Theory-Affirming Evidence About the Universe 542
Bill Kendrick writes "Astronomers using a radio telescope at the South Pole have recorded a flicker of light from nearly 14 billion years ago that verifies most modern theory about the cosmos. Way back then, light and matter were only just beginning to separate from each other."
Read the bible (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Read the bible (Score:3, Funny)
i always found it incredibly funny that my pastor would blame everything on "pre-flood" times where the earth was surrounded by water. i'm sure he would say this light was somehow affected in its transmission through the old water barrier and thus it proves that the world is 6000 years old.
"what about carbon dating?" the pressure from the flood of course
"evolution?" days wasted here, pointless... if we evolved why are there still monkeys?
either way, i've disassociated myself from the church... bullheaded morons. that is why i spend all my time on slashdot where i can be free from that. [/sarcasm]
No where does the Bible say earth's age.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway when I read this:
"when matter and light were only just beginning to separate from one another."
I thought of this:
Genesis 1:3 And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
I believe Genesis was inspired by God, but written though a person. I think the author of Genesis did a pretty good job trying to find words and descriptions for what they were shown.
Saved By Grace,
Brian Ellenberger
Re:No where does the Bible say earth's age.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, the two creation myths in the Bible don't even match up with each other, much less with what actually happened.
Re:No where does the Bible say earth's age.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No where does the Bible say earth's age.... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient
http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_bibl.htm
This hasn't exactly been hiding since the bible was written.
Actually, it does (Score:2)
If you assume that a "day" really means "day" in the Bible for the first 7 days (and why wouldn't you?) and then add up all the ages of the people listed from generation to generation, you get a fairly conclusive age for the universe according to the Bible. (I don't know if off the top of my head, but I know it's there) Now, you could argue that a the first 7 days in the Bible are actually billions of years long. But then if you start saying that words in the Bible mean different things than what we normally attribute words for, then you're allowing yourself to make up whatever you want to believe in and interpret the Bible however you want.
Re:Actually, it does (Score:2)
One might also point out that there is nothing that connects the Garden of Eden story to the sixth or seventh day of Genesis chapter 1. For all we know thousands or millions of years had passed between chapters 1 and 2.
Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
I read a site once "How to talk creation to a Jehovah's Witness" that was pointed to from the AiG people. They brought up a good point, that if the day was 1000 years then why did God create plants and then wait a thousand years before creating the insects to polinate them?
But that doesn't matter much to me since I personally think that the 1000 years time thing sufferes from the same problem as the 24hour thing (i.e. the sun hadn't been made yet). So I never subscribed to that view anyway.
I just take the Bible for face value.
I don't think plants being around on the third day discredits it either, since light existed on the first day, before the sun came around. And since light was present from the first day, there is no reason that you can't have plants.
People just think its the sun, becuase it is such a common light to us here on earth, but not becuase they read Genisis very well. Don't worry, not until a few years ago did I realize the "light" in the first verse wasn't the sun either. The sun is just way to prevelant in our lives for us not to think it is.
But I motice that God points out clearly in those verses that his first light and day was something different then what we are used to.
Here's the verses again...
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
It seems pretty clear to me that the "sun" is the greatest light during the day and he made it the fourth day. He also says that "days" didn't happen in some sence or other until the fourth day, along with seasons and years. Its all just straight forward and plain to me.
If AiG realized that, I think they'd realize it corresponds with AiG's other positions a lot better also, like starting with a small select group of "types" of animals becoming the many species we have seen since the Fall rather then populating the earth him/herself. God did things in stages, you need water, light and earth before vegetation and begetation before animals...etc. I think it started out small in the garden and things were told to "multiply and replenish the earth."
Actually I digress. I actually came to a simular conclusion as them on many respects independantly before I read them, which is why I liked their site so much. And when they tied it all together with the Fall it made a lot of sense with what I already believed.
If i instead read several verses that say the same thing, then I can be sure of it. This is where JW's and Mormons etc. have their problems.
Actually, the JW's and Mormons would probably argue that you are only taking verses that sound the same, and ignoring the ones that may not point where you want it to.
One of them being God's reproval of Job where he says...
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"
Honestly, I think Job was an anti-deluvian work. probably the only one book except the Book of Enoch that survived the flood. But that is just my theory. Either way, I think that laying the foundation of the earth was either before the "beginning" or during the first two days, yet we already have "all the sons of God" or all the players to go on to the stage. To me "Beginning" or "The beginning" means the start of some particular stage in God's plan, specifically relating to us. It could be the start of the whole universe or "time" but I don't find anything beyond it being the start of a stage in God's plan.
Also, since the "days" weren't created until the fourth day (in God's time) that makes the "Ancient of Days" Adam rather then God (which makes sence since God's throne doesn't have wheels which show God giving power to move). I don't agree with the JW's or anyone else who thinks Adam was a bad guy, since Christ is called the "second Adam" and "last Adam" at different times. Christ wouldn't be considered an "adam" if "Adam" wasn't a good guy.
Speaking of crazy beliefs, I've been perplexed how Christians say "you can't be saved by your works" and then tell people "you will be saved if you do this..." which is usually a very specific and prescribed "work" they have to do (like praying, acknowledging, etc...) That sure sounds an awful lot like they are being saved because of something they are doing.
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
Stop right there. Your pastor's a Jack Chick level moron.
Even if we presume that God intended to flood the world from the get-go, He didn't need to make a "second sphere" of water; he could just point to a cloud and say "make it rain", and alter creation to keep the water pouring.
The simple fact is that the universe looks like it's 14 billion years old. Either it really is this old, we've misinterpreted the data and it's a different age, or God created it looking 14 billion less 6,000.
*sigh*
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
Re:Read the bible (Score:2, Insightful)
Im not just talking half man-half ape... It could be 1/4 man 3/4 ape... or anywhere in between there.
Never a chance for those fossils to form?
billions of years?
I understand that not EVERYTHING fossilizes, but were talking b/millions of years here. It takes a more than little faith for me to believe that too.
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
Now, I'll grant you that we still don't have a complete idea of how humans arose; there are some serious gaps in the data and in our theories. But, come on, there's all kinds of skeletons out there. I'm sorry, but if you don't know about them, that can be only because you're choosing to remain ignorant of the evidence.
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
Ok, I admit I was speaking a bit figuratively. By "tons" I mean "a bunch of". Good enough?
producing only assertions, and telling the other side they are ignorant of the evidence. All you have made are assertions and no evidence.
Of course I haven't produced the evidence, because this is Slashdot. What, you expect we to spend 5 hours looking at the web and books to find references that the parent poster may or may not look at anyway?
Open up any university-level biology or anthropology text, read that, go to the references, and find it yourself. I'm certainly not going to do all that for you. But the bottom line is that the evidence is all out there, and if one says it isn't, one is choosing to not educate oneself about it. Unless I'm your professor in a class, and getting paid to teach the person, that is so not my problem.
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
Ok, I'll be more specific. Say 40-50.
I'll grant you, that's not a whole lot of data to span 3.5x10^6 years. And of course the data is widely disputed. That's how science works. Many different people have many different ideas about how these all fit together, and who knows who is right? There are some fundamental questions which do not have satisfying answers.
In summary, I'll grant you that there is perhaps too little evidence, and that much of it is ambiguous and controversial. But there original poster said something quite different, which is that there is no evidence. And that is bullshit which arose from the original poster's ignorance of the subject.
Slow progression (Score:2)
And there are fossil records of our ancestors: homo erectus, homo habilis, australopithecus afaranus and so on.
Re:Read the bible (Score:2, Informative)
Just because you don't know about the countless intermediary fossils that we've discovered for many species, including our own, doesn't mean they exist. We've got quite a nice progression from our common ancestor with ape to modern man, thankyouverymuch.
The Talk.Origins FAQ Archive [talkorigins.org]
Piltdown Man (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, you're correct about Piltdown Man; he was a fraud perpetrated by a rather small group of British researchers (including, of all people, Arthur Conan Doyle.) He is mentioned in many scientific and literary works of the early 20th Century, including the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. It was a wildly successful piece of scientific trickery and deceit, perhaps the most successful hoax in history.
But here's the thing: it wasn't anti-evolution activists or Baptist ministers who exposed Piltdown as the fraud it was. The truth came out of a process that started at an international congress of paleontologists in 1953. That's right; the same scientific establishment that you are accusing of widespread fraud and corruption is responsible for learning the truth about Piltdown Man. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find a biology textbook written any time after 1958 that mentions Piltdown Man in any context other than that he was a fraud. Find me a modern biology textbook that references Piltdown Man as evidence for evolutionary common descent.
Good luck.
Compare and contrast this with the creation science community. Many (but not all) of these folks consistently refer to theories and pieces of physical evidence that have long been debunked or shown to be fraudulent. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is references to the Paluxy River tracks, which some claim show human tracks next to dinosaur tracks, suggesting that man and dinos were contemporaries. This "evidence" was debunked a long time ago, and even the Institute for Creation Research [icr.org], an organization not known for its strong committment to the scientific method, has suggested that "honest creation scientists" not use the Paluxy River tracks as evidence for a young Earth.
That's just one example of creationists providing false and/or debunked evidence for their particular brand of creationism. The list goes on and on; we've got ridiculous claims that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, we've got the false stories about moon dust and about how NASA was afraid that Apollo 11 would get mired in it, we've got the urban legend about NASA computers "finding" the missing day from Joshua's siege on Jericho, etc. etc.
The point is this: Before you accuse scientists en masse of widespread fraud, lies, and deception, you might want to consider getting your own house in order first. The Piltdown Man debacle demonstrates that scientists are ever skeptical and are willing to admit when they are wrong and have been misled. Are you and yours capable of the same honesty?
Re:Piltdown Man (Score:2)
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
Sure lets use common-sense. It may suprise you that mountains are not typically BILLIONS of years old. They may have materials that are very old but their current elevation is due to the process uplifted. The rocky mountains for instance starting uplifting several 100 million years ago at best.
BTW there are lots of common sense geological features that nix a young earth arguement in the bud. For example, angular unconformties. There really is not a good young earth arguement for their existence. Examples abound, perhaps even in your neighborhood. Here [sammcgees.com] is one from my collection. Such a feature requires several steps such as deposition, lithification (cementation), tilting, erosion, and deposition again. This takes time - and lot of it
Or here is another of my favorites [sammcgees.com]. Here it is obvious that several processes are required to layer the column and then erode the river channel. If you are a YEC then indicate which feature was cause by the flood?
Re:Source of Scientific Knowledge (Score:3, Insightful)
The creationists don't *have* a theory. A theory has to have evidence, and it has to be refutable. Saying "God did it!" fails on both counts.
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
Re:Read the bible (Score:5, Informative)
Ah - this is complicated. It comes from ancient Egypt. The Egyptian civil calender was divided into months consisting of three decades (ten days) each, with 5 or so extra days tacked on at the end (New Year was fixed at the rising of Sirius, which signaled the inundation of the Nile - the most important event in the calender). This gives 36 decades in a year. The start of each decade during the year was marked by the rising of a particular star, and these stars were called decans. During any particular night you would see at least twelve decans rise, at roughly equal intervals. So it was natural to divide the night into 12 time periods. By analogy the day was also divided into 12 periods (actually, 10 - one was set aside for the twilight at both the begining and the end of the day). Hence the 24 period day came about.
Not quite.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The first man (Adam) of the Bible shows up around 6000 years ago. Interestingly, this is within a couple of orders of magnitude of when it's thought humans developed speech communication abilities. (There was a
I'm a believer in the "period of time" angle on that word, thinking that God created the world via the means of evolution. Don't get me started about why we still have monkeys!
Ben
Re:Not quite.. (Score:2)
Scientific Phrase: "Correct within an order of Magnitude"
Translation: Wrong
Re:Not quite.. (Score:2)
Re:Read the bible (Score:2, Funny)
No no no, the universe is 6000 years old. Haven't you played CivII?
Re:Read the bible (Score:3, Funny)
The Universe was created in 1983. All evidence to the contrary (including our memory of 1982) was fabricated by God to test our faith. Those who disagree are certainly among the hellbound.
Steve
Re:Read the bible (Score:4, Funny)
You sure about that? I always thought the beginning of time was January 1 1970.
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
HTH
Re:Read the bible (Score:5, Funny)
You obviouly didn't look too deep into quantumn mechanics. They are 'designed' pretty badly
Fine. Let's see your design...
your sig... (Score:2)
Re:your sig... (Score:2)
Well, just read the site...for instance:
"The 4 quadrant corners of the Earth sphere rotate as a quad spiraling helix - thus creating
4 simultaneous days per each rotation and 4 simultaneous years per 1 orbit around Sun.
Greenwich day is of stupidity."
I mean, what could be clearer than that?
Re:your sig... (Score:2)
4 simultaneous days per each rotation and 4 simultaneous years per 1 orbit around Sun.
Greenwich day is of stupidity."
I mean, what could be clearer than that?
Um, a brick wall? Or maybe ten thousand gallons of chocolate ice cream?
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
"Lawyers and tax collecters earn too much money, while teachers don't"
"Good doesn't always win out over evil"
"Some people start the game bigger/faster/smarter than other people"
These kinds of balance issues take TIME, okay? No wonder the dev stopped talking to the players years ago. All we do is complain.
Re:Yep! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yep! (Score:2, Funny)
The rules that say "don't wear your cotton/wool blend shirt", "It's okay to enslave your neighbor", and "If your sister's husband dies, it's your duty to impregnate her"?
Remember, "Jesus" said that he wasn't changing the rules, just fulfilling them...so those old rules are still in effect.
Guess we're all condemmed.
OR, alternatively, consider this: God is ominipotent, right? So he can do whatever he wants, right? But you're saying the only way he has chosen to honor his creation is by this one thin path as represented in this book that they can't even agree on the contents of?
Or is it possible that an omnipotent God has the power to provide multiple roads to happiness, the heavily proscriptive "Thou must do this and not that" road for those too simpleminded to contemplate making their own decisions, and the "Do as thou will, so long as it hurt no others" for those who have the intelligence and ability to live their life their own way?
You have to admit it's possible, or else God isn't omnipotent. Pick one.
Take it easy dude! (Score:2)
Ben
Re:Yep! (Score:2)
Re:Yep!yo bible scholar be my name, rizzo tsarkon (Score:2)
This religion will surely bring the most rewards!
Anything else is just hippy-flower-sniffing!
Screw quality of life - it's quality of death that concerns us!
Re:Not in disagreement with the Bible... (Score:2)
> "billions and billions of stars," when he was
> alive he resented people quoting him as saying
> such because of the mathematical redundancy and
> incorrectness of the statement.
He mentioned that in his last book - "Billions and Billions", of course. He attributed it to Johnny Carson's caricature of him.
Of course he *did* say at least one thing in Cosmos that sounds vaguely similar:
"Most of stellar evolution takes *millions* or *billions* of years, but the interior collapse that triggers a supernova explosion lasts only seconds."
Ages ago, I sampled _Cosmos_ on my Amiga to generate messages for my answering machine. (Okay, so I'm a science geek
Re:Read the bible (Score:2)
Hey, nothing personal, but you do.
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. That's like God's own first post.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. That's like God's own first post.
"There may be a short delay before your comment becomes part of the static page."
Re:Heh (Score:2, Funny)
Yahoo! News Links (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yahoo! News Links (Score:2)
When they went to search for early universe radiation, what if radio asronomers got, "404 - Link Moved or Not Found."?
Would that require a new cosmic theory?
Sunglasses on the face of god. (Score:4, Funny)
Is this polarization confirmation he was wearing shades?
about how old he was.
New Scientist Article has more (Score:5, Informative)
Matter (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Matter (Score:2)
The great breakup (Score:5, Funny)
14 billion years ago, matter and light were inseperable. They went everywhere together. Friends cheerfully complemented them on their strong attachment to each other, but whispered behind their backs about 'co-dependency'.
Then, something happened. No one apart from a few math-sodden physics profs are quite sure what is was. Some say matter was too indecisive, today forming simple hydrogen isotopes, tomorrow churning out all sorts of unstable heavy metals. Others blame light for being too inflexible, not wanting to 'move too fast'.
Whatever the cause was, matter and light decided to separate. Matter moved on, churning out everything from noble gases to metals that explode in water, satisfying every creative urge. Light, the brighter of the two, contented to be always aglow, yet unafraid to reveal shadows when the opportunity arose.
The tragic part of the tale involves the unfortunate castoff children of the great breakup, as divorces are never easy on offspring. Cosmic ray wreaks havoc anywhere and everywhere. Cynical X-Ray prefers to reveal everything hidden, as if compensating for repressed emotion. Young microwave is communicative, but very hot under the collar, and don't even ask about Gamma ray. Maybe someday the children of the great breakup will work out their issues.
Explain this to me... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Explain this to me... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Explain this to me... (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine an infinite rubber sheet covered in dots. At the beginning of the universe (or as early as we can postulate) this sheet started stretching in all directions , so the dots on it became further apart. This is similar to what happened to the universe, except in the universe it was 3 dimentional. So there is no special place where the big bang happened, it was everywhere
Since the universe was always infinite and the big bang happened everywhere on the 'sheet', as we look further away we see further back in time. This means light is always coming from every age of the universe since the big bang for us to see. The light in this case came from when the 'sheet' stretched just enough for the density of the universe to allow light to pass freely without being continually absorbed and re-emitted. This is the base microwave background radiation.
This article is saying polarisation has been detected which means some evidence of the lights last scattering event is present, so this tells us something about the universe at the point when it became opaque to light.
Re:Explain this to me... (Score:2)
Actually, it pretty much is. Although it is sometimes hard to describe these sorts of objects and events with methaphors from our own life, this is actually a reasonably good metaphor. According to every version of the Big Bang Theory I'm aware of, a crucial component of the theory is that all the crap in the universe was extremely close together (some would say at a 0-dimensional point, some would say just really small --- near the size of the proton). Then, for some reason or another, the universe just started expanding, and is pretty big now. So the conventional explosition analogy is actually quite good.
Now, of couse, if you don't buy the Big Bang theory, then you probably don't subscribe to the "all the shit was in one small place" part of it. Ok, this is reasonable. (And I'm not talking about creationists or any bullshit like that, I mean that there is a serious academic debate in the community as to whether or not the Big Bang happened.) But if you're using the words "Big Bang", then you sort of mean "conventional explosion from a singular point".
Another thing I want to mention is that you claim that the universe was always infinite and it's just stretching. According to most current theory, this is not true. Most cosmologists would say that the universe is finite in size, and anyone who subscribes to the BB theory must say the universe is finite in size, since it could only have grown a finite amount in 15 (or whatever) billion years.
As an aside, just because the universe is finite does not mean that we could go far enough and hit an edge. Cosmologists also believe that the universe wraps on itself in a higher dimensional way, so that we could travel in a "straight line" for an infinite amount of time without hitting and edge. For those of you who don't have the mathematics, think of a lower-dimensional analogy. Look at a guy on the surface of a sphere with finite radius (Earth e.g.) This dude can walk in a "straight line" for an infinite time, just by circling the globe.
The question has also been asked in this thread: "why are we seeing light from 14 billion years ago now? Will we see 15 billion years ago in a billion years?" The answer is no. The reason we see light from 14 billion years ago is that light travels (hah) at the speed of light. So if you look at an object or region of space which is 14 billion light-years away, you will see it as it was 14 bya. The reason that,these days, we can see further "back in time" is that we can simply see further out in space. Presumably, if we could see far enough away to see far enough back in time, we would be able to observe the BB.
Re:Explain this to me... (Score:2)
Re:Explain this to me... (Score:2)
Actually, in answer to your questions, I would say that they don't really have an answer. First of all, as I said in an earlier post (which is perhaps in this thread), the BB theory is even being called into question pretty seriously. But even given that one accepts the theory absolutely, then who knows the answers to those questions?
Certainly, the answer to "what triggered the bang?" is "Who the fuck knows?" The only philosophically satisfying answer I could come up with is that the universe just had an explosion "built-in". Which of course explans nothing.
The question about what was outside the particle is also not really well defined. I can't think of a way we would ever observe "outside the universe" (and we certainly can't now). Therefore, a scientist can't answer the question. Maybe it's a big-ass stack of turtles, who knows? If you can't observe a phenomenon, what can you say about it?
Re:Explain this to me... (Score:2)
Somebody back then got tired of paying high prices for real-estate, and thus found a way to create more space.
IOW, our universe is capitalism at work.
Re:Explain this to me... (Score:2)
I nominate you for "understatement of the year".
Thanks. But, hey, I'm a mathematician, so I'm used to dealing with things a lot bigger then just one measly universe. I mean, anything finite is just trivial...;-)
How would this be possible? Isn't all the light from the BB traveling AWAY from us? Assuming that the big bang comprised all the matter in the universe, there would be nothing for the light to bounce off so it should still be unhindered on its initial vector.
That's a good question. One way to get around your objection is to say that the universe could have expanded at more than the speed of light for a big portion of its existence, so the light hasn't been catching up with the expansion. Ok, that might be a little crazy, but doesn't really violate relativity as far as I can see.
But let's say it was expanding slower. Your intuition is good that you would have expected the light to pass us already. But if you buy the dominant theories in cosmology right now, then there is an explantion. (Let me stress that just about anything cosmologists say can be, and in many cases is, complete bullshit. It's a new science which is on shaky ground, so give it some time.) Anyway, the current mode of thinking is that the universe is finite, but it has "a nontrivial topology". Long story short, what we mean by that is that it has curved on itself. For example, consider a 2-D sphere in 3-space. For a person on the surface of the sphere, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that you're on a plane. Yet, if you travel in one direction forever, you'll never hit an "edge". So, if light rays travelled around the surface of the earth, you could conceivably just look further and further around the world. Of course, eventually you would see the back of your own head.
A sphere is a good example, but there are more interesting ones. For example, imagine that you live on the surface of a "torus", or, essentially, the surface of a doughnut. And, imagine light rays travel along the surface also. In this case, you could also travel, or look, forever. This is more interesting than the sphere, because if you choose the right angle, there are lines which travel around the torus and never come back to meet themselves (unlike great circles on a sphere). So, if you were to pick the right angle, you could sent a laser which would go infinitely far, yet never hit yourself in the ass. Conversely, you could see "infinitly far" but not see the back of your head.
Ok, now imagine that what we see as 3-space is really the surface of some crazy object in 4-D space. Why not? If you think about it long enough, you could convince yourself that it may be possible to send out a laser which could go an infinite distance without hitting itself, or, conversely, you could see an "infinite distance" without seeing your own ass.
Now, how does the BB work with this? Well, again imagine that the universe is a 2-sphere in 3-space. It starts off really small, and grows at some rate. Ok, fine, the light rays which were created at the inception of the sphere are moving faster than the sphere is growing, so they blow by you. But every light ray just keeps on travelling around the sphere, and will eventually come back. Thus, from any point, it could be possible to see infinitely far back into the past. So that is how one could see the light from the BB, it's just taken some complicated path (as perceived by a 4-D being) to get here.
Again, let me stress that all of the above, like all cosmology, is based on some shaky stuff. The mathematics of it are pretty solid, but the claim that the math models the real world is not satisfied to many people's satisfaction. Let me stress that it could all easily be bullshit, and we'll probably figure out in 30 years that it mostly was. But, that being said, it's the best theory we have right now, so you gotta go with what you got.
Re:Explain this to me... (Score:3, Interesting)
"The Whole Shebang" by Timothy Ferris
or, at a singificantly higher level (i.e. used in my graduate Cosmology course):
"Cosmological Physics" by John A. Peacock
The Great Expanding Rubber Room (Score:2)
The "Rubber Room" analogy seems to answer more questions than the "Rubber Sheet" analogy. Who ever said a diety had to be sane?
For example, why would a "stable" diety need to hear hymns about him/her/it-self over and over again? To me, that would suggest an ego problem.
Slashdot sensationalism... (Score:2, Informative)
It is getting quite disgusting as how Slashdot's editors are allowing this site to become the new "weekly world news". what's next stories about a two headed alien worm baby and a phycic moose found in northern canada?
This is my office mate's Ph.D. thesis (Score:5, Informative)
He provides an excellent lay (and more complicated,
if you're interested) introduction to what's going on here.
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that people
have been looking for this phenomenon for 20 years, and if someone finally said conclusively, "It's not there" that means the last few decades of cosmology would literally have been back to the drawing board.
This really is an exciting timne in cosmology.
Re:This is my office mate's Ph.D. thesis (Score:4, Funny)
This is probably more information than we needed, but I'm happy for you and your office mate.
Re:so the universe is only 14 billion years old? (Score:3, Informative)
Another discussion on measuring the age of the universe can be found here [ucla.edu].
Re:so the universe is only 14 billion years old? (Score:5, Insightful)
When astronomers look at really old objects and say "ah, these are 13 billion light years away, therefore we are looking 13 billion years into the past"... how does that work?
If the universe used to be really tiny and it's been expanding, is it expanding faster than the speed of light? Because if it isn't, why didn't that light from 13 billion years ago pass us a long time ago.
What am I missing here?
Here [nasa.gov] for example, NASA scientists say they discovered a galaxy that they think is 13 billion light years away.
If the universe is 14 billion years old, that would imply that it expanded faster than the speed of light in a very short time, leaving us 14 billion light years from these galaxies, so that the light would take 14 billion years to get to us. Maybe another possibility is that the rate or expansion is just under the speed of light, so that we (or our point in space) used to be fairly close to those galaxies, but the expansion was going on during the entire 14 billion years at such a high speed that the light from those galaxies is only now catching up to us.
On the other hand, if the speed of light always appears to be a constant, that last idea wouldn't work... or would it, since the entire universe would be expanding?
I never heard any of this discussed... what do the physicists say?
Re:so the universe is only 14 billion years old? (Score:3, Troll)
Re:so the universe is only 14 billion years old? (Score:4, Informative)
See also my earlier post [slashdot.org]
Re:so the universe is only 14 billion years old? (Score:4, Informative)
Suggested reading: http://hepth.hanyang.ac.kr/~sglee/thesis.ps
Re:so the universe is only 14 billion years old? (Score:2)
-l
Re:Isn't that odd? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is quite logical, actually. It's just a consequence of Hubble's Law [uiuc.edu]. Basically it's about light shifting frequency due to relative movement, kind of like how the siren of a policecar "changes" its sound when it passes by. Someone with a better grasp of astro-physics should be able to give a much better explanation - anyone?
Re:hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
I am relatively convinced that there are people smart enough to understand that which can only be verified as a single point observer. The verification of a system of this scale is exceedingly difficult - but should be just be defeatist and mire ourselves in religious texts and ignore the existence of the cosmos and remaining in a comfort zone?
There are those who watch, say Star Trek (in reality there are quite a few people inspire by this show who do interesting things), and want this to be true, even in the face of near impossibly using the same physics that helped to verify the "flicker of light" in article above. They will spend a lifetime seek what now seems foolish. Then there are those who are defeatist and simply what to fulfill Maslow's triangle and live this life out.
If you would have asked about getting to the moon 200 years ago you would have been told its impossible.
Same situation today; the question we ask is faster than light travel? Are there transcendental methods of travel? Do the fundamental laws of physics change as the universal timeline progresses, . as some recent studies have suggested [academicpress.com]?
One of the more intriguing things about intelligent people I meet is this; they all know that intelligence aptitude may be innate, this can be leveraged with conditioning, but the ultimate test of intellect is to realize that the more you find out the more you realize how much less of the whole you seek you know. The universe, physics, even material science regarding CPUs, signaling in hard drives (what does the signal really look like that is a 1 or 0? You would be surprised. )is inexorably complex.
I think accepting the work of those who are doing what some day may be the salvation of human existence. Being a scientist these days isn't easy. But they must have fun. It pays bad, the aprecation by your peers is fleeting, religious zealots are all to quick to ignore something as basic as carbon dating and take a work of man as a literal and corporate swine, such as Carly Fiorina, expect results or you're fired (never mind the meritorious nature of your research, or the good it may produce for humanity, as were the ideals of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard [as is reflected by the huge charitable foundations left in their wake], who made equipment because it was needed by science, such as liquid chromatography machines, oscilloscopes, etc. It wasn't about the money, it was about passion for science and engineering.)
Ask yourself to have an open mind, imagine the possibilities, maybe even help to seed a super genius.
I always enjoyed physics. I enjoy using the by product of applied physics every day, TVs, planes, computers, energy, electricity, you name it, the predictability of complex systems that use the fundaments of physics and other sciences is quite impressive, and the amount of work that gets done in a planful way rather than an empirical way is also impressive. Things are build, rarely are they haphazardly conjured.
Who would I aspire to be? Carly Fiorina/Gill Bates or the next Einstein? I have a strong feeling that even the king and queen of gluttony will fade into footnotes while the real pioneers and innovated remain time honored potentially for millennia, maybe even forever...
Re:hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Having an open mind means being open to both the idea that everything you know is right and that everything you know is wrong.
Occam's Razor (the theory of takest the simplest explanation over the more complex one) allows science to move forward and ignore some evidence that it doesn't have an explanation for because explaining that evidence involves a more complex theory.
This is a good thing. It allows science to move forward without being mired in minutiae. However it also leaves room for doubt and future breakthroughs. Don't assume the experts are right if you don't think they make any sense.
Take, for example, a blind man mapping a field with a stone elephant in the middle of it. His map will show 4 posts in the field. He could spend a lot of time examining the posts and perhaps discover their true nature as part of the stone elephant but that detracts from his goal of mapping the field. His resulting map is correct and allows him to move on to the next step, whatever that is, but it also leaves room for a future mapper to do more research and show that the 4 posts on his map actually represent a stone elephant.
Intelligence... (Score:2)
I recently read a short story called Swarm, by Bruce Sterling. SPOILER FOLLOWS
The story is about contact between warring factions in our solar system and a hive entity called the Swarm. One of our factions is hoping to pick up advanced biological techniques from the apparently unintelligent Swarm to use in its war with the other faction. The other faction has already failed fatally in its similar efforts.
By the end of the story, the protagonists encounter a previously unknown type of larva being gestated by the Swarm. It is "Intelligence," and goes on to discuss the Swarm's position with the remaining protagonist.
It turns out that (drum roll, please) in the Swarm's long experience, intelligence is not a survival trait. Nearly all of the time, the Swarm is just plain better off without Intelligence, and has adapted to exist that way. Every now and then, such as the particular time the story occurs, the Swarm determines that it needs some Intelligence, and gestates an appropriate larva. The larva lives a few thousand years, long enough to handle the crisis, and then dies, leaving the Swarm to go its merry way.
Intelligence has proven a survival trait for the human species, at least for the past 30,000 years or so. But from Nature's perspective, that's only the short run.
Re:hmm (Score:2)
knew a the time alchemy was the beginning of
a real science. It begat chemistry after all.
And yes turning lead into gold is now possible
(although stupidly expensive and wasteful), and
a exile of youth is no longer unscientific,
merely hard to do, look up applications of
stem cells, or drug candiates like ALT-711, if
you don't believe me.
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Re:hmm only 1 God? (Score:2, Insightful)
Religeon says BELIEVE, don't doubt, don't apply logic or reasoning. Stay dumb and send me the money.
Science says DOUBT, because doubt brings questioning, reason, logic, and finally the answer.
Re:hmm only 1 God? (Score:2)
If God created the universe, what created God? And what created the creator of God? If God wasn't created, you're admitting some things don't need creation, and either sprang into being by themselves, or always were. In which case you are making it too complex... the simpler explaination is that the universe sprang into being by itself, or always was.
As for your interpretation of meaning of life for athiests, it is quite wrong for most athiests. Athiests give themselves meaning, not needing to be handed meaning from some imaginary being. Athiests are, in general, pretty happy and well.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
If the hand of god came down, and the sky thundered "The day of judgement is neigh, only true believers shall be spared from my wraith", you can be sure as hell that every atheist would convert to whatever religion the hand told us to.
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Don't confuse this with, say, paint, which emits no light... it only reflects light incident upon its surface.
Eric
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Or what if the Atheist ends up in Heaven because he worked hard to make the world better, and you fry in Hell for spending too much time reading the Bible and not enough time being like Christ? Note - I'm using "you" in the generic sense, not specifically you, netphilter.
My point is that, none of us can really know what awaits us on the other side of death, and given the infinite number of possibilities, no religion should claim that its path is a "no-brainer".
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Of course, sitting here, at my computer, in this climate controlled building, surrounded by phones, laptops with 802.11b network cards, the very epitomy of our modern technology, I'm extremely cynical about any attempt to say that there is no science, only god.
Occams razor(misspelled, most likely...) comes up a lot in these discussions, but from the wrong side. Which is simpler; that there's an all knowing, all seeing, all powerful, completely benevolent being, backed up by a chorus of angels, or that the universe was formed by a big bang caused by a single, infinitely dense piece of material exploded, and that because we exist, any arguement saying we shouldn't is flawed.
Because I exist, I cannot question whether or not I exist. If I did not exist, I wouldn't be able to question whether or not I exist.
Re:hmm (Score:2)
http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho36.htm
None of this proves in existence of god of course. However, those who believe that science has come anywhere close to explaining life are as deluded as those who take the bible literally.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
The experiment produced only about half the amino acids that are necessary for life.
But, there is no reason to doubt that the other amio acids can be similarly produced by non-miraculous means.
Non-organic reactions always produce left-handed and right-handed molecules in (roughly) equal amounts. However, only left-handed amino acids can be used in living cells.
Actually, as far as we can tell, life could exist using all right-handed amino acids also. It's quite possible that both types of life existed for a brief time, but one out-competed the other very early in earth's history.
The experiment succeeded in producing amino acids, but scientists have never been able to produce any more complex organic molecules in the lab. No DNA (not even fragments), no RNA, and certainly no proteins.
Current scientific thinking on the origin of life tends toward the idea that the earliest self-replicating molecules were simple peptides, chains of perhaps a couple dozen amino acids. Given that a lab experiment can form a bunch of amino acids in a few weeks, it's not that farfetched to imagine a chain of 30 or so to be spontaneously generated throughout the oceans of earth in a number of years.
Organic molecules tend to break down over time. This process is accelarated by water (didn't life supposedly form in the ocean?) and heat.
Last I heard, RNA is thought to have first been formed on catalytic clay substrates. But why would creation "scientists" bother to check the current theories when attacking straw men is so much easier?
No matter how many creationists point out their supposed "holes" in the mainstream scientific theories on the origins of life, they always fail to produce the one thing that would end the debate forever: ONE IOTA of SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE that GOD EXISTS and that HE CREATED LIFE.
Until such time as this first piece of evidence is seen, why should the scientific community be expected to constantly defend the whole of mainstream geology, astronomy, and biology against attacks by creationists who have NO evidence supporting their own "theories", which are all based on a creation story the ancient Hebrews borrowed from the Sumerians and some unverifiable genealogies?
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I used the Shift key. And, I closed my <i> tag.
Hundreds of years ago, prior to the discovery of viruses and other invisible realities, I'm sure there were those who believed in things that were invisible that were causing these diseases in their communities, but they could not prove it. They didn't have the means. I'm sure many of these people were laughed at. Today we respect them.
We respect them not because they believed in invisible things that happened to be real, but because they sought out and eventually obtained evidence that those things existed. In the process, they created "miracles" of science like vaccines and antibiotics. Had they simply wasted their lives telling everyone "Believe in my tiny invisible germs or you'll die - no, I don't have proof, but they must exist, otherwise how would we get sick?" we would not have respect for them, despite the fact that they turned out to be right.
It has taken man long enough to discover some of the invisible realities, and just think, these are only created things. How much more complex our Creator must be! Praise God, and God Bless America.
I'm guessing you think you're replying to an atheist, I hope it doesn't disappoint you that I agree that our Creator is mighty complex. I believe that He and His creation are far too complex to have been properly described by the nomadic hunter-gatherers of dozens of centuries ago. They are also too complex to be fully comprehended by the scientists of the 21st century, but every discovery gives us a slightly clearer picture.
Advances in the scientific understanding of nature should give believers a greater appreciation of His wisdom, rather than scaring them witless because it happens to disagree with what the Sumerians believed about creation centuries before the Bible was written down.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right. I can not prove that there is no God. Additionally, I can't prove any negative. The catch to the situation is that while you're busy looking for things that might exist solely on the premise that no one can say they don't, science is busy cataloging those things that can be proven to exist. One of these activities leads someone, and the other... well...
You'll have to pardon me, I'm going out to look for all those invisible unicorns every keeps telling me don't exist...
Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This proves God exists- it does no such thing (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, the question about why there is a universe at all has to be answered. But according to Bill Ockham's Remington, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. God + universe = two entities, universe = 1 entity, therefore, as Laplace put it, je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese.
Re:This proves God exists- it does no such thing (Score:2)
Not that I believe, but it's the only logical conclusion. :P), the desk, the windows.
For God to be omnipotent, he would have to be everything/everywhere.
The chair you're sitting on (God got a boner!
We all know the bible is the 'difinitive work' of god, written by humans.. (and the church isn't exactly full of 'Holy' men..) Who's to say god and 'Nature' are different beings, or even have a conciousness?
"god's will" is about equivalent to 'it just happens' or 'that's the way the world works'. There's only the assumption of a conciousness behind the outcome.
At least now you know that 1 'day' = 2 million 'years'. ;)
Re:This proves God exists- it does no such thing (Score:2)
Lately it seems to be coming to light that most great thinking comes from pondering dating issues.
Try an easy example (Score:2)
Okay, now a beam of light travelling from point A to point B takes 1 year to travel 1 ly. But in that same amount of time, the universe has expanded 99% of 1 ly and stretched our two points apart by that much (the universe being our two points here). So the total distance from A to B is now just under 3 ly, and our light has only gone 1. It didn't really cover a lot of ground, did it?
Work the rest out yourself. If the universe is expanding at
And this scales up or down in terms of time. Whether I used years or seconds or milliseconds makes no difference, the expansion of the universe means that things move apart at some speed, thus increasing the travel time of light without slowing it down.
Oops (Score:2)
Re:How does that work? (Score:2)
Moreover, the data doesn't say that the speed of light changed, either. Within ~ 2.5 sigma or so, the speed of light hasn't changed. For those attempting to reply to this with the Webb data re: alpha changing due to quasar absorption line shifts, look at the data. The worst point is about 2.5 sigma off, and the farthest data point is consistent with no change.
Right now, the safest thing to say is that the data (tentatively) supports the fact that the speed of light is constant over a good range of the Universe's age.
Well... (Score:2)
Re:On the subject of proving that God exists... (Score:2, Insightful)
The point you seem to be missing is that Science is a process and Creationism is a part of a faith.
Science at one time did believe the world was flat. Science questioned itself and eventually rejected an absurd notion. Faith doesn't do this.
It doesn't matter to reality one whit what people believe. The world was always round, regardless of our perception of it. All science is, is humankind's effort to gain a more correct perception. And it's an ongoing effort, which is why things like cosmology matter.
Science isn't a myth, it's a process. A process that produces results, by the way. So, the next time you turn on a light or flush a toilet, thank a scientist.
Weaselmancer
Re:So... What was there 15 billion years ago? (Score:2)
A separate question is whether our universe exists in some higher-dimensional structure, with its own timelike dimension(s). Even if it does, we'll probably never be able to determine anything about that - it may be physically (and philosophically) impossible to ever retrieve any information from "outside" of our universe.