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Controversial Cosmologist Fred Hoyle Dies At 86
MikeCamel writes: "The BBC announced today that Fred Hoyle, astronomer, science populariser and science fiction writer, died yesterday, aged 86. He is best known for having coined the phrase 'Big Bang,' though he was actually an opponent of the idea, and advocated the 'steady state' theory. He also believed that life didn't start on Earth, but that we were 'seeded' from outer space."
farrellj adds: "Hoyle was famous for a number of things, inventing the term 'Big Bang,' figuring out how stars create the heavier elements, and his most controversial, the idea that the seeds of life on earth came from space. He was also a noted Science Fiction writer, with many books, sometimes co-authored with his son, Geoffrey. We have lost one of the more original thinkers in the field of Astrophysics. You can read more at the NY Times site. (free reg. required, yadda yadda)"
So, did he die all at once in a sudden implosion, or gradually fade away over a long period of time?
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
We need good scientists who refuse to accept the commonly accepted explanations. The scientific method is good at testing theories, but we need people who can create alternative theories so they can be tested.
Of course, when you're talking about universe formation, the repeatability part is kind of awkward.
--
E_NOSIG
I find it incredibly cool that the guy who invented (or at least first classified) the term "Big Bang" didn't susbscribe to the theroy behind it.
GCM d+ s+:+ a- c++ U? P! L E-- W++ NM+ V PS- PE+ Y+ PGP- t 5+ X?+ R+++$ tv+ b+ DI++++ D---- G e
to give us a working non-reg link? me no how to typie..
2 2HOYL.html
http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/08/22/obituaries/
"Big Bang Theorist Fred Hoyle Dies At Age 86"
"...he was actually an opponent of the idea..."
So he wasn't actually a theorist of the Big Bang?
I really liked his ideas about Texas Hold'em, Canasta and Honeymoon Bridge. My granddad used to say "do it according to Hoyle's or don't do it" and I understand now he was referring to the physics of the universe! Wow!
AC's cheerfully ignored
Did he go out with a bang? A big one?
Blog,Twitter
The title of the article describes Hoyles as a "Big Bang Theorist", then the body says he was an opponent of the theory.
Dumb.
Actually, Hoyle was not the only one who didn't support what he "invented".. Einstein himself strengthened the base of quant fysics but believed in determinism. I am sorry if I didn't spell this stuff correctly, as I haven't learnt those words in english class just yet. :P
The unfortunate truth (unfortunate for him, where he is now I mean):
... more like he *still is*.
... not any more, now I'm sure he advocates the Bible.
... again: not anymore.
"he was actually an opponent of the idea"
"advocated the "steady state" theory"
"He also believed that life didn't start on Earth"
and I'm not trying to joke around either, I grieve for him, however, he chose his path and the consequences of it and that cannot change for all eternity.
I don't think he would've been too pleased to be called a big bang theorist - he was an advocate of the steady state theory, and came up with the name 'big bang' to make fun of the then opposing cosmological theory. Ironically, the name 'big bang' stuck.
I was a graduate student at the IoA in Cambridge (which Fred Hoyle founded), and I met him a couple of times. He was still keeping up with contemporary research and had a few great stories to tell. A very clever man, and sharp as a tack.
His sci-fi books feature (unsuprisingly) a lot of astronomy - I just read "The Black Cloud" and it's a pretty good read, I'd recommend it to anyone interested.
I loved "The Black Cloud"; read it repeatedly once I found it. Too bad this grand old man has passed away.
Gray.
Less than a week ago I started reading his novel "The Black Cloud"...seems like a very interesting premise thus far.
For anyone that like understanding the science behind fantastic, but possible, lifeforms, read "The Black Cloud" or Robert Forward's "Dragon's Egg". Characters aren't developed all that well in either, but the hard sci fi makes them each very interesting reads...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Not as a troll, but rather from the perspective of the fly on the wall ... I wonder what Chandra Wickramasinghe and Daisaku Ikeda have to say about Hoyle's passing.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
It has been theorized that Hoyle's particles are drifting apart at an increasing rate. After a billion years or so [give or take 50 million or so] his hydrogen atoms will begin to congeal again into clusters that will one day form new stars.
According to the newest data, Hoyle will continue to expand for the next ten billion years at which point it will begin the slow process of contraction until
the beloved science fiction writer condenses
into a single
point
This past sunday in the NY Times Week in Review section there was an article that said that scientists think the laws of physics change over time.
[Hmm. I hit return at the wrong place and may have posted something utterly blank.]
I will long remeber encountering Fred Hoyle's science fiction. My favorite is "The Black Cloud" in which Hoyle posited intelligent space-borne entities whose internal communication was radio waves. It was excellent hard-science science fiction for its day and remains interesting today.
Hoyle's steady state hypothesis and his ideas about panspermia were interesting, but seemed to fall at the fringes of his solid science -- speculations developed in scientific dress rather than presented as science fiction entertainment.
Are you aware that he was a critic of the Big Bang ? Did you read the headline ?
I once heard on the BBC a scientist describing his theory that the speed of light slowed down during the inflation period. Has anybody heard this as well? If so was he full of shit or is his theory worthy of serious consideration?
...that is, the idea that life on earth was seeded from space, is this: Where did that life come from?
OK, I haven't read much of what Hoyle himself said about this, but I'd think you'd have to confront that question right off. Otherwise, you've got the same sort of problem as the flat-earth myth: What is the earth sitting on? Four elephants. What are the elephants standing on? The back of a giant turtle. What is the turtle standing on? You get the picture.
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
You and Louis Savain should get together and talk physics. You'd probably get along, and that way we don't need to listen to either of you.
He also believed that life didn't start on Earth, but that we were "seeded" from outer space
Hoyle spent decades studying the universe and life in it, and became convinced that life on earth could not have happened solely through "the blind forces of nature". Lecturing at the California Institute of Technology he once explained:
"The big problem in biology isn't so much the rather crude fact that a protein consists of a chain of amino acids linked together in a certain way, but that the explicit ordering of the amino acids endows the chain with remarkable properties . . . If amino acids were linked at random, there would be a vast number of arrangements that would be useless in serving the purposes of a living cell. When you consider that a typical enzyme has a chain of perhaps 200 links and that there are 20 possibilities for each link, it's easy to see that the number of useless arrangements is enormous, more than the number of atoms in all the galaxies visible in the largest telescopes. This is for one enzyme, and there are upwards of 2000 of them, mainly serving very different purposes. So how did the situation get to where we find it to be?"
Hoyle added: "Rather than accept the fantastically small probability of life having arisen through the blind forces of nature, it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act."
Hoyle left us with some fascinating intellectual gems to consider. As our knowledge of biological complexity increases, more and more educated people who understand these complexities are in agreement with his observations.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
He was also the inspiration behind the Hoyles Casino PC Game. Truly a revolutionary, I'm sure we'll all miss his wrinkled old ass.
He also believed that life didn't start on Earth, but that we were "seeded" from outer space.
I've never read his theory, and I'm sure he had his reasons for believing this, but I've never understood this reasoning. Does he think that Earth doesn't have the raw material necessary to create complex proteins? I seem to remember "lightning bottle" experiments that proved that you could create simple proteins from primordial earth "stuff".
Just using "the simplest explanation is usually the right one" logic, one would tend to believe that we don't need extraterrestial explanations to theorize how life began.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
But if you read anything beyond a high-school physics textook you very quickly realise that there are hundreds of facets to Physics and the behaviour of the universe cannot be summed up into a brief, spoon-fed book. Then go read "A Brief History of Time". Hawking puts across a lot of good points about just that topic and (unless I'm just mashing theories together (somebody clear up exactly who said this if it wasn't Hawking)) that our knowledge of physics actually breaks down as we theorize back to the "Big Bang". It isn't at all as simple as "this is how atoms behave and anything that I didn't learn in 'basic' physics is fundamentally wrong". Look at antimatter. "Basic" physics would say that you cannot have a inversely-charged atom, but oh wait!, we have them.
Then start reading about string theory. Now that's deep.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
[epitome of lameness elided for brevity]
*This* makes it past the lameness filter, but the shell script I tried to post last month didn't?!?!? Grrrr....
Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is irrelevant. What is relevant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
What is wrong with you man? If it weren't for CmdrTaco, Slashdot wouldn't even be here. And if you don't find Slashdot a valuable resource, leave! I'll admit, Taco has made some questionable decisions, from both a business and technical point of view. But, come on!
Anyway, until you have evidence, please quit posting this bullshit about Slashdot being secretly in business with Microsoft.
I met Fred Hoyle while getting my BA in Physics & Astronomy at Rice in the mid-70s. He came to speak on Newton and give some smaller talks to student, IIRC. After his speech (which was open to the public), there was a reception and Q&A session. Two things at the Q&A stick in my mind: the first was when an adult asked Prof. Hoyle about the whole "Chariots of the Gods" thing, which was very hot at the time. (This was a book that asserted that aliens had visited the earth in the past and were responsible for the pyramids in Egypt & MesoAmerica, among other things.) I could tell that the questioner was a true believer type. A quick cloud of annoyance passed over Hoyle's face, as he was undoubtedly getting asked about this all the time. He quickly and politely dismissed VonDaniken's book as "rubbish". A few questions later, a 10 to 12 year old boy asked him about Stonehenge: was it an alien landing site or something? This time there was no annoyance, and the teacher aspect of his personality came to the fore. He patiently explained to the child what was known about Stonehenge, how the seasons were very important to ancient farmers, and how we shouldn't assume that the people back then were stupid because they didn't have our technology, etc. At this point the Q&A was ended and Prof. Hoyle made sure to talk to the boy and encourage him to think about the world and to keep asking questions. Good advice to all of us. He'll be missed.
First Evidence Of Life Coming From Space Reported
Evidence of living bacterial cells entering the Earth's upper atmosphere from space has come from a joint project involving Indian and UK scientists. The first positive identification of extraterrestrial microbial life was reported on Sunday (July 29) at the Astrobiology session of the 46th Annual SPIE meeting in San Diego, by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University in Wales. He spoke on behalf of an international team led by Professor Jayant Narlikar, Director of the Inter-Universities Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India.
Samples of stratospheric air were collected on January 21 under the most stringent aseptic conditions by Indian scientists using the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) cryogenic sampler payload flown on balloons from the Tata Institute Balloon Launching facility in Hyderabad.
Part of the samples sent to Cardiff were analyzed by a team at Cardiff University led by Professor David Lloyd, assisted by Melanie Harris.
Commenting on the results, Professor Wickramasinghe said, "There is now unambiguous evidence for the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometers, well above the local tropopause (16 km), above which no air from lower down would normally be transported."
The detection was made using a fluorescent cyanine dye which is only taken up by the membranes of living cells. The variation with height of the distribution of such cells indicates strongly that the clumps of bacterial cells are falling from space.
The daily input of such biological material is provisionally estimated as about one third of a ton over the entire planet.
This new evidence provides strong support for the Panspermia theory of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe.
"We have argued for more than two decades that terrestrial life was brought down to Earth by comets and that cometary material containing microorganisms must still be reaching us in large quantities," Professor Wickramasinghe said.
Cardiff University is home to the UK's first Center for Astrobiology, which provides the UK with a facility to contribute to space missions probing for life on solar system bodies. The Center is a joint initiative between the University and the University of Wales College of Medicine.
The Center combines research interests in astronomy and molecular cell biology to throw light on the emergence and development of life in the cosmos and planetary bodies. The work of the Center will also provide information essential for the emergent discipline of space medicine.
Cardiff University has a history of service to Wales and the world which dates from its foundation by Royal Charter in 1883. Today, independent government assessments recognize the University as one of Britain's leading research and teaching universities.
30-Jul-2001
Describing Fred Hoyle as a "Big Bang Theorist" is a bit like saying that RMS invented that notion of free Unix licenses, like BSD.
In A Brief History of Time, Steve Hawking gave another amusing answer to the question of what the turtle is standing on - "It's turtles all the way down."
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
'coined the phrase'.
heh
the koran spoke of the big bang and the creation some of the universe some 1400 years ago.
www.beconvinced.com
Wasn't Ron Jeremy in that?
Im currently in the process of moving my private network to Linux. The only real experince i have with unixes, is Ive used it a bit in my job as a programmer(i just quit my job, to complete my Bachlor in comp. Science(will take a while, ive only got the first two semesters, which ive got through another Danish comp. education)), but it was mostly Java work. Hence i coded a server on the system, not really digging into anything really OS related issues(the only REAL hands on expirence I got from it, was setting up java+tomcat on a unixbox). And on my personal network, Ive just completet setting(/reading :o) up the network related stuff. So i ping the world, u know. And Ive really havent gotten to study the X architecture yet. So, I have a question...
Is all windowmanagers compatible through X or what? The main reason im shifting to 100% *nix enviroment is that I really dig the though of software being open(and FREE). And I would like to get involved in some OpenSource project down the road, but will one have to port a GUI between n different windowhandlers?
I would like to think that you just use some sort of std. X interface, that all the windowhandlers can implement. But i also know that Gnome uses all sorts of custom stuff, glib or something right?
Science accepts heretics a lot better than religion. This is good.
Otherwise we would still have alchemy, phlogiston, Newtonian gravity, creationism and COBOL (oh - sorry about the last two).
His theories may have been largely bollocks, but at least it makes people think.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
our knowledge of physics actually breaks down as we theorize back to the "Big Bang"
It certainly was known before "A Brief Theory of Time". What happens is that, as we work backwards in time, trying to figure out what the universe was at certain points in time, we get to a point which is 1.e-43 second away from the Big Bang, and we find that all "laws" break down at that point. We just can't describe what happened in that first fraction of a second; there's no way to get at it. Another way of thinking of it is to say that the "laws" of physics were being created in that first fraction of a second. The analogy is pretty bad, but what is important to realise is that it's not a function dependent on our inability to measure more accurately, or see farther with a bigger telescope, or test with finer granularity...all our laws simply stop working at that point.
A few years ago, Fred Hoyle (along with a couple of other chaps, whose names escape me) postulated a new variation on the steady-state model, known as the quasi-steady-state model or QSSM. This basically says you have periods of rest and then periods of activity in the creation of the universe, perhaps as many as six or seven. Quite seriously, it actually sounds a lot like "On the nth day, God created...and night passed...". (Cue flamebait/troll mods -- but it really does.)
this is not a troll. trigger happy idiots.
Why do you think that (in your sig) about AI/nanotech?
Don't get me wrong, Fred Hoyle thought outside of the box and made some contributions -- but because of his contributions coupled with some of the whacked out things he's said, he has also been a detriment to the advancement of science.
Take a look at any Creationist/Evolutionist debate. The Creationists always quote Fred Hoyle, because the dumbass didn't really separate his wild speculation from his more grounded theories. Creationists use the words of a "noted astronomer" to advance their own non-scientific agenda.
Every time I read someone about to quote Fred Hoyle, I cringe, knowing that I'm about to sit through some bullshit foisted on us through the careless attitude toward science of one of "our own".
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
What? The great cosmetologist, Fred Hoyle died! The inspiration for many in the field of beauty.
Wait a sec. It's cosmologist. My bad.
A very cool and respected guy died,
and you have nothing to do but posting
stupid questions. Is that ok?
Think before posting!
Yes i know the answear to your question,
but i wont teel you... Go to #linuxhelp
on OPEN PROJECTS...
It's like saying humans didn't pop up all of a sudden in North America, but that the species began somewhere else. Most anthropologists believe that "somewhere else" is Africa. Reasoning by your line of argument, since life in Africa had to have come from yet another place, scrap anthropology and say we've been in North America all along.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
This is sad news. I've just been reading one of his Andromeda sci-fi books, which were also produced a British TV series in the early sixties.
The story involves a criminal entity/corporation called 'Intel' no less! Also a lot of VERY CLOSE parallels to Carl Sagan's 'Contact' (which I also love).
Great stuff, full of good science and a classic Brit feel, written by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot.
**>>BELCH
Since you don't provide a link I can't check this out for myself. However, I think the absurdity of what you're quoting speaks for itself. What "scientists" are these? All of them, in a lemminglike mass? What leads them to "think" this, as opposed to proving it? If they do, is that changability not a law of physics itself?
A law of nature is our interpretation of what we observe. If we make new observations later on that contradict what we used to observe, obviously we're going to have to change our description of the laws.
All of science depends on the phenomenon described being repeatable. If phenomenon cannot be repeated, there's no point in formulating an explanation for them.
Of course, it's all guesswork for anyone, but here's my thinking.
For AI, we don't even have the beginnings of a good theory of intelligence/conciousness, even after 50 years of computers, not to mention 2000 years of the greatest thinkers and philosophers thinking about it. We have made small amounts of progress, but mostly we've learned is how hugely complex the brain is. Given that major techological revolutions seem to occur in 25 year cycles, it looks to me like the progress arc is 4 cycles away from "real" AI.
Keep in mind that it took 25/30 years for the Internet to go from the lab into real use.
As for nanotech, it may not even be practical. The engineering challenges are insane: power, communication, reliability, movement, manipulation, and probably hardest of all, organization. It's definitely not just a matter for making "small parts".
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The 1st Law of Thermodynamics is that the change in the internal energy of a closed system equals the heat added to the system minus the work done by the system; put more simply, it says that energy is conserved in a closed system. You're thinking of Newtonian mechanics.
I fail to understand how a steady-state universe would preclude the existence of paired forces. I don't believe the universe is steady-state, but I'd still be curious to see your reasoning here.
a little offtopic, but i was watchin NOVA on PBS the other day and i heard an astronomer refer to the reverse big bang as, "...what i like to call gnab gib..." who first coined that? i thought it was douglas adams, through zaphod, but it sounded like this witty doc was trying to lay claim.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I take exception to putting Newtonian Gravity in the same class as alchemy, phlogiston and creationism. Those other ideas were/are not good scientific theories. General relativity only applies a very small correction to Newtonian gravity, (so small that it is virtually impossible to observe on human scales). For example, Newtonian physics was good enough to get several men to the moon and back safely.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Why are we here? because we're here, roll the bones, roll the bones
Why does it happen? because it happens, roll the bones, roll the bones
Gott IST Wuerfel
i.e. the strong anthropomorphic priciple
This is a very sad day. Many discoverers in the past were considered outcasts but are often thought of as geniuses in todays time. Hopefully the same will stand true.
Rest in Peace
The real irony is that there is a commandment prohibiting lying, and Christians are the biggest liars on the planet when it comes to flat-out denial of simple (and subtle) truths. I bet more lies have been told on behalf of Jesus than anyone else in history.
At least when Saudi religious officials declare a fatwa that the earth is flat because the Koran says so, you get the feeling that they're going through the motions and don't really believe this stuff.
"Science is prediction, not explaination" - from Hoyle's "The Black Cloud".
Maybe my eyes are playing tricks on me, but I think the article title changed when farrellj added an update to it.
Call me a conspiracy theorist and moderate me down if you like, but it seems that Fred Hoyle was slightly downgraded from scientific icon/genius to "controversial cosmologist" as the comments started rolling in.
Now, I question established standards as well as controversial opinions alike, and I don't agree with everything I read. But, could it be that some of those zealots subscribing to the Church of the Holy Science Textbook didn't like the direction that the comments were heading?
I'm just asking, because although Fred's dead, his accomplishments speak for themselves, and I don't think we need to overly discredit him post mortem.
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
One of his major theories was that complex organic matter drifted through and evolved in interstellar space. It's long been seen that organic matter could form huge clouds, but it was always an open question as to how it could possibly "evolve".
But the recent discovery of exotic forms of ice that possess many of the properties of liquid water rather than the usual, crystalline solid properties of earth-bound ice make this possible. Evolution happens *much* more slowly in interstellar space and within comet cores, but now the discovery of this new ice makes it probably, even likely, that exotic forms of space-bound life exist and thrive.
http://ccf.arc.nasa.gov/dx/archives/planets/comets /comets3.html
http://www-space.arc.nasa.gov/~leonid/ice/strong.h tml
High-density amorphous ice,the frost on interstellar grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake, D.F.; Wilson, M.A.; Pohorille, A. Astrophysical Journal vol.455, no.1, pt.1 p.389-401. Dec.
High-Density Amorphous Ice, the Frost on Interstellar Grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake,D.F.; Wilson,M.A.; Pohorille,A. NASA/TM-95-207251. 21 January 1995.
Liquid Water in the domain of cubic ice Ic P.Jenniskens, S.Banham, D.F.Blake, and M.R.S.McCoustra, Journal of Chemical Physics 1997, 107 1232-1241
As a side note, he was originally a campaigner against the singularity theory of universal origins (which he derisively coined the "Big Bang Theory"). It was the "all or nothing" part of it that most offended him. And the insistence on bounded, finite time.
He was more all about a continuous and random creation of matter in what he termed "interstitial spaces".
Nowadays, the hottest theories of cosmology involve quantum foam expansion, oscillations, and string loops spitting off random particles. Kind of a weird synthesis of the two. I guess we're in the middle of a paradigm shift.
In another generation, the debate about Bing Bang versus Steady State will seem as quaint and alien as the argument over which theory could best explain diseases: Humoral, Miasmatic, Contagia, or Germ.
Da Blog
there's a great quotation that goes something like "Scientific theories are never accepted by their skeptics, they're just embraced by a new generation that has grown up used to hearing them."
Got Rhinos?
I guess it all depends on your idea of a "good scientific theory".
Obviously, you can't mean "any theory that was later proved to be incorrect or inadequate". I'm guessing that you mean something along the lines of "theories that were developed before the advent of - or without recourse to - the modern idea of the 'scientific method'".
Personally, I think the "phlogiston" theory was pretty good for its time - it explained a certain phenomena in a way that agreed with the current paradigm.
Oh. I get it. The phlogiston theory was bad because the "scientist" who proposed it was not visionary enough to first propose a paradigm shift that would allow a different, correct theory to become evident. By the same token, Fred Hoyle was a good scientist because his theories were almost always preceded by a paradigm shift that was not adopted by the rest of the scientific community.
I guess that in order to properly judge Newtonian physics, we should first determine if that theory required a sufficiently radical paradigm shift before it could be proposed.
The same principle applies to creationism, I suppose.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I never heard very much about Hoyle, but he sounds like the kind of scientist we could do with more of. Nothing is gained by 'following the leader' all the time.
I never bought into the evolution malarkey anyway. IMHO, there are WAY too many attributes in species that just could not have evolved by chance and natural selection. But, you don't want me to bore you.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
Thus the theory of the multiverse, advocated by Deutsch which states that there are limitless parallel universes, in which said cat exists in all possible states. So, if the cat is alive (and angry and upset here) in a parallel universe it is dead.
I understand that's sort of what the Scorsese film "The Last Temptation of Christ" is about. The idea that Jesus Christ could have wished for a "normal life", living out his days with Mary Magdalene instead of dying painfully on the cross, is of course, rank heresy to some so the film was poorly received by the fundie community. Protests etc. But apparently it's an excellent, moving film. I really should watch it some time.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Something Slashdot readers may not realize is that this was also the guy who gave Intel its name. In 'A for Andromeda', Intel was the name of a shadowy Swiss business organization attempting to control the alien-designed supercomputer built by the government.
This obviously assumes that Intel the semiconductor manufacturer took its name from this source. The TV series came out in 1961 and the book before then.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Dear Dr. Wickramasinghe,
I just saw your article in the Daily Mail, which includes the following.
> engineer and amateur Egyptologist, Robert Bauval, first pointed out that
> overhead photographs of the three Giza pyramids show an astounding
> similarity to the disposition of the three brightest stars in Orion's belt.
>
> This includes the distances between the pyramids and their size in relation
> to the brightness of the stars. It even includes the minute detail of a kink
> in the lines connecting the pyramids that matches a similar kink in the
> lines joining the stars in the sky.
The distances are not even close. The brightest star in Orion's belt is the middle star, but the largest Giza pyramid is on the end. The kink's angle is off by over 20%. Bauval made up most of this. As a scientist, you might check such things.
> This theory is also supported by a pioneering new science, dendrochronology,
> the study of the thickness of tree rings at different times in the past. The
> thinning of tree rings has been discovered in oaks across the entire period
> 2354 to 2345BC which comes close to the final decades of the Old Kingdom.
>
> The most simple explanation is due to the frequent arrival of cometary
> missiles, that would have dusted the atmosphere and dimmed the light from
> the sun, depriving trees of much needed energy. Here is yet further evidence
> that the Egyptians were under a regular torrent of missiles from above.
The Old Kingdom ended long after the Irish tree trauma--c. 2200 BC. The likely cause was extremely low Nile flood levels. And there is no evidence from ice cores to support your claim of high dust levels. You just made up most of this.
Wickramasinghe apparently did not reply. It seems clear that the Daily Mail article Wickramasinghe wrote was fraudulent.
For me, once someone has done something fraudulent, I become suspicious of all their other work. If you consider the prestige that Wickramasinghe might garner from his panspermia claims, there is all the more reason to be suspicious.
Funny, a religous person's belief is centered on faith with historical proof (just ask a well seasoned historian) but is apparantley false because the book/scroll was written by a man/woman that lived x number of years ago, so why would we believe it? Errr, I never met Einstein, so he and all the talk about him must be a lie.
Seems to me that while it is understandable (I share this desire) that we find answers, many seem more anamoured by fake answers that make them look good and say "We are so smrt [if you have to ask] that we know everything there is to know"
How arrogant and small minded, with irrational fervor that rivals any known religion.
sad to hear this. He definitely thought "outside the box."
Some highlights of his talk:
Overall, the impression I have is that the theories get lots of press because they sound cool, but that there's not a lot of hard evidence to back it up. It seems like they're doing science in reverse--they have a theory and are looking for the data to support it.
Except for rare cases, the scientific establishment listens to people with good data to support their claims. I think the reason Hoyle was considered a "maverick outsider to the establishment" was because his science wasn't up to par.
Seems like he was hit with the....
wait for it...
BIG BANG ATTACK!!!
It's a good thing life may have been seeded... because otherwise we might have to account for the near-infinite improbability (engine) of the current version of evolution with (cover your ears) the dreaded "creationism"
*shudder*
Oh, wait... I believe in that. How irrational.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
whether you agree with it or not
only looking at evidence which supports your own personal agenda is what really makes a scientist unscientific
But it's amazing to see what the NY Times can spin out of what Webb summarises as
Of course it's going off the rails. How else is it ever going to fly?
mentioned. And people here at /. just want to talk about big bang and organic stuff from space.
Fred Hoyle was the guy who was bold enough to predict a resonance oxygen burning step in the thermonuclear cycle of stars when everybody else was saying its impossible. Willy Fowler found it, and both wrote a paper on it, solving one of the greatest problem in stellar physics.
Fowler got the Nobel, Hoyle did not. The problem is that Hoyle was a proponent of the "life from space" idea, and the Nobel Committee was embarrassed to give him that.
Shame. Shame on the Noble Committee.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
This comment was meant for the story about a new Enlightenment (or something, the search is down :o) windowhandler.
And i think the comment actually was appropiate for that news story.
Offcource my comment has nothing to do with this story.
I wonder what went wrong though, I havnt even read this news before.. How did my comment end up here??
But anyways, i really sorry Id posted such a lame comment for this story..
my fault.
example, I wanted to post a reply to you(and the other guy, who commented my wronlyplaced comment). The first one got attacthed to his message, as it should. The other(which actually was meant as a reply, to you) ended up as a new comment/tread for the story.. Im VERY certain that i still know how to post comments @ slashdot, could there be some sort of wierd bug?
BUT ANYWAY, sorry. The comment was mean for the story about a new/updated windowshandler(the enligthenment story, yesterday). It just ended up in a completly different story, i really cant figure out why.
Do the computer scientists who experiment with genetic algotithms give any thought to how "cruel" their method is to the algorithms that don't make the cut? No.
Likewise, you shouldn't blame the intelligence that first experimented with DNA-based life. They started with microbes -- and they may have had no idea that something sentient would eventually evolve from the whole thing.
And I don't see you coming up with a better method for propagating life. The one we have now is unbelieveably complex. The intelligence that came up with it was not shabby at all. I doubt a better one will be invented in our lifetimes.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
"Earth was seeded with life from elsewhere" and "the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act" are two totally unrelated hypotheses. They give rise to a four-quadrant matrix of possibilities:
1. Earth was seeded with life from elsewhere, which had its origins in a deliberate intellectual act.
2. Earth was seeded with life from elsewhere, which arose through the blind forces of nature.
3. Life originated on earth, in a deliberate intellectual act.
4. Life originated on earth, through the blind forces of nature.
I personally tend to believe #1 is true.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Building a space shuttle is orders of magnitude more complex than building a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow is always ready for immediate use -- has 6 sigma reliability -- but something like 40% of shuttle launch attempts get scrubbed because some little component is giving out-of-spec readings. That is the state of our art.
Building a self-replicating organism is several orders of magnitude more complex than building a space shuttle. It's amazing our bodies work as well as we do. Yes, medical science can improve our functioning somewhat. It's fortunate that each human doesn't require the army of support and maintenance technicians that each space shuttle does.
And did you ever think that having some defective organisms is neccessary? If all organisms had seven sigma reliability, and all organisms were equally reliable, there would be no basis for natural selection to determine which ones were fittest. There would be no opportunity for the "design" to advance itself. Nature is constantly trying out new designs -- and the better ones displace the inferior ones only over geologic time frames, so we don't see it. You think childbirth sucks now, maybe 100,000 years ago womens' hips were even narrower and it sucked more.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
It's amazing our bodies work as well as we do... And did you ever think that having some defective organisms is neccessary?
More excuses! How acceptable would it be for the builders of the space shuttle to account for the Challenger disaster by saying that some defects are necessary?
I quote Richard Dawkins in the The Blind Watchmaker: A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all."
If I understand you correctly, you are postulating the existence of intelligent creators who are without vision or foresight. As such, they resemble natural selection rather than intelligence as we normally understand it.
You suggest that natural selection is a mechanism to correct initial defects in the design of life. It also appears sufficient to account for the miserable design of life by itself. There is no need to bring in intelligent intervention and then try to defend the shoddy job that resulted.
Natural selection doesn't require any excuses for its failures. Failure is a feature, not a bug.
If you would like the last word in this debate I would be happy to read it, but I have nothing more to say on the subject that can't be found in Dawkins' books.