On Lawn's Journal: Genesis as Kindergarten Science, Day 2

Welcome to the latest installment in my series. So far I've set up the context -- telling real science and cosmology to kindergartners using Genesis as our text to see how well it works or doesn't work. Kindergartners are just our approximation of bronze age campfire communities.

The story started before the big bang, in a dimensionless stage with a strong feeling of liminal space. We watched the spark of the big bank, a flash of light that lasted several hundreds of thousands of years, that eventually subsided to a twilight of cosmic background radiation. A story that is remarkably abstract, yet salient in the few details provided so far.

After the big bang comes the great inflation, where space expanded at a significantly accelerated rate even compared to the Big Bang or what we observe now in the universe. Does that fit account of Genesis Day 2?

And said God, let there be expansion in the midst of the waters, and let it separate in the waters from the waters.

Why two waters? Babylonians drew up the waters as dragons, one representing salt water (depths, seas) and one representing fresh water (rain, rivers, lakes). That isn't far from the more mainstream tradition that the night sky was looking directly into one kind of water, and the earth we experienced another kind of water. Which isn't so weird when you think of it, after all we call the largest observable object in the sky the "Milky Way", not the cloudy way.

But it also isn't weird when you look at the imagery we have from the Sun in the past few decades. Splashes, rain, ripples all dance across the Sun in a way that is observable only when you have the right instruments. The Milky Way is a galaxy, which not only looks milky from within, but from the outside at a distance looks like water flowing down a drain.

During the rapid expanse of the Great Inflation, space expanded while all of the forces of the universe like gravity, electro-static, and even the nuclear forces kept cohesion. I suspect it looked something like a jug of water being hit with a bullet or shotgun slug, a rapid expansion with the water's own cohesion being stretched to thin tendrils and eventually small droplets. Only these droplets would soon start shining like jewels, much like light shimmering through rain.

The thin tendrils resemble the very large structures we see in the universe today comprising of a kind of cohesion keeping galaxies relatively close around the edges of huge cosmic voids.

So I'm torn on continuing this analogy with kindergartners. On one side, calling the universe "the waters" is a very neolithic sense. We have new and better words and a need to use them to describe cosmic flows and chaos. I could simply say "cosmos" and remove the ambiguity of thinking it was H20. But Kindergartners are still very visceral, and there is a reason "waters" worked for those ancient societies. Rooting the analogy in water is useful to keeping them engaged and grounded in the experience.

If I had to make the decision I would go with it, invest in it, and plat the seed for a clearer distinction between H20 and cosmic flows around the 3rd grade. But one of the first compounds that formed as stars began their fusion burning was H20, as Oxygen is the most reactive element most readily formed element we get when we start fusing Hydrogen and Helium. e.g. https://phys.org/news/2011-06-baby-star-blasts-jets-space.html

So we continue with the explanation in Genesis...

God caused the expansion, refining the waters that are under the space from the outer space waters. And it happened as planned.

And God named the expansion "space", and that was the morning and evening for day two.