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The Milky Way is Not a Spiral?
ETEQ writes "Space.com reports that new data from the Spitzer Space Telescope showing that the Milky Way is in fact a barred spiral! Looks like all our old astronomy textbooks will have to be thrown away..."
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The evidence they found tells us that this MAY be a barred spiral galaxy, it is not yet, theres just good strong evidence that could lead to a barred-sprial conclusion.
Cogito Eggo Sum, I think therefore I'm a waffle
Looks like all our old astronomy textbooks will have to be thrown away...
Which happens every year at the university level anyway, where a new 'edition' comes out every year with one or two pages slightly modified, but you have to buy the new one for $150 since the questions and homework study in the appendix are completely different. No, I'm not bitter that the fall semester is coming or anything.
I am in agreement with you. I believe in creationism and intelligent design. Having said that, I don't mind going along with the notion that God (who I believe was the creator) could have used many things that scientists hold true and call "evolution" and the "Big Bang" to get us to where we are today. I think there is enough evidence to suggest that I can't be closed-minded about this. I for one have no problem believing that the earth is millions or billions of years old. However, I have friends who subscribe to the "Young Earth" theory which I find an interesting theory, but not very likely and not based on scientific evidence.
I don't try to tell people that don't believe like I do that they are wrong...I just want to have the same right to believe that which I do without being called a moron, fool, etc. just because someone else doesn't agree with it.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Not exactly a "revelation"- I learned that the Milky Way was a barred spiral in a Slashdot story three years ago.
There is a difference between stagnant and conservative. Stagnant means the religions do not change over time, and that is not true, there is tremendous change over the past millennia in religion. Conservative is not taking what is currently popular ideas in blindly incorporating them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The "throw away the textbooks" comment is a little snarky. The text I currently use, as well as most of the others in use, describe the Milky Way as *possibly* having some kind of barred shape, as there has been evidence along these lines for years. Books evolve. 15-year old books don't have much to difinitively say on the cosmological constant, either, though they may be perfectly good texts on all other phenomena.
> Well the actual problem is people on both sides. First you have one group who believes that science is actual truth, and that all the problems in the world can be fixed with science.
I suspect that most scientists actually believe that science is an attempt to get at the truth, and will likely never be complete. And that only some problems can be fixed with science.
> Religion on the other hand is more of a combined study where you put together many different studies and look at the truth as a whole
Actually, religion looks at mythology and people's opinions about theology, morals, the proper social order, and the existence of a lot of unevidenced supernatural stuff.
> The main difference is science is trying to constantly disprove itself while religion is trying to prove itself. They are not opposing forces just different methods of trying to find truth.
Religion, most often, merely attempts to maintain traditional beliefs and values. Those who are "trying to find truth" usually get kicked out of the club, because truth is rarely deferential to traditional beliefs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What? What do barred galaxies, George W. Bush, and HHTTG have in common? What in the world made you think they would be funny when combined?
The joke-creating part of your brain needs a QC department. Stat.
Please, first of all, don't feed the offtopic troll.
Second, there's a difference between being open-minded and just plain trying to justify remaining religious while supporting popular scientific theories. Personally, as a believer in what I guess is called the postmodern philosophy, I'm extremely skeptical about most things, especially things of universal magnitude. I just don't think there's any evidence whatsoever to suggest intelligent design is possible, and there's plenty of evidence to the contrary that the Divine Scenario and the Scientific Scenario are completely and totally mutually exclusive. The truly open-minded cannot ascribe absolute faith towards any one theory, or they risk alienating the possibility of other ideas (and you realize that christianity, judaism, islam, et. al. depend on absolute faith); therefore, the only options you have are to either admit that you absolutely believe creationism and assert with ultimate certainty that god created the universe, or to assert that you depend on scientific evidence, and that you cannot express with complete certainty that god created the universe.
Also, I don't think calling someone a moron or a fool because of their beliefs is wrong. I think it's a dastardly thing to do unless you actually show evidence supporting your point of view, but I think calling people idiots and fools is an integral part of the free exchange of information; and aside which, they're not getting any more intelligent with you patting them on the back and saying "good idiot".
I intend to be called an idiot and a fool in response to this, and also probably be modded down as much as my karma can stand, but this just has to be said. That's what I believe.
+5, Truth
Arguments from incredulity may satisfy your faith, but in the pursuit of knowledge, they're in fact worse than useless.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What a load of blather. Science is simply a way of attempting to explain observed data and make predictions upon it. It isn't a religion any more than hammers or toothpicks are religion. Maybe some misguided souls who likely don't understand science think of it in that fashion, but science is a methodology, a means of determing provisional explanations. Have you ever heard of a religion that says "to the best evidence we have to date is explained by , but we await more data"?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A parsec means nothing to me. A lightyear on the other hand means a lot. If it takes 8 minutes for light to reach earth from the sun, then I can kind of, sort of imagine how far away 27000 lightyears is.
> This has been precisely my argument in favor of Intelligent Design. Evolution could have been the product of the creator stacking the dominoes so the right tap made it all happen. Evolution and the Big Bang may have been the implementation of "the Design."
FYI, that's not an argument in favor of ID. It's merely an argument that ID could be framed in such a way that it would not be in conflict with the known facts.
Unicorn Theory can also be framed in such a way that it is not in conflict with the known facts, but an argument in favor of UT is another matter altogether.
And that's precisely the problem with ID. When you analyze their arguments and spot them for the bunkum that they are, you're left without any reason to believe in ID. That's not a proof that no IDer exists, but it leaves ID in the same category as UT, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, PSI power, and other stuff that some people believe in without any evidence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Strawman to the nth degree.
Your comment reveals a profound ignorance of what science is about. Anyone who believes science reveals truth doesn't understand science. Science is the search for fact. not truth. As Indiana Jones memorably said,
Furthermore, the purpose of science isn't to "solve problems"; it is the search for fact.
And ever since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment displacing Rationalism in the 18th century, science never seeks to prove anything. In science you can disprove, but you cannot prove because of the principle of skepticism. So the statement "if science can't 100% prove it, other theories are fair game" makes no sense at all.
The purpose of science is the search for fact. Science is the study of the natural world. Religion and philosophy are there to provide commentary on and understanding of the human condition. From that perspective, they have nothing to do with each other and should not be mixed.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Astronomy texts as recent as 40 years old still mention the Marias on the Moon to be ancient seas (though some scoff at the idea that they currently hold water, how preposterous); how the dark areas on Mars are the result of vegetation, and yet made humour about how people used to think there was intelligent life there; green stars, especially the green companion of Antares when there are no green stars; etc. Interestingly they DO mention planet X since they were still searching for it while most recent astronomy books had given up on the search for planet X. Now it seems we've found planet X after all, and even bigger than we thought after we discovered the IR telescope had the wrong target.
Going back further, astronomy books thought galaxies were nebulae, just puffs of gas and dust within our galaxy. Just like we originally thought that ours was the only solar system, it was not that long ago that we thought our galaxy was the only one. Soon perhaps the idea of just one universe will sound silly to us...
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
If you think about it, 1850 that wasn't too long ago. It seems that humanity has been full of sh%t for most of history. It points to the importance of keeping facts only if you understand the underlying theories behind them. A good mind is ready to discard "Facts" when a new and better theory comes along. Beware all dogma. These old science books had a lot of Facts but little real science. Maybe future generations will look at the 1900s as a true "second rennaissance" where science was actually first adopted by the masses and that America was a champion of human rights -- I think that the Freedom and Free thinking are intertwined. We take these for granted as though they have always existed -- but in fact, they are highly inconvenient principles for Governments.
I guess we can't expect this momentary lapse of lucidity to continue. Four more years and we will be fighting "noxious swamp humours" that cause tuberculosis with good feelings.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
If you think about it, 1850 that wasn't too long ago. It seems that humanity has been full of sh%t for most of history.
We still are. 100 years from now, they will laugh at us for our crazy notions about strings, chaos, and the human genome.
Science is not, and never has been, about being right. It's about trying to find predictive models of the universe which you can rely on most of the time.
The most advanced concepts of science will most likely sound as silly as "turtles, all the way down" to people a couple generations in the future, but they are still incredibly valuable to us today.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This is a major theme of the book and PBS series The Day the Universe Changed. It's all to easy to look back in history and think that our ancestors had ridiculous beliefs. But it's also easy to forget what we perceive isn't reality, but our own interpretation of what we get from our senses, which is filtered by our personal beliefs and biases. What we think is real is often an elaborate hallucination that often has little or no bearing to actual reality.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Call me old fashioned but I believe that when you find evidence that invalidates or modifies a theory, you REVISE your text book instead of throwing it away. I don't really think we want to throw away the entire body of astronomical evidence over this one. Apart from that policy putting the human race back quite a bit, that'd upset me quite a bit given that I spent 2 1/2 years studying astronomy.
Besides you don't want to set a precedent for your cowboy president to throw away all books on evolution because some small flaw is found in one part of the theory.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The issue of truth is not so crucial. There is nothing wrong with looking for truth. There is only something wrong with the arrogance involved in thinking one has found it. Science, at it's best, looks at the world in hope of one day finding the truth. It is seldom that the scientist believes they hav found the truth, or has the arrogance to state that the revealed theory is hogwash based on personal belief. In such cases, the revealed theory still wins.
The problem is really that the people who attack science tend to confuse themselves with god, and believe not only that they have the capacity to understand the truth, but that they have found it. In fact, the truth is the sole provenience of god, and it is the privilege of us lower being to examine the creation and try to understand some of it.
The situation gets worse as the arrogance goes beyond the belief that one is god, to the belief that one is such a wonderful god that one can put the entire truth of creation into one text. At this point stupidity replaces arrogance, as all that can be done is to fit new fact patterns in existing theories of existence. A person who does such a thing is arrogant, stupid, and corrupt beyond the ability to be saved by any messiah, prophet, or wise person. Such people are best locked up in the ghetto of an old sports arena, so their disease can be contained, and the harm to civilized society minimized.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I had one of those science books, with the typical electrical motor you can make yourself! Complete with nails in the cork, etc.
It wasn't until 2 years later in Jr. High I figured out why it didn't work. The wires in the drawing were a stylized winding, only looping about 6 times, well spaced, on each nail. Not the tightly packed windings back and forth and back and forth actually needed to get that turd to move, even with the train set transformer cranked to 100!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
What we think is real is often an elaborate hallucination
Pardon me, but the word "hallucination" seems very misleading. More preferable is the word "choice". We choose simplifying assumptions so that we can reason without getting bogged down with details that in the end tend to yield minimal effects.
Take toilet paper as an example. If you choose to work out the exact mathematical and physics model of toilet paper, you will still come to the same conclusions about effective procedures in cleaning. These simplifying assumptions are so useful in everyday thinking that we apply them until they lead to problems. Then instrumentation becomes more economically tempting.
A hallucination on the other hand is more of a belief that is taken even if it may be false - such as an Aries believing to be a Gemini.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Occam's razor says not to multiply hypotheses without reason. Old Bill had nothing to say about what size Hilbert spaces God finds neccesary, but as a medieval theologan he would have been more likely to demand a reason why there should be some finite limit than the converse.
That the different outcomes or causes all occur (depending on whether one looks at it from the mathematically equivalent many-futures or many-histories points of view) is only a single hypothesis, and at that, only one that suggests that we simply assume that the math says what it appears to say. It is in fact conceptually simpler to suppose that the wave function goes on with parts becoming hidden from us than to theorize that the wave function is frequently unpredictably interrupted by this miraculous and inexplicable collapse of the state vector to a single value.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry