Roger Dana, Ph. D., led a discussion that highlighted the Big Bang and Bell Curve are connected via science.

Dana said he began putting together this presentation back in 2017, when more anti-science and anti-vaxxers were getting more coverage.

“I was really offended by that, and wanted to put together a rebuttal,” Dana said. “This isn’t really a rebuttal, but a speech that highlights the integrity, rigor and beauty of science.”

Dana started explaining how the Gaussian distribution, also known as the Bell Curve or normal distribution, is important to science.

“You can observe a Galton board’s distribution, and you’ll see some higher numerals compared to the bell curve, as well as some lower,” Dana said. “But that is a random process, and if you look at the results, most of the curve is towards the middle. That happens again and again, from bin to bin.”

Dana then walked through how radio signals work.

A radio is a speaker and an automatic aim control for those listening. When the aim control matches the signal of the radio, that’s when the sound of the radio comes in the strongest.

“What you don’t notice is that the radio noise is always there,” Dana said. “When you find the right frequency, the speaker is able to broadcast a clear signal that overpowers the radio noise.”

When you are not fully locked into a radio signal, you hear that static alongside the signal you’re trying to hear.

Dana said in radio science, the important data is the signal in period compared to noise in the same timeframe.

Long distance communication via radio was important in World War II, and was helped by scientist and actress Hedy Lamarr.

When scientists began turning their eyes to space, they began to wonder how they could best send signals from a long distance to be heard and understood back on Earth.

The Russians were first to fire an orbital satellite into orbit in 1957, which spurred the United States to increase funding to science, technology, engineering and math fields for the next couple of decades.

The U.S. were able to send their own satellites and ships into orbit in the coming years.

One of the biggest accomplishments for NASA was launching Mariner 4, which was a satellite whose orbit would take it past Mars.

The challenge with that launch came to how the device could communicate to Earth from such long distances. An even bigger challenge was the device only had a total of 310 watts of power to work with.

With Mars being more than 36 million miles away, the strength of the signal would weaken due to that distance.

Scientists worked on how to get the amount of modulation in the signal by finding the maximum number of bits that could be modulated by a signal.

Claude Shannon was the scientist who found the limit on modulation of radio signals. That curve that he discovered followed closely to the bell curve. There is a limit to the amount of power that can be contributed to a signal before it is overpowered by noise, and that curve follows along that bell curve. If you add more and more bits to a signal as well, that also increases the signal to noise ratio along that same bell curve.

“You start to get gibberish if you’re sending too much information over the bell curve,” Dana said. “If you’re below the curve, there’s a chance you’re also being drowned out by noise.”

Scientists that came after further confirmed Shannon’s finding with their own models and testing.

Dana said that compared to the supercomputers used in the 1960s, the cell phones that many of us use to this day have far more computer processing to them and how they are able to utilize signal towers to modulate their communication.

Dana said that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were some of the first scientists that discovered cosmic microwave radiation with their antenna in the 1960s when they were using it as a telescope. They discovered a constant low level of background noise in all of their observations. Like good scientists, they ruled out all other possibilities that it wasn’t their machine or other areas that were contributing to the signal.

Robert Dicke, a scientist at Princeton University, had been pursuing a theory about the Big Bang that if there had been a big bang, residue from that explosion should form a low-level background radiation in the universe. Penzias and Wilson’s observation was an observation of that Big Bang theory.

Their observation has been confirmed and built upon by others, who are able to give even more observations of the distribution of that radiation that helps envision how galaxies are formed.

“Science is built on discoveries and understanding the underlying principles,” Dana said. “Understanding the principles and asking the correct questions leads to new discoveries. We scientists stand on the work of those done in the past. The hardest part of all research is finding out the right question to ask.”

Discussion after the presentation focused on the balance of faith and science.

Dana explained that he views the Big Bang as a creation of God.

One questioner said that some people in STEM say delving into the questions of the Big Bang Theory is heretical to God’s existence.

“My counterargument is God gave us brains,” Dana said. “If we’re not meant to use our brains, why do we have them? I think looking into how God created the universe, I think it’s understanding God beyond the Biblical story.”

Dana also outlined his faith comes from his family background. His grandparents were devout members of the Dutch Reformed church.

“I think the Bible is the inspired word of God, not the literal words of God,” Dana said. “The Genesis stories in the bible are there to help us understand that this is God’s world.”