"He is the
Creator of the Heavens and the Earth..." (Surat
ash-Shura, 11)

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

Chemistry is a science that deals
with the composition, structure, and properties of
substances and with the transformations that they
undergo. The bedrock of modern chemistry is the periodic
table of elements. First laid out by Russian chemist
Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev, the elements in the
periodic table are arranged according to their atomic
structures. Hydrogen occupies the first place in the
table because it is the simplest of all the elements,
consisting of only one proton in its nucleus and one
electron revolving around it.

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

Resonance is defined as the
harmony of frequencies (vibrations) of two different
materials.

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…Other nuclear reactions do not proceed by
such a remarkable chain of lucky breaks…It 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…A
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… (Surah Nuh:
15)

1. Paul
Davies, Superforce, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984,
p. 235-236
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,

The
Order in the Skies
Why
so much Space?  Entropy
and Order  The
Solay System
Earth's
Fine Location  Alchemy
in the Stars

Links
Site
Map All Books
E-mail