Hebrews 11:3 NIV By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
John Engelbrecht Nov 17 2016 Hebrews 11:3 is as close as I currently see to nucleosynthesis as being the source during creation of nuclei heavier than helium.
Following the modern physics view of creation, a lot of it is parallel to what Genesis says. (Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists don't like the Big Bang because it implies a beginning, not an infinity of time.) The main lack of parallelism is no obvious mention of nucleosynthesis in the Bible. This lack has interested me for four years.
But Hebrews 11:3 might be a hint. If God would take a person back to Genesis 1:3-4, "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness," the person might see the result from the Big Bang, after the first three minutes, when the nuclei are formed, and see 76% hydrogen (including deuterium) and 24% helium, with just a trace of lithium. There is no carbon, nitrogen, or other elements to make life from. This could be "what was visible" in the Hebrews verse. To get the life atoms, God could have used his new physics to allow large, hot, blue stars to form. They quickly (mere millions of years, by the accounting of modern physics) run through their hydrogen fuel and burn helium to make carbon. Elements up to iron might form, but that is only atomic number 26, whereas iodine, number 53, is needed for life, and the cool element gold is way up at 79.
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast122/lectures/lec18.html See the diagrams. There are similar web sites that give an even better idea.
But a star with original mass less than 25 solar masses slowly cools to become a black dwarf and suffer heat death. [Whatever heavy elements are in the core stay there and are not available to make life.]
So the lighter stars make most of the life atoms but they are trapped in the cooling stars. Now, think about stars greater than 25 solar masses. They undergo a more violent end to their lives. Carbon core burning lasts for 600 years for a star of this size. Neon burning for 1 year, oxygen burning about 6 months ... At 3 billion degrees, the core can fuse silicon nuclei into iron and the entire core supply of silicon is used up in one day. An inert iron core builds up at this time where successive, lighter, onion-like layers above the core continue to consume any remaining fuel of lighter nuclei. The iron core is about the size of the Earth, compressed to extreme densities and near the Chandrasekhar limit. The outer regions of the star have expanded to fill a volume as large as Jupiter's orbit from the Sun. Since iron does not act as a fuel, the burning stops.
The sudden stoppage of energy generation forces the core into gravitational collapse and the outer layers of the star fall tens of thousands of miles onto the core in about one second. The infalling layers collapse so fast that they 'bounce' off the iron core [after reaching terminal speed of 15 to 25% the speed of light, which is a tremendous kinetic energy, since kinetic energy goes up by the square of the speed. Some of the core is mashed into a new black hole.] The rebound causes the star to explode as a type II supernova. The energy released during this explosion is so immense that the star will outshine an entire galaxy for a few days [as seen in total electromagnetic energy. Just in the visible light, the Large Magellanic Cloud 1987A supernova's visible-light peak was at 85 days. The decay of cobalt 56 prolongs the radiation from the supernova. See lecture 9 in http://www.astro.bas.bg/~petrov/hawley99.html.]
The pressure and temperature of the infall are so extreme that all nuclei up to and even past uranium are formed. In the shock-wave explosion caused by the bounce off the iron core, all these new nuclei spew out into space and form new gas and dust clouds. It is thought that new stars and solar systems form, and the habitable earth is an example. The elements needed for life are present.
Now we return to the Hebrews verse. Before the supernova, "what was visible" did not include life atoms, just hydrogen and helium. After the supernova, and after the solar system forms, "what is seen" are the life atoms in life-friendly abundances on the earth, with the atoms bound in molecules that are friendly to life. This seems to John Engelbrecht to be just a hint in the Bible of nucleosynthesis.
It is interesting that nuclear energy from fission, and the destruction of fission bombs, was very difficult for man to obtain. Perhaps God set it up that way so that man was safe until man was somewhat able to use reason to manage nuclear proliferation. The first, man-made, fission reactor had a sustained chain reaction on December 2, 1942 at the University of Chicago. This first fission pile did not use any enrichment by U-235, it used tons of natural uranium oxide from Norman Hilberry and R. L. Doan and also uranium metal from Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, Metal Hydrides Company, and F. H. Spedding, who worked at Iowa State College at Ames, Iowa.
Nuclear energy from fusion of hydrogen to helium is similarly hard to accomplish. In 1929, a paper by R. d'E. Atkinson and F. G. Houtermans predicted that the fusing together of the nuclei of very light atoms (such as hydrogen) would produce new atoms that would weigh less than the total weight of the original constituents. According to Einstein's formula, this loss of mass should produce the enormous energy of stars. Hans Bethe went on to produce the quantitative theory of fusion energy in stars that would earn him a Nobel Prize. The U.S. fusion bombs were the first man-made fusion, and all fusion bombs since use fission bombs to provide compression of hydrogen. "Cold fusion" and tokamaks and other exotic devices to make fusion in plasma do not yet work very well.
If Hebrews 11:3 is a hint at nucleosynthesis, the next question is how the cosmologists' time span fits or doesn't fit the Genesis account.
More about the core collapse ... Once the silicon burning phase has produced an iron core the fate of the star is sealed. Since iron will not fuse to produce more energy, energy is lost by the productions of neutrinos through a variety of nuclear reactions. Neutrinos, which interact very weakly with matter, are not hindered by all the matter above them, and immediately leave the core taking energy with them. The core contracts and the star teeters on the edge of oblivion. As the core shrinks, it increases in density. Electrons are forced to combine with protons to make neutrons and more neutrinos, called neutronization. The core cools more, and becomes an extremely rigid form of matter. This entire process only takes 1/4 of a second [,which is comparable to the speed of light transiting across the width of the core.] http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast122/lectures/lec18.html