Magnetosphere rendition.jpg, from h?ps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/, File:Magnetosphere_rendition.jpg, 2005, by NASA, public domain.

The NASA illustration above shows the diversion of cosmic rays from the sun by the Earth’s magnetic field. Without the Earth’s magnetic field, radiation intensity on the surface of the Earth would be far too high for carbon-based organic life (like us) to survive. There is a campy, but surprisingly good movie called “The Core” that goes into the impact to life on Earth if the magnetic field were to fail for any reason (Best line: “Will you take a check?”). Without a magnetic field, the Earth would have to be much further from the sun to reduce radiation to an acceptable level. Contrariwise, the Earth needs to be pretty much just as far from the sun as it is for there to be liquid water on the surface. If it were much further out, the water would all freeze into ice; much closer and it would all turn to clouds and fog.

In a Creation where everything is done for a reason any planet that supports carbon-based life (the most versatile chemistry available) has to have radiation shielding to be in the liquid water zone. Cosmic radiation from the sun is made of electrically charged, very high velocity particles (called cosmic rays). Hence, any effective radiation shield would need to be able to divert electrically charged, high velocity particles.

In this Creation, electromagnetic fields providentially do exactly that. Magnetic fields in particular apply a force to moving, electrically charged particles that is perpendicular to the direction that the particles are moving (very handy for diversion). Therefore, in order for life to exist on the surface of any planet, the physics of Creation must include electromagnetic fields or something very similar to electromagnetic fields. In particular, the physics of Creation must have something that is sensitive to the velocities of charged particles (as electromagnetic fields are in this Creation).

At the same time, the physics of Creation has to work the same regardless of the velocities of moving objects. Our sun moves at velocities ranging from a few thousand miles per hour to over 800,000 mph relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background (probably the frame of reference for the Big Bang) depending on where it is in the revolution around the center of our galaxy. It would be really inconvenient for us if chemistry (which depends, in part, on electromagnetic field interactions) worked differently from year to year and day to day.

In order for the physics of Creation to be both sensitive to the velocities of objects (to divert cosmic rays) and insensitive to the velocities of objects (so chemistry is always the same), the physics of our world must include both special and general relativity.

When we look at the world it looks straight. It looks as if we could make a line, like a laser beam for example, that would just keep going in exactly the same direction forever. This idea of a straight (in physics, it is called flat, not straight) universe was first formally written down by the Greek mathematician Euclid around 300 BC. In his honor, flat space is called Euclidean space.

In 1637, French mathemetician Rene Descartes proposed the Cartesian coordinate system that assigns numbers to positions in Euclidean space by measuring along three perpendicular rulers called axes. Positions in Cartesian coordinates (and Euclidean space) are described by three numbers (-4, 2, 6) that represent the measurements of the position along each of the three axes.

Measurements along axes use both negative and positive numbers (…-4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4…) so that Cartesian coordinates can, mathematically speaking, be used to measure positions with the origin in any location and with the axes oriented in any direction. The point where all three axes meet (and where all three positions are 0) is called the origin. Cartesian corrdinates unified algebra and geometry: geometric figures could be described with algebraic equations and algebraic equations could be displayed as geometric figures.

Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and others used Cartesian coordinates to develop mathematical models that exactly predicted the behavior of the world that we see around us; a study that we now call physics. Cartesian corrdinates are the fundamental tool of methematical physics to this day; nearly all of the mathematical models (what are usually called laws) of physics use measurements along the three axes of Cartesian coordinate systems (called x, y, and z in physics).

Because they use Cartesian coordinates, which can be located anywhere and oriented in any direction, one of the fundamental requirements for all laws (mathemaical models) of physics is that they have to work with Cartesian corrdinates that can be anywhere and oriented in any direction. The detailed numbers that are used to calculate predictions of behavior may change depending on the coordinates that are used, but the laws of physics must work for all coordinates.

As was mentioned above, planets, stars, and galaxies move in many directions at many speeds. For the physical processes that underlie life in this Creation to work consistently, physics (and, therefore, chemistry) has to work the same no matter what speed or direction any object is traveling. For the laws of physics, that means that they have to work regardless of the position, orientation, velocity, spin, or acceleration of the corrdinates that are used for any calculation in physics.

For the laws of physics developed by Galileo and Newton and for the first hundred years or so of the development of physics this was not a problem; the laws did work the same regardless of the position, orientation, velocity, spin, or acceleration of the coordinates (as far as could be measured at the time). Again: the specific numbers would be different depending on coordinates, but the laws worked.

In the mid 1800’s, however, Coulomb, Gauss, Faraday, and Maxwell developed laws that predicted electromagnetic behavior. As was mentioned earlier, electromagnetic fields are sensitive to the velocities of electrically charged particles. They have to be to shield the Earth from solar cosmic rays. Because electromagnetics are sensitive to velocities, they do not work the same regardless of the velocity of the coordinates used for calculations. Which means that electromagnetics are not really compatible with Cartesian coordinates. Which means that they are not really compatible with Euclidean space.

But, as far as we can tell from astronomy, electromagnetics do work the same everywhere and at every velocity that we can see. This has to mean that this universe that we live in is not a flat Euclidean space; it just looks that way. It took 50 years for physicists to figure out, but it turned out that this universe that we live in is a four-dimensional, pointwise Minkowski spacetime.

Between about 1890 and 1915, physicists Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincare, Albert Einstein, Herman Minkowski, and others developed mathematical models that described the kind of world that would be necessary for velocity-sensitive electromagnetics to work the same for all coordinates.

Mathematically, the heart of the problem was to find a way to transform positions, velocities, and accelerations between Cartesian coordinates that are moving relative to each other in a way that would allow electromagnetics to work for all coordinates. The simplest approach, just adding in the velocities and accelerations (called a Galilean boost transformation), had been used for many years in other applications but did not work for electromagnetics. The trick turned out to be that distance and time had to change depending on the relative velocity of the coordinates.

Lorentz and Poincare used the electromagnetic laws consolidated by Maxwell to derive that time had to slow down (called time dilation) and distance in the direction of motion had to contract for coordinates moving at different velocities. Einstein developed a mathematically much simpler approach by assuming that the speed of light was always the same in all coordinates. He was able to duplicate the results of Lorentz and Poincare and further derive that simultaneous events in one coordinate happened at different times for coordinates moving at different velocities (called simultaneity in physics). Einstein went on to derive how energy and momentum change between moving coordinates and discovered that all material in our universe is made of energy and nothing but energy (E=mc squared).

Minkowski derived the complete rules for transforming positions, velocities, and accelerations between coordinates moving relative to each other, so the kind of space that we actually live in is called a Minkowski space (ie, it is not a flat Euclidean space). One of the rules for transforming physical quantities between moving coordinates is that it does not work to transform spatial coordinates (x, y, z) by themselves. Because time is affected by time dilation and simultaneity the transformation has to include time (x, y, z, t). Because time has to be included with the three spatial dimensions, physicists call Minkowski space a four dimensional spacetime.

The Minkowski transformation is only used for the special case of coordinates that are moving at a constant relative velocity (that’s why it is called special relativity). In 1915, Einstein and some others derived a more general mathematical model (called general relativity) that applied to transformations between coordinates that are moving at changing velocities relative to each other, coordinates that are either accelerating or spinning. Like special relativity, general relativity had some interesting implications: even static spacetime is not flat as Euclid thought, it is warped and stretched by the presence of material (really energy) in planets, stars, and galaxies; the rate that time progresses changes depending on how much material (energy) is nearby, the more material, the slower time progresses. General relativity still uses Minkowski transformations to describe local space, but, because spacetime is warped by the presence of material, the details of the Minkowski transformations change a little from point to point in spacetime.

NASA image, public domain

So far, all of the discussion has been about the development of mathematical models. But we are talking about physics, where theories are supposed to be tested by experiment and observation. Special and general relativity have been tested by experiment and observation. All of the predictions of the mathematical models of special and general relativity have been physically verified. As far as we can tell, we really do live in a four-dimensional, pointwise Minkowski spacetime.

In a Creation where everything is done for a reason, special and general relativity have to be true for chemically-based life to survive on the surface of a planet.