I was reading about Dark Matter today (I was also avoiding work and thinking about a novel) and the reason it is hypothesized to exist. In the short and layman's terms with which it was described to me, if our theories about the Big Bang, certain gravitational constants, conservation of motion, et cetera are correct -and we've got good evidence that they are -then the energy in the universe should be causing the observable galaxies, star systems, and so on to fly apart. Because this doesn't happen, we hypothesize there must be matter and energy in the system to counter this effect, and we just can't detect it.
Now, it's possible, perhaps likely, that this is really the effect of a vast empty space and not enough light and energy meaning that non-emitting matter can only be detected if it's close enough to a star to reflect the light or other energy -though I'm not sure from my reading if this is actually the scientific thought on the matter given that Wikipedia is throwing around words like nonbaryonic and matter without atoms -I don't actually care enough to get this aspect of the science right in any book I write unless I first decide to publish it and then an editor insists.
But as I was in a literary mood I recalled a metaphor for God -which a quick search of my concordance reveals is non-Biblical -that in his capacity as personal God of the Universe sets and holds the heavens in their courses.
And I thought, gee -wouldn't it be cool if that's what Dark Matter was. God's hands holding the stars in the sky and carrying them through their courses.
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That is a beautiful poetic observation Matt. In fact, there was something I read in Smithsonian about six years ago about how some of the leading Physicists, biologists, and chemists in the world basically explain that the beauty, the awe, the majesty and mystery they find in their work confirms their personal beliefs in God (or Yahweh or Allah, etc depending on the scientist's faith). They wanted to make it clear that analyzing things like the Big Bang, Dark Matter, Evolution, or quarks did not automatically make them atheists, but rather reinforced faith in God in many of them by forcing them everyday to deal with things of such awesome power and obscure origins that they just stand back in sheer admiration of His work. It's quite beautiful.
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