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Theory-Affirming Evidence About the Universe
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."
"If a person read only the Bible, they would be one of the most ignorant on Earth as far as reality is concerned."
The Bible is about salvation. There is of course some history and science included but that is not the point. You liberals attack the Bible for your perceived historial and scientific faults as if it should be a divine source for both subjects. This idea of yours and your ilk is the real idiocy.
Christianity has changed right along with humanity since day 1, except it always wants to be 75 years behind.
Incorrect.
If you wanna be spiritual, that's cool, but don't expect to find any useful information in there.
The most important information ever known is in The Bible. It's all about salvation---something you fail to see.
PS Hey Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, et al: ---- -- ----! Stop ripping off the elderly with your gaudy, fake, materialistic --------!
What example are YOU providing to the world, then? Are you going without? I assume you used a computer to type your message. Maybe all the liberals should give up all their goods and clothe themselves in rags so they can claim they're better than others. They can live off of their intellect alone! Yeah! Why not try that? Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the liberals love material things---to the point of worshipping them.
When's the last time anyone saw Jesus wearing a Rolex?!
It probably wouldn't matter what they wore, you'd probably still find some reason to attack them for preaching.
Much of the science that is used to theorize about the cosmos is verifiable right here on earth. (Fusion, fission, properties of light relativity, force, gravity) The question is does what (LITTLE) we know here properly extrapolate ad infinitum.
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?
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...
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
I always hear about "new telescopes which will be able to see back to the beginning of the universe". How can that possibly work? With the matter in the universe expanding slowly, (relative to the speed of light) the light from the big bang should be long past us by now -- streaking out into some void way beyond Earth... What did I miss when I wasn't paying attention in physics class?
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 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?
It started out Chaos (light and matter all jumbled together) but ended up as Order (light and matter divided just as the Bible litterally says it happened, with both entities taking on incomprehensible levels of order and complexity).
Without God, this outcome is fundamentally impossible according to the Entropy (the 2nd law of Thermodynamics).
This is really off-topic, but...
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, 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?
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Oh boy another wonderful /. creationist-vs-evolutionist debate!
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?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
This is the "watchmaker" argument, made about 200 years ago (replace "car" with "watch"), one version of the "argument from design." Fairly persuasive in its day, because people didn't know (before Darwin) how it was possible for complexity to arise out of simplicity.
Read The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins. He eloquently answers the argument from design. It is, IMO, one of the best books on evolution (since Darwin). Also has lots of neat computer analogies, and some simulation software.