Cornelius Hunter just posted a wonderful blog about the "debate" between Newton and Laplace about the origin of the solar system. Newton remained a committed Theist to his dying day, believing that God created the planets in their orbits, but had to fix them occasionally to keep them in line. Laplace, on the other hand, "had no need for that hypothesis" and in the original "god-of-the-gaps" argument, reduced God's job requirements by one.

No, make that two, because Laplace formulated a "Nebular Hypothesis" explanation of the creation of the solar system (1796), so God didn't actually have to create the planets either. Immanuel Kant really liked the nebular hypothesis, and wrote quite a long treatise on it early in his career in 1755. No, it certainly wasn't as famous as his later work, but you can see how this god-of-the-gaps thing converted people into atheists and rationalists.

Well the Nebular Hypothesis made it into physics books very early, and Newton got booted out of astronomy, though his theory of  forces was de-deified and makes a big part of the introductory physics curriculum where it has been used to promote a materialist philosophy that we are nothing but atoms bouncing in the void. Clearly Laplace won that debate.  But curiously, there haven't been any experimental proofs of the Nebular Hypothesis.

Oh sure, we can set up a simulation of five million particles in a cloud and follow Newton's laws of motion for a hundred thousand timesteps to watch this simulation crank out planets. And yes, it takes a very special condition to get the simulation to make planets. And yes, the arrangement of our solar system is an even stranger one than most, making it one of those "Anthropic Proofs". But this isn't science! It's a  simulation!  (I know, I know, I've offended all those "computational physics" people out there, but look, would you believe a scientist who said "I can explain human behavior using a computer running millions of copies of "The Sims"?)

Where's the experimental proof?

Now my specialty in science is making really tiny mass spectrometers that can fly on satellites and measure the really hot material trapped in the earth's magnetic field, or even flowing straight from the Sun. Please forgive me for bragging, but before my design for a mass spectrometer, the best measurements of the solar wind could barely separate helium from oxygen, and couldn't even come close to measuring the isotopes of oxygen. With my "isochronous mass spectrometer" design, we  suddenly could separate the isotopes of oxygen, the isotopes of nickel, and measure everything in the solar wind, and between 1990 and 2000 three versions of my instrument were launched into space.

Why is this important?

Because the Sun is the largest object in our solar system, and if the Nebular Hypothesis is right, we should all be made out of the same material as the Sun. And while spectroscopically we could measure the elements in the Sun, we didn't know their isotopic composition. But the isotopes track the history of where the stuff has been. Was the Sun created from the ashes of a supernovae? Was the Sun a second or a third generation star, being born 8 billion years after the birth of our galaxy? The isotopes will tell us.

As luck would have it, my college roommate and fellow physicist was also working on mass spectrometers at Cal Tech where his boss made him analyze meteorites, but of course, would never promote him to a tenured job. It just doesn't happen at Cal Tech.  So when a job in space physics at Los Alamos National Lab opened up, I told him this was too good an opportunity to miss. He got the job and started working on, you guessed it, solar wind mass spectrometry.

We really weren't competitors in mass spectrometers, because I built the ones for space that fit in a shoebox, whereas his filled a room and waited for space to deliver the goods. But one day he makes a special visit to  my lab in Switzerland and asks me a confidential question. "Is there something you cannot measure?"

Wow. That was a loaded question.

If I were writing a proposal, say, asking NASA to fund another $5 million instrument for the only solar wind space mission in this decade , I would definately never tell the failings of my instrument. If you reveal the slightest weakness, then your competitor with the stupid instrument he got to build because his wife knows the senator from Maryland,  will use that weakness against you when NASA asks for a "write-in" review. Even if it is nonsensical, the panel reviewers might think it was a devastating criticism and that would be the end of your space career. Nope, its a Darwinian world out there in academia, and you never never never show weakness.

But he was my roommate. Where does Darwin end and altruism begin? Was my success just a product of evolutionary chance, or could I help out his career even to the detriment of mine?

Fortunately, neither of us were Darwinists, so I told him the deep dark secret.

"I can't measure O18," I said, "the measurement technique always has a high-mass tail to each peak, and the tail from O16 swamps the signal from O18."

So he went on to propose a $150M NASA mission, which would put a spacecraft out in the solar wind, expose some silicon plates, bring them back in and parachute to Earth where he could put them in his room-sized mass spectrometer and measure O18 from the Sun. His proposal got smashingly good reviews.

Even NASA said it was great, but couldn't fund it because the acronym wasn't pronounceable. (Seriously.)

So he renamed it GENESIS, and proposed it again.

This time NASA funded it, and everything went great except the parachutes didn't open. (They were wired backwards.) The return capsule hit the Utah desert at over a hundred miles per hour.

However, he did collect enough Silicon wafer fragments out of the crater to put in his machine.

What did he find?

The O18 was more numerous than O16 on Earth.

What does this mean?

Laplace was wrong. Again.

Too late to tell Immanuel Kant, but now you won't have to make the same "god-of-the-gaps" mistake. Because Newton was right.

God is still in the gap.