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Origins Mini-Series Airs Tonight
SeaDour writes "The much-anticipated NOVA mini-series Origins begins tonight on PBS (check local listings for time). Hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, the ambitious show plans to journey all the way to the Big Bang and back again, "blending astrophysics, geology, chemistry, biology and even paleontology to knit together insights about the structure of the universe, the creation of planets and the foundations of life itself." MSNBC has an interesting write-up on the show that's been four years in the making."
So is this supposed to be as good as Cosmos was? Maybe then I'd turn my satelite back on.
Make Carl proud.
"Statements by Non-creationist Scientists -- Even they do not believe evolutionary foolishness"
riiight... lets not let facts get in the way here. I mean the earth was OBVIOUSLY created in 7 days! God put dino bones in the ground to fool non-believers!
The effects will be great, no doubt. Too bad the science behind most of what they'll say is bunk.
I have had the misfortune to now live and teach in two states that have a really conservative attitude towards presenting theories such as the big bang and evolution (Don't!). Why is it that these ultra-fundamentalists (to borrow your phrase) can't at least acknowledge that what scientists observe what seem to be universal physical laws, and then draw their conclusions from observations using those laws? That is how geologists come up with the age of the Earth, and astrophysicists come up with the age of the universe.
Frustrated,
JMD
When all else fails, feel free to panic.
I just finished reading Bill Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything which covers just about the exact same topics. It starts out with the creation of the universe, and works itself forward in the timeline, covering formation of the planet, early life, cambrian explosion, etc. until it ends up with the advent of homo sapien. Not a bad read.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
...all us religious types are uptight Dean Wermer lookalikes who shake our fists at this "science" and "methodology" you crazy kids talk about nowadays.
Read "Inherit the Wind". I'm a catholic, and I have no problem rectifying evolution and the big bang with creationism. Something had to set those events into motion neh? Could it not have been grand design?
Offtopic, I know, but I'll be tuning in, and I doubt I will suffer any theological distress over such scary topics as chemistry and astrophyics.
In the future, try to be as tolerant as you would undoubtedly have your in-laws be.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Intelligent Design has precious little to do with the Bible. It involves researching origins to see what evidence there is for an intelligent designer. It doesn't care who or what that intelligent designer is- it only cares about what it did in making us and the universe. It's not just for fundies- crap, some of it's logical underpinnings are rooted in medieval Muslim philosophy.
What principle demands that any theory involving an intelligent creator must be systematically dismissed from scientific inquiry?
Too much time is spent by some materialism evangelists dissing somebody's holy book or dismissing all religious folks as inbred hicks, and screaming that ID "isn't science". Their a priori exclusion of still-valid hypothesises isn't helping anybody. Who the heck cares if it doesn't fit into somebody's notion of what "science" should be? Scientific inquiry exists apart from any meaningless definition of it. So, why don't we all open our minds a bit and discuss theories on their merits, instead of our prejudices?
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
"There are now 36 instances where genetic programming has automatically produced a result that is competitive with human performance, including 15 instances where genetic programming has created an entity that either infringes or duplicates the functionality of a previously patented 20th-century invention, 6 instances where genetic programming has done the same with respect to a 21st-centry invention, and 2 instances where genetic programming has created a patentable new invention.".
Now the computational power of these computers is faily meager. I think the largest cluster applied so far has been 1000 pentium 350's. The "computational" power of a population of species is massive. If quantum computers can be developed, and genetic programming algorithms can be written in such a way that takes advantadge of the properties of quantum machines, we *really* will be entering a new era in humanity (however there is no indication this is possible or not possible, I am just speculating)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Not all Christians have problems with modern cosmology. In fact, we embrace it.
http://www.reasons.org/
Evolution, OTOH, is just not convincing on it's own merits. I find special creation easier to believe than the spontaneous natural generation of life. Too much irreduceable complexity in the celluar machinery. Too many chicken-and-egg problems. The field of origins research has only progressed in recent decades by demonstrating that the popular theories are wrong, with no convincing alternative. No pre-biotic soup on Earth, etc.
Quite true. But a fair number of criticisms attack the falsification of evidence which is pandemic in the field. "Icons of Evolution" is quite an illuminating read. Fact is, both sides of the debate are full of ideologues more committed to their preconceptions than to the discovery of truth or the humility to admit that they don't know. Pseudoscience and
fallacy, sometimes outright intellectual dishonesty, although we generally make the charitable assumption of folly instead, pervade any highly charged controversy. Which conditions are no less true now that the religion of scientific materialism holds the social and academic high ground than they were before Nietzsche, Marx, Frank and Weishaupt, when corrupt churchmen held that strategic advantage.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Quick question... and not trying to be a troll.
How does one reconcile the theory of macroevolution (species, over time, have evolved into more ordered organisms - humans - from less ordered organisms - one-celled animals) with the second law of thermodynamics (the natural tendency over time of any closed system is to enter into a *less* ordered state)?
Again, I'm not trolling, it's just that for a scientist who believes in both, there may be some problems - or doublethink - involved in reconciling the two.
Every five or ten years PBS or some other entertainment organization seems to produce these shows purporting to tell us unwashed masses the _Truth_ about the universe. When Cosmos was produced, the Truth was that the Big Bang occurred over and over as the universe expanded and contracted back into an infinitesimally small singularity and exploded again. Now the Truth is that not only is it expanding, but it's expanding faster and faster with no end in sight.
In the past 30 years, there have been so many new, and contradictory Scientific Revelations in the origins of man and the Universe, I can't help be cynical about shows like this. I've come to the conclusion that they're no more likely to be Right (with a capital 'R") than those "bible-thumping fundamentalists."
This series is just entertainment. The most entertaining part is how excited the current True Believers get when their theory is explained with such erudition.
Anybody who purports to explain the "structure of the universe, the creation of planets and the foundations of life itself" is definitely ultra-religious in my book.
OK, a better example is quoted here: "Order from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system."
That order is not "real" information.
The difference between dna and a snowflake is like the difference between "abcabcabcabcabc" and "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog".
That's something I've been annoyed about for some time. Just how many variations on "a group of people invade your house and redecorate/reorganize!" or "a group of people make a car really cool" or "a group of people make a wacky machine".
That or, "A Makeover Story" followed by "A Dating Story" followed by "A Wedding Story" followed by "A Baby Story". For grins, I've often wanted to make "An Eating Story" to be followed by "A Taking-a-Big-Dump Story".
I'd love to watch programs detailing the power creation & management of the Mars Rovers (or the Voyagers, for that matter). Hell, NASA TV nowadays, half the time you turn it on and it's dumbed-down Jerry-Springer style crap.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
It sure had lots and lots and lots of massive explosions as CG comets hit CG earths! Wow! Look at that flaming meteor zooming at the earth! Amazing!
Sigh.
Mainly I was disappointed that they really glossed over the origins of life. There's all sorts of cool research out there about how something like RNA could have been the first reproducing chemical structure, and other such things. But they just talked about how amino acids could have formed on earth, or how they could have landed here from space and then jumped to cyanobacteria changing the atmosphere.
It seemed like they left lots of places where someone who wanted to believe in God could have said "Ooh! Ooh! God did THAT part!". The host kept going ON and ON about how "aMAZing" it was that life came from non-life. Great.
Anyway, I thought it could have been much heavier on the science and much lighter on the fiery CG asteroid collisions.
It's important to note that Christians don't have to be Young Earth Creationists.
Also, why does carbon dating keep getting dragged out in these things? IIRC, it's only useful between 80000 and 8000 BCE. That's useful for anthropologists who track the spread of modern Homo sapiens around the world, but pretty much useless for actual palaeontologists.
Finally, please give Darwin a rest. Yes, he was the first to see the forest that is evolution instead of just peering at trees, but his theories are rather dated and puritanical. Go pick on Dawkins or Gould or whoever.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I've heard on more than one occasion that Tyson, more or less, gave himself his PhD. I saw this guy at a symposium once and he's an arrogant piece of work. He's got nothing on Sagan, and never will.
Either the universe exists, or it does not. If it does not, then everything you see and read (including this!) are simply figments of your imagination. If that is the case, there is not only no purpose to further discussion, but also no foundational basis on which to discuss. Therefore, we will assume, for the purposes of this writing, that the universe does in fact exist. You exist. I exist. This document exists (if only in digitized form). So, there are two possibilities: the universe (or some form of it) has always existed, or it was, at some point in time, created. If it was created, then its creator(s) either had always existed, or were in turn created by something (or someone) else. Again, either way, there would have to have been a being (person, mind, intelligence, etc.) that had "always existed". So we have those two choices: either a matter-and-energy mixture has always existed, and from it has sprung intelligent life (us humans at least, if you want to call us intelligent) or an intelligence (or group thereof) of some form has always existed and it created the universe.
/. discussion... at least for now :)
So, the question now becomes: which of these two is more logical and/or more likely? Well, to answer that question we should think a little bit more about the properties of the two possible existants. The second, an intelligence of some form, is rather vauge: all that can really be known for sure is that it (I will use singular forms of pronouns from now on for convienence sake, though keep in mind that there is no limit as to the quantity or quality of creators, if it/they exist, or at least none has been established yet) would have a level of what we would call "mental" ability far beyond anything we can imagine. It is even possible that this "mental" power would be enough to create the universe, since this being would not neccessarily be bound by any physical laws (these are, after all, a part of the universe, and it is concievable - in fact, essential - that these would have been created too in this case).
The universe, however, is fairly well known to us. It contains a fixed amount of matter and energy. We can observe that it contains, at a minimum, thousands of galaxies each with billions upon billions of stars, many with the potential to house a planetary system. Our Solar System is one, with a myriad of planets and other orbiting debris, and with at least one planet which contains (intelligent?) life. We also know that the universe is governed by physical laws, like the law of gravity. These laws govern how the matter and energy work. There is even a law that covers how the matter can be converted to energy and vica-versa (I know, there is debate about Relativity Theory, but even if the law as we know it is incorrect then there is a correct one we simply have not discovered yet).
So, again, which is more logical and likely: a self-existant intelligence of incredible (infinite?) power, or a massive, complex, self-existant matter-energy universe with laws governing the actions that take place within it? That I am going to leave up to our wonderful
William George