus, if he was right or wrong), but "releasing chemical energy stored in the fuel" does convert mass to energy. Very little mass ... it obeys E = m*c². It has to.