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Author: Brian Sacks | Originally Published: 2 October 2007, The Jewish Chronicle
Tomorrow in the synagogue, we read the Torah account of the first six-day working week. The world and all life were created in that time, so the story goes, seemingly at odds with the current scientific estimate of 13.7 billion years. Yet Dr. Gerald Schroeder, a former professor of nuclear physics at MIT and member of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, believes there is no conflict between these two timelines. Both are to be taken literally.
Schroeder, author of the bestselling book Genesis and the Big Bang, maintains that the Torah was scientifically 3,000 years ahead of its time. Its insights begin with its first word: Bereshit, "In the beginning". In a 1959 survey, two-thirds of leading American scientists believed the universe had no beginning—that it always was. Then, in 1965, the cosmic microwave echo of the Big Bang was discovered. There was a beginning; the scientists were wrong, Bereshit was right.
The Torah writes of the end of day one: "Vayehi erev, vayehi voker, yom echad"—"There was evening and there was morning, one day". According to Schroeder, these words can equally be translated: "There was disorder and there was order, one day". One can verify his translation with a dictionary; for example, in the Torah, the erev rav is the "mixed multitude" that accompanied the Israelites out of Egypt.
This theme of progression from disorder to order is reinforced by the Torah’s description of the Earth as initially "unformed and void", and by its account that on five occasions God "separated", for example, between the lower and upper waters. In modern thermodynamics, a movement from disorder to order (a decrease in entropy) cannot occur without an external cause. For Schroeder, this cause would be the Almighty.
Schroeder notes a difference in construction between yom echad, "one day", and the subsequent yom sheni, yom shlishi—"second day", "third day", etc. The Torah does not talk of yom rishon, the "first day", but of "one day", then the second, then the third. Time is viewed from the outset forwards—not in retrospect from a later time, when there would have been the first day, then the second, then the third.
Scientists also see an important distinction between looking at time from the outset forwards and from a later date backwards. This is because, since Einstein, we know time is relative. A holiday at the Dead Sea can make you younger: general relativity asserts that the stronger gravitational pull at this, the lowest spot on Earth, causes time to pass more slowly. You could return home a tenth of a second younger than if you had never traveled.
The effect might not be worth the effort for such a small gain, but if you were at a place or time where relativistic effects were strong—like at the Big Bang—the time-stretching effect would be profound. Schroeder quotes Nachmanides, writing in the 13th century: "From the moment that matter formed from substance-less substance, time grabs hold." The Biblical clock starts when matter first condenses out of energy.
Taking Nachmanides’ start-point for time and applying modern physics, Schroeder computes a time-stretching factor of one million. Six days of 24 hours each, from the viewpoint of an observer present when matter first formed (the moment of quark confinement), would appear to an observer looking back from the end of the period as a million times longer, or 15 billion years. The breakdown is: the first day corresponds to 8 billion years looking back, the second day to 4 billion years, and so on.
Schroeder believes the Torah uses two clocks. The first, within the Almighty’s frame of reference, recorded Creation from the moment within the Big Bang when matter condensed out of energy. The second, within a human frame of reference, started at Rosh Hashanah with Adam’s birth, ticking away 5,768 years by 2007. Supporting this "two clocks" thesis, Schroeder cites Midrash Rabba from 1,500 years ago, stating the six days of Creation are separate.
He also references Nachmanides’ commentary on Deuteronomy 32:7, where Moses exhorts the people to "consider the days of old, the years of the many generations". Nachmanides interprets "the days of old" as the six days of Creation and "the years of the many generations" as the time from Adam onward. Moses suggests God’s fingerprint on the universe is visible in two ways: the miraculous Creation in six days and human history from Adam onward.
Schroeder argues that the Torah account of Creation aligns strikingly with modern scientific understanding. He uses ancient interpretations to explain apparent contradictions, such as the stars being mentioned on a later day than the Earth. Starting from a belief in the literal truth of the Torah, he departs from the scientific method, which accepts explanations only after experimental testing.
However, he points out that we assume too much when asking, "Did it take six days or 14 billion years to bring about the universe, life, and mankind?" This assumes a Newtonian universe where time is the same for everyone, whereas Einstein showed we live in a relative universe. Even Stephen Hawking might have no issue with Schroeder’s use of "time dilation" to reconcile six days of Creation with billions of years viewed from today.
George Gershwin famously wrote: "Whatever you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so". But Gerald Schroeder has put up a spirited argument that it ain’t necessarily false, either.