Ask A Scientist General Science Archive

name         Ann W.
status       educator

Question -   I would appreciate your help with a question that I 
 have not been able to find in your archives.  These are questions that 
 were asked of me by elementary kids whom I teach.

At what time do we think the Earth was formed? (This 6 year old clarified 
that he wants to know at what time (as in hour) of the day was the Earth 
formed.)
Any ideas of how to answer this for this young student?
-----------------
Dear Ann,
I can only give a definite answer to your first question:

At what time do we think the Earth was formed? (This 6 year old clarified
that he wants to know at what time (as in hour) of the day was the Earth
formed.)
Any ideas of how to answer this for this young student?

No one knows the answer to that question. There is no experiment that can 
answer the question of how long ago the Earth was formed that precisely.

You might ask the student what time s/he had breakfast today. Then ask 
what time s/he had breakfast yesterday. Then keep going back... the 
answers get less precise the farther back in time you go. However, s/he 
still has a rough idea when s/he had breakfast each day (in the morning, 
before school). It's kind of like that. We know approximately when the 
earth was formed, but because it was so long ago we do not know exactly 
when it was formed.
2)  How do scientists know that Space is infinite?  Again, I did 
not find this particular questions in your archives.  I would appreciate a 
response that would make sense to a 6 year old.


This is a much, much tougher question. I am not actually sure that space 
is really infinite, and in fact I think that the cosmologists don't agree 
(although this is not my field). My vote here is to answer this with 
another "No one knows."

To address this, you might ask a student how long it takes to walk across 
the classroom. Then ask how long it takes to walk to, say, Alaska 
(assuming you are not already there!). The "I  do not know" that results 
is because the student has never walked that far, and cannot walk that 
far. It is kind of like that; no one knows whether or not space is 
infinite because no one has ever gone very far away from Earth, and no one 
could ever go far enough away from Earth to ever prove that space is 
infinite. When a scientist says that "space is infinite" or "space is 
finite," each one of those statements is a "working hypothesis" (a 
starting point for thinking about things). When a hypothesis is proven 
wrong and there is only one alternative possible, we may say that the 
alternative is true. However, the universe may be more complicated than that.

All the best,
Prof. Topper
=====================================================
That is a very interesting question.  Scientists think that the Earth is very old, 
about 4.5 billion years.  I doubt a six-year old could comprehend such a large
number---older than the oldest person he knows, older than the dinosaurs he sees 
in museums, etc.  As for hour, I think Bishop Ussher proposed that it was 9AM.  I 
do not know how he came up with that time.  Since people made up the idea of time 
and a clock, it would be very difficult to establish a time.  I think a six-year 
old could understand that people invented the clock, and that there were no clocks, 
or people, for that matter, when the Earth formed.
 
Pat Rowe
=====================================================
Ann W.,

Most scientists believe that the Earth, Sun and all of the other planets and moons in 
the solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago from a giant cloud of gas and dust 
known as a solar nebula.  The gas and dust in this solar nebula originated in a star 
that ended its life in a violent explosion known as a supernova.  I hope that this 
helps.

Sincerely,

Bob Trach
=====================================================
Of course, this is part of the mystery of the origin of the world, and is
unprovable. But here is my understanding of the question. (If you do not
wish to read a theologically based suggestion, please don't read any
further.)


The Biblical account of creation, in Genesis chapter 1, tells us that the
world was dark and chaotic when it was created. Then God created light. "And
it was evening and it was morning - day one!" So I think it may be safe* to
tell your 6-year-old students that the earth was created in the evening. It
was night-time from the first instant of creation until the moment the light
appeared, which was then the first morning. We can think of the "six days of
creation" as being Sunday through Friday, but if we define each day as
beginning at nightfall the previous evening, then it seems that the world
was created on a Saturday night.

(*As to whether your school administration would allow this explanation, it
is up to you to decide what is safe for the teacher to say. This is beside
the question of what may be safe for students to hear.)

Footnote: I see much in the Bible that either supports the story of creation
and theory of evolution or, at least, does not necessarily contradict these
ideas.

I imagine the beginning of creation as the moment when matter came into
being, and the six days of creation as a time when God was actively reducing
the entropy in the universe, organizing the matter into molecules, and
arranging the molecules into the physical universe, by the input of God's
divine energy and instructions ("And God said".). This may be consistent
with modern thinking about thermodynamics and information theory, which
states that one can reduce the entropy in a closed system by adding energy
or information to the system.

I picture God completing the creation of the world at a certain point,
defined Biblically as late Friday afternoon, whatever that may mean. Time
itself was one of God's creations, after all.

At that point, if God said, "Ready, set, go," then at that moment He must
have started up the process we observe today, in which evolution of
biological species does take place before our very eyes, and entropy, or
chaos, does increase. At that moment, "God rested." And perhaps we are still
in the Seventh Day now.

However, those who believe in God have an awareness that "God never slumbers
nor sleeps" (Psalm 121), so how could it be that God "rested"?

An interpretation that makes sense to me as a scientist is that God is no
longer inputting creativity into the universe that might reduce the total
entropy, but is allowing the physical world to proceed (most of the time)
according to its established rules. We can study these rules in our science
and math classes.

Nevertheless, I believe God has the power to occasionally perform miracles
by suspending the usual rules on certain historic occasions. This is quite
aside from the normal daily miracles whereby the world continues in its
usual way - enough of a miracle all the time!

As for the human world, it is clear that we have free choice. Those who
believe in God believe that God granted us free choice on purpose, out of
kindness, for our moral benefit. Even here it may be possible sometimes to
recognize Divine intervention in our daily lives. Some people are quite
convinced of it! Certainly, anthropologists find that every culture and
nation has had some form of worship and religion, throughout history. It is
apparently part of the human condition.

Sarina Kopinsky, MSc, H.Dip.Ed.
=====================================================