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NASA Reaffirms Big Bang Theory

Peretz writes "NASA has found evidence reinforcing a theory of what took place post-Big Bang and time expansion. They claim: 'Over the course of millions of years, gravity exploited the density differences to create the structure of the universe---stars and galaxies separated by vast voids.' Thereby creating a 'structure' to the universe -- a kiddush cup. '...finds that the first stars---the forebears of all subsequent generations of stars and of life itself---were fully formed remarkably early, only about 400 million years after inflation. This is called the era of reionization, the point when the light from the first stars ionized hydrogen atoms, liberating electrons from the protons.'"

313 comments

  1. Misleading Headline by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Insightful
    NASA Confrms a Big Bang Theory

    NASA has a confirmed a theory of what took place post-Big Bang and time expansion.


    Please don't use sensationalist and misleading headlines. Confirmation of a theory is tantamount to saying that it is proven. Given that this is scientific theory we're referring to, I don't think that's what you want to say. What you probably want to say is, "New evidence supports a Big Bang Theory".

    What NASA actually says in their article is:

    The WMAP team is announcing two major results: evidence for cosmic inflation, and confirmation of when stars first turned on. Both results depended on a combination of temperature and polarization data.


    To put that into laymans terms, they have new data that agrees with old data and theories. That can be a good thing for the status of a theory. But let's be somewhat scientific here and not throw around statements that imply proven theories. This is, after all, supposed to be "News for Nerds". :-)
    1. Re:Misleading Headline by jdavidb · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The difference between the headline and the first line is pretty vast, although the headline is clearly trying to hint at the truth rather than mislead, by using the word "a" intead of "the."

      What the first line says is that a theory about how certain events played out after the big bang had been "confirmed." What the headline sounds like is "the Big Bang has finally been proved!" But note that it says "a Big Bang theory." Here's the writer of the headline trying to give himself an out. I cut him some slack; I'm sure he's working with a limited 80 column field or so. In other words, technically what he said was that "a theory about the Big Bang has been confirmed," but he made it just a little too sensationalistic, which is probably going to lead to a whole string of, "See? NASA has confirmed the creationists are _wrong_!" posts that have nothing to do with this. But since everyone likes to see a good tussle between the creationists and the more evolutionary-minded here on slashdot, I'm not even sure that's a bad thing.

      Incidentally, I'm a fundamentalist, and I lean toward a literal understanding of Genesis and a 6000-year earth (although I'm not adamant about it and easily accept that I might be misunderstanding things), and even I accept that the "Big Bang" is probably a pretty good model for what happened. (I just think the timescale may be way off, and that we have a long way to go before we truly understand.) So for anyone who did misread the headline and thought you finally had complete triumph over all the creationist wackos, I hate to burst your bubble. :)

    2. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Where did the "matter" the exploded in the Big Bang come from?

    3. Re:Misleading Headline by AKAImBatman · · Score: 1

      To the editors, thank you for correcting the headline and text. Twice. :-)

      Still, I'm not sure if "Reaffirms" is better. How about "More Evidence for Big Bang Theory." The text itself seems fine now.

    4. Re:Misleading Headline by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      But- what's really exciting about this isn't confirmation of the big bang, but rather evidence of the cosmic inflation idea of the big bang. This is the one that theistic evolutionists (that is, those who believe God plays pool with the universe and set it all up to run just as it has) point to and say "There is an injection of energy, and better yet ordered energy, that proves God's existance". Up until now, though, there's been nothing other than mathematical proof for cosmic inflation itself- only theories that seemed impossible (matter moving at several million times the speed of light?!?!?). This gets us a step closer to a GUFTE- a grand unified field theory of everything that would be as close as science could come to describing God.

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    5. Re:Misleading Headline by PseudoQuant · · Score: 2, Informative

      The findings described by this article are not so much about the "Big Bang Theory" per say, which is already fairly well accepted by cosmologists as a likely accurate view of the early universe. Rather this is more about "Inflationary" theories, which describe the rapid expansion in the very ealry moments of the Univesrse. This seems to be the first solid evidence supporting the theory that an Inflationary period occured in the early universe.

    6. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      "So for anyone who...thought you finally had complete triumph over all the creationist wackos, I hate to burst your bubble"

      Feel free to believe whatever you want, just don't call it science or I'll tell you how you should pray.

    7. Re:Misleading Headline by jdavidb · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Incidentally, only on Slashdot can you get modded up for obsessing over the use of "a" instead of "the." (Which is why I guess grammar nazis like me like the site...)

    8. Re:Misleading Headline by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      To put that into laymans terms, they have new data that agrees with old data and theories. That can be a good thing for the status of a theory. But let's be somewhat scientific here and not throw around statements that imply proven theories.

      No, in layman's terms, they've proven the theory. In scientific terms, they have new data that agrees with old data and theories. The problem is that non-technical language doesn't distinguish between "theory" and "hypothesis," nor between "sufficient evidence to accept" and "proof."

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    9. Re:Misleading Headline by PseudoQuant · · Score: 1

      As already remarked, something like "First Evidence supporting Inflationary Theory" would be closer.

    10. Re:Misleading Headline by RayBender · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I'm a fundamentalist, and I lean toward a literal understanding of Genesis and a 6000-year earth (although I'm not adamant about it and easily accept that I might be misunderstanding things), and even I accept that the "Big Bang" is probably a pretty good model for what happened. (I just think the timescale may be way off

      Which timescale? The astronomers', or the Bibles? I think this new data is actually a beautiful confirmation of the Big Bang. The theory makes some very specifc predictions about what one should see when using a partuclar kind of microwave receiver - predictions that have now been confirmed. At this point, the idea of the Big Bang is as solidly supported by real-world evidence as almost any other theory - including gravity, relativity, QED, or even the theory of evolution. That theory makes very specific claims about the age of the Universe. Pretty cool, eh? What supporting evidence does the Genesis story have? What predictions does it make - and can they be falsified?

      --
      Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
    11. Re:Misleading Headline by amightywind · · Score: 1

      NASA *Reaffirms* Big Bang Theory

      Look like you were in a big hurry to do some karma whoring and you neglected to even look at the story. The original posting was completely reasonable.

      --
      an ill wind that blows no good
    12. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      What supporting evidence does the Genesis story have? What predictions does it make - and can they be falsified?

      Among other things, that snakes will all live on the ground and crawl on their bellies in the dust for all time. Naturally, they live in the sea, rivers, and some arborial species spend their whole lives in trees. At that point the Creationists start talking about how the serpent was a metaphor. Yeah, it's some kind of "faith" that needs to proped up with delusion and (poorly) manufactured "evidence."

    13. Re:Misleading Headline by AKAImBatman · · Score: 1

      If you would be kind enough to look up a few posts above, you'll find out exactly what happened.

      Look like you were in a big hurry to do some karma whoring and you neglected to even look at the story.

      Looks like you were in such a big hurry to criticize that you weren't paying attention to the signs that the story changed.

    14. Re:Misleading Headline by grub · · Score: 0


      Why flamebait? I'm truly in awe of the Big Guy's wang. If Jesus took after the old man, just imagine how hung he was. I bet the ladies fought over who'd get it next.

      --
      Trolling is a art,
    15. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      That's "per se" not "per say."

    16. Re:Misleading Headline by hunterx11 · · Score: 2, Funny
      In Soviet Russia, articles use y--wait.

      In Soviet Russia, there are no articles.

      --
      English is easier said than done.
    17. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I just love you fundamentalists telling God what he can and can't do. You told him he couldn't create a round earth, you told him he couldn't have created evolution... ...and now you are telling him he couldn't have started with the entire "Let's create a universe" concept last week and simply set the wayback machine to any time to do it. Why do you choose to constrain him with a timeline just because you are constrained to one?

      The biblical God is a cartoon created by very unsophisticated people--so in order to solve the hundreds of contradictions in their stories they had to say "He can do anything", so he can really do anything at all--and you aren't allowed to question any of it, if you do you are not a proper fundamentalist!

      Please leave the thinking to those who are still allowed. By submitting to a "Higher force" you have essentially broken your brain and are of no further use to us. Go worship your god and stop wasting your time doing anything else.

      Hell yes I posted anonymously--fundamentalists are, for the most part, a bunch of fucking insane murdering psychos and I'm not about to stand up to them in public (Unless they are no longer taking responsibility for the psychopath they kept in office)...

    18. Re:Misleading Headline by 9Nails · · Score: 1

      Nasty to think that I'm glactic jizz. I hope we have a better theory out there!

      I think that if you take the matter and turn it over, there will be a label that reads, "Made in China."

    19. Re:Misleading Headline by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The problem is that non-technical language doesn't distinguish between "theory" and "hypothesis," nor between "sufficient evidence to accept" and "proof."

      I agree completely. However, if you're going to take things down to laymans terms, you need to explain what you're talking about. Saying "the theory is proven" is not correct, even in laymans terms. Saying "the theory is effectively proven, with a vanishing small chance for error" better conveys the reality.

      In any case, most people have pointed out that the story is misleading anyway. While this is evidence for a big bang type event, it is more interesting because it provides evidence for an inflationary universe; something that has had far less evidence to back it before now. :-)

    20. Re:Misleading Headline by z0I!) · · Score: 1

      Does it make you feel better to you're just your daddy's jizz?

    21. Re:Misleading Headline by AKAImBatman · · Score: 1

      I bet the ladies fought over who'd get [Jesus in bed] next.

      You need to stop reading Dan Brown. It's rotting your brain. ;-)

    22. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You do realize where you came from really, unless you are some sort of advance AI, right? I'll give you a hint, it involves a gooey mess of organic substances....

    23. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't confuse evidence and facts with mythology. Yes, the creation story in the Bible is mythology. There are no facts to support that mythology. I like mythology as much as the next person; it makes wonderful fiction reading. I even like to mix some of my facts and mythology in some types of science fiction.

      I do like to disern between mythology and facts or evidence.

    24. Re:Misleading Headline by bflong · · Score: 1, Insightful

      hmmm... whats missing is the fact that the Genesis account begins with the earth already existing, and with water everywhere on it. It does not begin with the creation of the universe. There is nothing in the bible to contradict what astronomers guess the age of the universe to be.

      --
      Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
    25. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agreed. How small must you think your god that you've assumed either:
      1) He is smaller than and thus bound by time and so had to "hurry" to get a 6000 year universe put together for the benefit of us monkeys.

      OR

      2) Created time but was only able to create it in one direction...

      My persoal favorite theory is that the universe is 5 minutes old and was simply created with a past as well as a future. All of the believers in little gods are welcome to tell me why this can't be so...
      By the by, can anyone point out to me where is says in Genesis "Hey buddy, the universe is only 6000 years old". I seem to have trouble finding it for reference.

    26. Re:Misleading Headline by Tango42 · · Score: 1

      There's lots of evidence supporting inflationary theory - the fact that measurements show we're in an almost flat universe is the first one to spring to mind.

    27. Re:Misleading Headline by Foobar+of+Borg · · Score: 1
      That's "per se" not "per say."

      That's my purse. Hey!

    28. Re:Misleading Headline by Schemat1c · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Incidentally, I'm a fundamentalist, and I lean toward a literal understanding of Genesis and a 6000-year earth

      Well then you must know that Genesis literally is a just a hacked up and edited version of much older Sumerian myths and also that it was written by 6 different authors. And where did Cain find that wife of his anyway? Oh well, it's the perfect word of god so it must be true.

      The part of genesis I like best is "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth". In fact I'm off to partake in some herb bearing seed right now, though it is a bitch when there are too many seeds.

      --

      "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
    29. Re:Misleading Headline by jdavidb · · Score: 1

      I just love you fundamentalists telling God what he can and can't do.

      I love you atheists knee-jerking and noticing I'm religious and failing to read the entire post and realize I said exactly the opposite of that.

    30. Re:Misleading Headline by jdavidb · · Score: 1

      And where did Cain find that wife of his anyway?

      Cain screwed his sister. And I imagine he had a good time doing it.

    31. Re:Misleading Headline by jdavidb · · Score: 1

      Feel free to believe whatever you want, just don't call it science or I'll tell you how you should pray.

      Sounds good, only I prefer I have the liberty to call it what I want as long as I don't impose any of it on you. In other words, we all leave each other alone, and we're good. It'd be nice if people could agree to that.

    32. Re:Misleading Headline by Laur · · Score: 2, Informative
      hmmm... whats missing is the fact that the Genesis account begins with the earth already existing, and with water everywhere on it. It does not begin with the creation of the universe. There is nothing in the bible to contradict what astronomers guess the age of the universe to be.

      Who the hell modded this insightful? From the "first" creation story: Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." From the "second": Genesis 2:4 "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens..." "Heavens" is generally understood to be everything which is not the earth, i.e. the universe. In addition, according to the first story the earth was covered with water, but according to the second the earth wasn't covered with water until a "mist from the earth" came.

      --
      When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
    33. Re:Misleading Headline by jdavidb · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      BTW, in addition to being a fundamentalist, I also support the legalization of pot. Thought you might find that cool.

    34. Re:Misleading Headline by irablum · · Score: 0, Troll

      Well, I'm a particle physicist and I believe that the concept of a 6000 year old earth (or universe for that matter) is so ludicrous as to defy logic. The only way you could possibly believe that is if you believe that the creator created the universe so as to be at that particuarl state 6000 years ago. It would have been much easier for him (or her or whatever) to have created it 19billion years ago, and then sat around for 18,999,994,000 years until it reached that state and then say, "Ok, time begins right... wait for it.... NOW!" assuming that the big bang occured 6000 years ago is just plain wrong. Sorry, but the stuff thats out there could not have made it to those distances in less than 19 billion years, give or take a few billion years.

      Personally, I'd feel better if fundamentalists instead said something like, God created the universe whenever the Physicists said it began, and shaped its creation to bring about the earth as it currently stands throughout that time. Then they get their God, they get their creationism, they get their divine province, but they don't look like idiots to those of us who know better.

      "God doesn't play dice with the Universe" - Albert Einstein
      "God doesn't play dice with Albert Einstein" - the Universe (only Poker)

      Ira

    35. Re:Misleading Headline by AKAImBatman · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heaven[s] and the earth."

      Also translatable to "When God began to create the heavens and the Earth." My reference is the footnote in the New Revised Standard Edition.

      The second verse more clearly explains that the Bible is talking about the creation of the Earth as we know it:

      Genesis 1:2 "The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep"

      I've spent a lot of time considering that beginning passage. I just don't think that the Bible is talking about the creation of the Universe. I think that Moses received a vision of the beginning of life on Earth, which would be consistent with the Bible's purpose. (The purpose of the Bible is to catalog the lineage of Christ.)

      In the context of Genesis, the "heavens" refers to the sky above us. Moses probably saw the Earth go from a lifeless rock in space (without form and void) to a habitable planet (God's spirit moved upon the waters).

      Without an atomosphere to diffuse light, the Earth would appear quite dark, even when lit. (Like the moon's surface.) Alternatively, the thick atmosphere during formation may have blocked out the light until God said "let there be light". This would have made the Earth's rotation apparent, thus "separat[ing] the light from the darkness".

    36. Re:Misleading Headline by iminplaya · · Score: 1

      Flat universe!? Some people still need to be convinced that the earth is not flat. Now this? We'll need to send Columbus to the "new" universe to prove them wrong.

      --
      What?
    37. Re:Misleading Headline by quest(answer)ion · · Score: 3, Insightful

      you've probably already flamed to death on this one, but i thought i'd weigh in soberly. what your take on this neatly leaves out is that what genesis mostly conflicts with is theories of how the earth itself (not to mention the life on it) has formed. the 6000 year inference is in direct conflict with the scientific (i.e. geological and archaelogical) evidence as to how long the earth has been around. granted there are lots of disagreements about how accurate our best scientific dating methods are, but the discrepancies are hardly enough to account for a several billion year overestimate.

      don't mean to be rude, but i'll trust systematic observation of the actual earth and the geological processes shaping it over literal analysis of a book--history or not--anyday.

      side note: genesis doesn't really start with the earth *already* created. it begins with the word, then light, etc. y_w_h did a fair amount of creatin' before the earth was actually "there." so saying that "god left out the creation of the universe" isn't terribly accurate anyway.

      even assuming that the literality of the bible picks up at a fairly late chapter in human evolution--with Adam and Eve happening say, around the time of the emergence of language and sophisticated culture with H. Sapiens leaving Africa, that makes for a discrepancy in time-table in the ballpark of a hundred-thousand years, which is WAY beyond the error margins of our dating techniques.

      i'm sorry, i just can't see any reasonable way to justify a literal reading of the bible as world history, except as a kind of mythologized history of one particular people in the middle east area. seen in that way, it makes a great deal of historical, cultural, etc sense and is pretty damn important to understanding humanity as it has developed in that part of the world.

      i'm not trying to step on any religious toes here--you can get as literal as you want with the moral/cultural stuff in the bible if you want; if you want to read, say, leviticus as the literal law of a vengeful and nitpicky god, go for it, that's your business, but to equivocate and try to wiggle into a literal interpretation of the historical accuracy of it is--again, sorry if i offend--a little weak and kinda does an injustice to your faith.

      --
      /. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
    38. Re:Misleading Headline by Schemat1c · · Score: 1

      Cain screwed his sister. And I imagine he had a good time doing it.

      Which of course brings us back to the whole issue of 'the big bang'.

      --

      "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
    39. Re:Misleading Headline by AKAImBatman · · Score: 1

      "God doesn't play dice with the Universe" - Albert Einstein

      "Don't tell God how to run his Universe." -Neils Bohr

      (Both quotes are actually paraphrasings rather than quotes, but what the hey.)

    40. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well that's fair enough. But you really needn't have brought the Bible into this. This thread is not about Creationism.

    41. Re:Misleading Headline by professionalfurryele · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Since you seem convincable, I advise you to hunt down a physicists and a biologist to explain to you why, from a scientific stand point, you are wrong. Dating via radioactive isotopes and the distribution of the elements indicate clearly that the universe is much much older than 6000 years. These are not pseudoscience. Your religious friends who ridicule these facts, are wrong. The mainstream scientists are right. The Earth is billions of years old.
      I'm a professional physicist, and I've seen the evidence for the Earth being more than 6000 years old with my own eyes, and calculated the age of things with pen and paper (and a mass spectrometer) myself. I'm sorry, but you are just wrong about the age of the Earth.

    42. Re:Misleading Headline by Laser+Lou · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Incidentally, I'm a fundamentalist, and I lean toward a literal understanding of Genesis and a 6000-year earth

      I'm now convinced that the creation vs. evolution controversy (with intelligent design) is really, well, a bunch of hype that serves to draw people away from religion and science. Let me first make it clear that evolution is fact; no "if"s, "and"s, or "but"s about it.
      This controversy pulls people away from religion and Christianity because they see christians arguing a naive, scientifically untenable, point, and they come to associate that with Christianity. In essence, creationism becomes a stumbling block. Also, it pulls people, mainly christians, away from science because it forces a stark choice between believing in the Bible and believing what scientists say. Since the stakes involved in not believing in the Bible (i.e. going to Hell for eternity) are much greater than those in not believing scientists (i.e. sounding like a fool in front of others), they tend to draw towards creationism and away from common science. Unfortunately, that also discourages any sort of deep study into who authored Genesis, when, why, etc.. (i.e. the only answer I've heard from fundamentalists is that Moses wrote it, as if he or anyone else was there witness it). The only way out, that I see, is an earnest effort to understand the rationale behind sciences like evolution and astronomy. The motivation is the fact that you can't learn science through creationism.

      --
      No data, no cry
    43. Re:Misleading Headline by Digital+Vomit · · Score: 1
      hmmm... whats missing is the fact that the Genesis account begins with the earth already existing, and with water everywhere on it. It does not begin with the creation of the universe. There is nothing in the bible to contradict what astronomers guess the age of the universe to be.

      Huh?

      Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

      The very first first of the first book in the Bible describes that the earth was created, not that it already exists. However, it should be pointed out that there's absolutely no details as to what processes were involved, or how long it took, so you're still correct on that point.

      Basically, it starts out at the point science can never go (what started the Big Bang), then leaves everything science can explain as a complete blank for the reader (kind of like a "figure the rest out for yourself" thing).

      Of course, the hints about the life arising from the earth follows with verse 2 immediately begins with the sun's light seeping throught a thick atmosphere, enabling plant life to evolves, which cleans up the atmosphere enough so that the sun, moon, and stars are visible, then aquatic life appears, then land animals, and finally, man. (well, that's one way to read it, anyway) The sad thing is, the anti-science religionists choose to understand the story in an extremely literal way that they would never apply to anything else, and the anti-religion scientists reject it because it's not written like a science textbook.

      --
      Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
    44. Re:Misleading Headline by Decaff · · Score: 1

      Incidentally, I'm a fundamentalist, and I lean toward a literal understanding of Genesis and a 6000-year earth (although I'm not adamant about it and easily accept that I might be misunderstanding things)

      I hope you don't mind me asking, because I am fascinated by the fundamentalist mindset - but why don't you simply accept that you are indeed misunderstanding things?

      I think that one of the harshest lessons anyone who likes think about more than trivia has to learn is humility - that one simply has to take the word of experts, no matter how much one may personally want other things to be true.

    45. Re:Misleading Headline by jdavidb · · Score: 1

      that one simply has to take the word of experts

      I tend to not take the word of experts on anything. Maybe it's just a genetic trait I have or something. But it's a very common theme in many aspects of my life. (Including religion ... I'm a member of a church that opposes the theology of just about every Protestant and Catholic religious body out there.)

      Experts are often wrong. That doesn't mean we should assume they are wrong. But take the field of medicine, for example: for the most part, I think "alternative medicines" are hogwash. But every so often something comes along that completely shakes up known medicine. Nutritional recommendations seem to change daily, for example. Experts don't always know. Again, that's not cause for assuming them to be wrong. But I don't like to automatically ascribe anyone authority simply because some other authority ranks them "an expert in their field."

    46. Re:Misleading Headline by lasindi · · Score: 1

      Up until now, though, there's been nothing other than mathematical proof for cosmic inflation itself- only theories that seemed impossible (matter moving at several million times the speed of light?!?!?). This gets us a step closer to a GUFTE- a grand unified field theory of everything that would be as close as science could come to describing God.

      Not really. A unified field theory would unify the four fundamental forces of the universe -- gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force -- into one mathematical framework. Many physicists see this as the ultimate goal of physics. Einstein spent the last part of his life trying to achieve it, and string theory, despite its lack of experimental evidence, is seen by many as a candidate for becoming the "theory of everything." But Big Bang Theory, while it's very important to the work on unification, is not unification itself, and this new evidence for inflation does not (at least directly) help with unification. Also, a unified field theory, if it ever is found, will just be a set of equations. Unless you think that "God" is just a set of mathematical constructs, don't think that physics is about trying to fulfill anyone's philosophy; that's why physics is science, not religion.

      --
      I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
    47. Re:Misleading Headline by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1

      That's why I put the E on the end- GUFT is a subset thereof. To find God, you've got to go the extra step to examining what forces were in effect during the cosmic inflation. Oh, and while I don't think God is "just" a set of mathematical constructs, for God to be true AND mathematical modeling to be true we must be able to mathematically model God's actions, just as we can mathematically model human actions.

      Of course, I'm from the school of thought that a miracle doesn't neccessarily need to be supernatural either- it can be just a fortunate coincidence for you.

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    48. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      shut up you anal retentive fat fuck.
      How's you moms basement, I'll make sure to say hi when I'm done fucking her.

    49. Re:Misleading Headline by w1ll0w · · Score: 1

      Funny thing about that comment is that the big bang actually helps support creationism. Something caused the bang and God's pretty tough so it fits perfectly into Genesis. I thought most evolutionists were moving away from the big bang because of this.

    50. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...as close as science could come to describing God.

      For all we know, the big bang was a side effect of God stubbing Her toe on a 12-space pebble. Description of the big bang is unlikely to reveal anything about the nature or reality of God, nor the infinite multiverses which seem to imply Her existence.

      Far, immeasurably far is She above that which they attribute to Her.

    51. Re:Misleading Headline by x2A · · Score: 1

      So for anyone who did misread the headline and thought you finally had complete triumph over all the creationist wackos, I hate to burst your bubble. :)

      Misread headline or not, we don't take the "creationist wackos" seriously anyway, so I really wouldn't worry about bursting bubbles!

      I believe this is all evidence that supports and reinforces theories, as the universe probably has more dimensions than what we see and can easily measure in, it's unlikely we'll ever know fully what happened 100% (at least for a long-long-long time, but quite possible ever), but we can get closer and closer.

      --
      plug: External harddrives (UK)

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    52. Re:Misleading Headline by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1
      I disagree with the grandparent's view that you should accept the view of experts, since I consider this another form of fundamentalism. If I don't personally understand something then it goes in my brain's 'unknown' pile until I do. The opinions of experts are acceptable first-approximations, but should not be taken as fact.

      Back to the original point, however, I wonder just where you get these beliefs. You claim that the world is 6000 years old. Do you have any evidence that supports this? If you are reading it from The Bible, then you are relying on experts (and those experts are human, since The Bible was inspired by God but written by humans, while the Qur'an was written under dictation from God's secretary). Or are you relying on the experts in your own church? If you do not rely on any of these experts, I would be very interested in learning what it was that persuaded you that the Earth was only 6000 years old.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    53. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Who said anyone was an atheist? OH, are you assuming that being terrified of the christian fundamentalists that are going to destroy the planet by empowering psychopaths is atheism?? Quite a jump there--there are a lot of other religions that are endangering the planet much less. There are a few that are psycho fundamentalists, but only christians are putting crazies in the most powerful position on the planet.

      If you wish to understand them, whenever you see a "Christian fundamentalist", simply imagine the one from "Trading Spouses" and then put her inside the person you are talking to. Typically, the only difference is that Marguerit was less cunning about concealing her inner self.

      ps. This also does not tend to apply to Catholics or most other sane Christians that understand the fact that the bible was written by humans and mostly stories and fables of how we try to relate to our God.

      It's reading the bible literally and twisting your brain into circles trying to make sens of it that breaks your break.

      I happen to have read much of the bible and easily excluded it from being true or even representing a conceivable God that I would be in any way interested in loving, but I still believe in powers outside humanity and am refining my understanding of them--a Good God (as mostly described in the new testament but completely incompatible with the olde one) is not beyond possibility.

      We're all trying to feel our way through life and understand it. The parts that help, keep. The parts that don't--get rid of them. Jesus did just that. He saw how dangerous the old testament was and canceled out a lot of the harm it was doing while still offering insight into what God might be like. Great!

      Religion has been used throughout the ages to force people to submit to a unified power (the church). It's a lever to use against people just like patriotism.

      Use it as a lever instead to help you understand your surroundings, just be VERY CAREFUL to NEVER let others influence your understanding, and to not use your understanding of that old stupid book to influence how you perceive things around you.

      Please mod this down to -1. Just venting and it's totally o/t. thx.

    54. Re:Misleading Headline by mOdQuArK! · · Score: 1
      Since the stakes involved in not believing in the Bible (i.e. going to Hell for eternity) are much greater than those in not believing scientists (i.e. sounding like a fool in front of others), they tend to draw towards creationism and away from common science.

      Actually, it forces people to make a choice about who they will believe when it comes to fundamental truths about the Universe: the scientists or the religious-types, i.e., it polarizes them.

      How many go which way is probably a good measure of the general level of rationality versus emotionalism in society.

    55. Re: Misleading Headline by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

      > Incidentally, I'm a fundamentalist, and I lean toward a literal understanding of Genesis and a 6000-year earth

      So how come you reject all the evidence that Genesis is a collection of a myths?

      > and even I accept that the "Big Bang" is probably a pretty good model for what happened.

      It's certainly not anything like what's described in Genesis.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    56. Re: Misleading Headline by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

      > > hmmm... whats missing is the fact that the Genesis account begins with the earth already existing, and with water everywhere on it. It does not begin with the creation of the universe.

      > Huh? Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The very first first of the first book in the Bible describes that the earth was created, not that it already exists.

      If you read the next nine verses it's clear that 1:1 is a statement of what's about to be explained in more detail. And that detailed explanation seems to portray a hero-god stamping order on a pre-existing chaos, just as in other versions of the common Near Eastern mythology.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    57. Re: Misleading Headline by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

      > Funny thing about that comment is that the big bang actually helps support creationism. Something caused the bang and God's pretty tough so it fits perfectly into Genesis.

      "They both had a start" is just about all they have in common. You can add the next stray cat you see to the same set.

      > I thought most evolutionists were moving away from the big bang because of this.

      Biological evolution doesn't depend on the big bang. Most "evolutionists" believe it simply because they credit the professionals of that field as knowing more about what they're talking about than dopes like Hamm and Hovind.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    58. Re:Misleading Headline by JPriest · · Score: 1
      You thought evolutionists are straying from the big bang theory because it supports creationism?? What is next, evidence of the "missing link" supports creationism also? (well it was created at some point, and god does create stuff)

      Stand there while I dig a nobel prize out of my pocket for you.

      --
      Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
    59. Re:Misleading Headline by daniel23 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The really funny thing - for the rest of the world - is to watch the selfproclaimed rulers of the world/universe/galaxy getting hot about this creationism folie whenever there is a chance. Some new scientific data - astronomical, geologist, biological, archaeologist, linguistic, genetic, you name it - and after 3 or 4 sensible posts the slashdot crowd turns to debating how this new factoid shines in the light of a 15th century mindset.
      Pages and pages.
      And most of you folks just state the obvious - that creationism etc is utter nonsense - but why mention it at all?

      We don't discuss this US phenomenon much over here in Europe. It's like someone dear to you turns lunatic. It's embarrassing, you try to keep the topic under the table, when you have to mention it, you use euphemisms and code words while hoping all the time the crazy brother finally gets back into his right mind.

      Please! Stretch! Yawn! Rubb your eyes - and get back to normal. TIA

      --
      605413? Yes, it's a prime.
    60. Re:Misleading Headline by pnewhook · · Score: 1
      Incidentally, I'm a fundamentalist, and I lean toward a literal understanding of Genesis and a 6000-year earth
      It's not 6000 years old. It's actually been only 5766 years since creation according to the Hebrew calendar.
      --
      Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
    61. Re:Misleading Headline by pnewhook · · Score: 1
      Personally, I'd feel better if fundamentalists instead said something like, God created the universe whenever the Physicists said it began, and shaped its creation to bring about the earth as it currently stands throughout that time. Then they get their God, they get their creationism, they get their divine province, but they don't look like idiots to those of us who know better.
      That's basically every major religion's view except for the fundamentalist Christians, which incidentally constitute only a small percentage of the total number of Christians worldwide.
      --
      Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
    62. Re:Misleading Headline by Frozen+Void · · Score: 1

      Don't forget to be fruitful and multiply!
      Well considereing this is slashdot,you can forget it.
      I generally consider that
      Genesis was like open-source myth gone wrong,some scribe written those poetic paragraphs,another scribe copied it and made few corrections and third remastered it in a bigger framework with his version expanding as he saw fit.
      Quality control in that time was poor and making a issue of fractioning some ethnic group because of
      few disputed sentences(i don't mean it could happen ) of holy scriptures.
      see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesi s

    63. Re:Misleading Headline by bunratty · · Score: 1
      So for anyone who did misread the headline and thought you finally had complete triumph over all the creationist wackos, I hate to burst your bubble.
      The debate about evolution vs. creationism has nothing to do with which is right and which is wrong. It's about creationism not being based upon science, but based upon faith, and as such it has no place being discussed in a science classroom.
      --
      What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
    64. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mathmatically modeling human actions. That's an interesting one. How would one model a humans thinking? Free thinking. Willingly making bad descisions when a more beneficial outcome is clearly evident. How do you model that mathmatically? And emotions; how do you model them? What's the mathmatical formula for Love? Is there an algorithm to model anger? There may very well be math for such things, but there is overwhelming complexity involved in discovering it. There are things about us that no one understands.

    65. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What you probably want to say is, "New evidence supports a Big Bang Theory".

      Sorry, couldn't help but wonder how unpopular ./ would have to be to see the _opposite_ story here and have someone actually suggest the following instead: "New evidence proves Darwin was wrong". Now the question is, does ./ have the guts to publish factual information against a theory that's so popular with their fan base? Now that would be something truely newsworthy!

    66. Re:Misleading Headline by GotenXiao · · Score: 1

      Big Bang. Energy from this explosion reaches zero. Universe starts to collapse back in on itself. Big Crunch. Singularity compresses to a point so small that it can no longer contain itself and explodes. Repeat.

      --
      Goten Xiao
    67. Re:Misleading Headline by Ginger+Unicorn · · Score: 1

      the fact you have to spend hours considering the meaning of a couple sentences that are supposed to be god's divine explanation to us of how our world came to be, and that the only conclusion you can come to is a best guess based on one particular printed variant of this "absolute truth" totally invalidates the notion that bible is authoritative in any way.

      --
      (1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
    68. Re:Misleading Headline by psymastr · · Score: 1

      The Bible is wrong! There you go! I didn't wait until March 18th, 2006 to learn that!

      --
      Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
    69. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The problem with calling it science is that that it is fraud. It is also the first step towards trying to teach it as if it wasn't actually religion when it is. Freedom doesn't give you any right to mislead. Call a spade a spade.

    70. Re:Misleading Headline by jdavidb · · Score: 1

      There are a few that are psycho fundamentalists, but only christians are putting crazies in the most powerful position on the planet.

      If you'd actually read through the things I'd post, you'd see that I support eliminating that position.

    71. Re:Misleading Headline by jdavidb · · Score: 1

      It is also the first step towards trying to teach it as if it wasn't actually religion when it is. Freedom doesn't give you any right to mislead.

      Freedom means I can say whatever I want to say, and you can take it or leave it.

      As for teaching children in the classroom, children are clearly not free if they are forced to be somewhere.

    72. Re:Misleading Headline by corngrower · · Score: 1
      Here's a link to the wikipedia article about the cosmic microwave background radiation, including some history. Now this was predicted by George Gamow, way back the first half of the last century. This topic has an interesting history and I've read a book or too about it, including one by one of the Physicists involved (Smoot).

      The grandparent posits a belief in a fundamentalist interpretation of the creation story in the Bible. Does this creation belief allow you to make any usable predictions? I doubt it. Its a useless theory, especially when it is not supported by any evidence other than the fact that we, and the universe exist. But when we get to looking at the details, we find that the bibilical creation story is inconsistent with our observations.

      Back in the 1960's some cosmologists (Physicists) still held out hope for a steady state universe theory. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation and its spectrum closed that door. I remember reading articles in science news as these discoveries were coming to light.

      Now this microwave radiation is extremely consistent no matter what direction you look in the sky. But the theories indicated that for galaxies and clusters of galaxies to form, there had to be some variation in this radiation. Finally, the COBE satellite was able to detect this variation and mapped it . More recently other satellites have provided more details to this background radiation.

      Did creation theory predict that we would observe variations in cosmic microwave background radiation? Nope. Hell it couldn't even predict that there was such a thing. That creation theory is a pretty weak theory if you ask me.

      For those who hold literally to the story in Genesis, you should question your motive for continued belief in young earth creationism. What purpose does it serve? Are you afraid of questioning what your church authorities tell you? It's impossible to take the Bible totally literally. It contains internal inconsitencies (it contradicts itself on certain things). Some portion of it, therefore cannot be taken as the literal truth. The question now is, what should be taken as the literal truth, and what should be taken figuratively.

      Concerning the observations supporting the Big Bang theory (and inflation) and a 14x10^9 year old universe, If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it may as well be a duck.
      JMTC

    73. Re:Misleading Headline by Listen+Up · · Score: 1

      But what you don't seem to understand is that the Christian god is simply human make-believe, like all gods in all religions, there is no difference. Anything that is not disprovable, repeatable, and predictable is not real.

      Let's make this even more clear, especially with consideration to one point, if the universe was created by the Christian god, who created the Christian god? Do you just make up new, non-logical make-believe answers to that question such as "he exists beyond the laws of the universe" or there are an infinite number of creators? And on and on. Again, religion is completely fantasy. Hey, if the Christian god could have simply existed, so could the universe, without a god.

      Do you simply choose to ignore the completely, blatantly obvious fact that humans simply invented religion for their own needs? That the universe is exactly as it appears.

      The one point people do not understand is that science and the scientific process applies to everything in this universe, not just want they want to pick and choose to apply it to. You must apply it completely or not at all. Science is proof through disproof, if any part of your explanation is false, it is all false.

      And Mathematics is not just equations, it is truly the language of the universe. Physics is the modeling of the universe through the use of Mathematics.

    74. Re:Misleading Headline by Decaff · · Score: 1

      I tend to not take the word of experts on anything. Maybe it's just a genetic trait I have or something.

      but you do, in practise. Do you drive a car? Or travel on a plane? If so, you are taking the word of experts that these things work.

      Nutritional recommendations seem to change daily, for example. Experts don't always know.

      True, by my point is that experts know better than most. To ignore experts on everything because of the occasional mistakes seems to be (as we British say) 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'.

    75. Re:Misleading Headline by Decaff · · Score: 1

      I disagree with the grandparent's view that you should accept the view of experts, since I consider this another form of fundamentalism.

      Utter tosh. What is the point of being human if you don't rely on the practical experience of others? Do you intend to personally test all foods and medicines you eat or take? Do you intend to design your own car or plane? If not, they you are relying in the views and experience of experts. To arbitrarily then pick a certain field of knowledge and refuse to listen to experts (I did not say that you should accept their views unquestioningly) is hypocritical.

    76. Re:Misleading Headline by SerenaStargazer · · Score: 1

      What kind of word is "evolutionist"? I think that if I let go of something, it will fall down. Does that make me a gravitationist?

      --
      "The reason for this is not understandable to the human mind." - IT helpdesk assistant
    77. Re: Misleading Headline by w1ll0w · · Score: 1

      ""They both had a start" is just about all they have in common. You can add the next stray cat you see to the same set."

      Good enough to show there was an eternal root cause of everything.

    78. Re:Misleading Headline by w1ll0w · · Score: 1

      "What is next, evidence of the "missing link" supports creationism also? (well it was created at some point, and god does create stuff)"

      I thought evolutionists gave up on the missing link to. They can't find one so the incomplete fossil records must be the problem. Man has never seen something from nothing. So it becomes a theory where accident can't be the cause. After that God sneaks in to the equation. Can't have that now can we?

    79. Re:Misleading Headline by w1ll0w · · Score: 1

      I agree. If you've been told something long enough and someone presents evidence to the contrary it puts people on the offensive. Rightly so, who wants to be shown they are wrong and have proof? I'm not saying all of the data supports God, but the alternative theories starts looking much less like unbiased science and more like an attempt to prove anything but God. All the data is out there, one must only read with an open mind. If you can read everything out there without bias and still say that yep everything's an accident than so be it. At least you read the data and interpreted it for yourself. Come back with some reasonable conversation. Show us how all this evidence against us is right and all the evidence backing us is wrong.

    80. Re:Misleading Headline by w1ll0w · · Score: 1

      Hahaha, never thought about that.

    81. Re:Misleading Headline by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1

      But what you don't seem to understand is that the Christian god is simply human make-believe, like all gods in all religions, there is no difference. Anything that is not disprovable, repeatable, and predictable is not real.

      Well, for that matter so is the scientific method- it's not disprovable, only about 50% repeatable, and as an axiom, is not predictable, it just is. So is the basis of all human thought when you come right down to it- all sorts of things can interfere with human observation to the point that we don't know what is repeatable and what isn't. The logical end of skepticism and solipsism is that nothing is real at all- because we can't trust anybody.

      Let's make this even more clear, especially with consideration to one point, if the universe was created by the Christian god, who created the Christian god?

      Why the hell do you care?

      Do you just make up new, non-logical make-believe answers to that question such as "he exists beyond the laws of the universe" or there are an infinite number of creators?

      More that "he IS the laws of the universe- to know those laws is to know him". Quantum physics suggests that there may very well be an infinite number of creators- one per universe in the multiverse. But I repeat, why do you care? You've already chosen to be skeptical instead- so take your skepticism to the inevitable logical end- we can't believe in anything we don't experience ourselves personally, and even then, we can't be sure that the controls on an experiment aren't affecting the outcome of the experiment to the point that nothing is real.

      And on and on. Again, religion is completely fantasy.

      Absolutely- including the religion of no-religion and the religion known as science.

      Hey, if the Christian god could have simply existed, so could the universe, without a god.

      Well, if you truly understood the idea of a God to begin with, no, the universe couldn't exist without a god because the universe is a part and parcel of the concept of God. Or rather, God can't exist without a universe- the two concepts are equal. First, you've got to figure out if a reality external to your brain exists at all- it too may well be complete fantasy. All depends on the myth you grew up with.

      Do you simply choose to ignore the completely, blatantly obvious fact that humans simply invented religion for their own needs?

      Not at all- I'm just not as willing as you are to abandon that need. The need still exists today- even in yourself- but because you don't recognize the need you're likely going to end up like Madalyn O'Hare- suiciding in a ditch because you finally realize that your entire life is a lie, and that nothing is real.

      That the universe is exactly as it appears.

      Yes, and as it appears to me it's a wonderfully complex system that required the selection of certain constants in the model that cannot be adequately represented in our mathematics, only approximated. From PI to the cosmic expansion to Planck time to the mass of an electron to the universal gravitational constant- none of these can be expressed by our current mathematical models, YET it all works together. I don't make a god out of chaos to explain the unexplainable, like you do, I don't try to claim that an infinite universe/God is knowable to a finite brain. But I find most atheists really have a problem with parents, rather than the actual concept of infinity.

      The one point people do not understand is that science and the scientific process applies to everything in this universe, not just want they want to pick and choose to apply it to.

      I'd agree with that- I've often said there are no miracles. HOWEVER, the scientific process- the scientific method- is just another description of God, no different than Odin, Thor, Zeus, or Yahweh. It's just another way of looking at reality- and is just as imperfect as any other way human beings look at reality- and equal

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    82. Re:Misleading Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Okay, I'm sorry for ranting at you. I should have picked another venue.

      Posting as a "Fundamentalist Christian", with a good point or not, is much like saying you are a Nazi because they are helping to rebuild the fatherland. For many it was true, but you still had to blame every single one of those proud little bastards.

      I'm really tired of seeing otherwise intelligent people professing to be a part of this cult. It's dangerous and offensive and people need to start standing up against it.

      Borderline people who still haven't completely broken their brain (possibly you?) could really help by trying as hard as possible to truly question the fundamentalist principles rather than trying to support them. Anyone truly questioning a fundamentalist religion could not persist in it's belief for any significant amount of time--if they do, they aren't really being critical.

      So don't take my offense as meaning that I didn't agree with your post, take it as a general rant against anyone being proud of being a christian/nazi/member of the Spanish inquisition. Note:Of the three, the first is by far the most dangerous, and is a superset of the other two anyway.

    83. Re:Misleading Headline by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1

      Mathmatically modeling human actions. That's an interesting one. How would one model a humans thinking?

      I can't even prove that human beings think, let alone model it. But if it exists, theoretically it's possible to model it.

      Free thinking.

      Free thinking is highly rare in the human species- what most people call free thought is really reaction to given stimuli in view of personal experience.

      Willingly making bad descisions when a more beneficial outcome is clearly evident.

      The problem there is that "clearly evident" is different for different people- what is clearly evident to you is not clearly evident to me, nor is what is beneficial to you always beneficial to me.

      How do you model that mathmatically?

      As a function- stimuli + experience = action.

      And emotions; how do you model them?

      As stimuli/response, just like anything else.

      What's the mathmatical formula for Love?

      Define Love first, then you'll see it's just another stimulous/response.

      Is there an algorithm to model anger?

      Anger and Love are just flip sides of the same coin. Without love, there is no anger. Just reverse the sign on the stimulation.

      There may very well be math for such things, but there is overwhelming complexity involved in discovering it.

      Ah, yes, the overwhelming complexity argument. Welcome to Intelligent Design.

      There are things about us that no one understands.

      No HUMAN understands- that does not mean no one understands it or that there isn't an infinite being out there that does understand it and then some. It's just a different level of technology.

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    84. Re:Misleading Headline by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1

      For all we know, the big bang was a side effect of God stubbing Her toe on a 12-space pebble. Description of the big bang is unlikely to reveal anything about the nature or reality of God, nor the infinite multiverses which seem to imply Her existence.

      Random vs ordered effect- this universe has definite constants that seem to imply a design.

      Far, immeasurably far is She above that which they attribute to Her.

      Ah, you believe in metanature then. I don't.

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    85. Re:Misleading Headline by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1

      The problem- RTFA- is that we have a short section of time within the big bang itself that can't be explained by this cycle- and it's now verified to actually exist. The Cosmic Expansion phase has the bang actually using more energy than the Big Crunch would create as heat- thus pushing out matter at many times the speed of light, which eventually slowed and created the universe we know. Thus, while the Big Bang-Big Crunch cycle was good enough at one point, it's now been *slightly* disproven (Asimov put forth a theory in one of his short stories that oould explain the discrepancy- but that theory required a God of a type, if you can call a computer storing the output and consciousness of a 36 billion year evolution of a species God).

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
  2. Summon Bevets! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wait, wrong website...

  3. With What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Big bang prooved with another Shuttle Re-Entry?

  4. GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by Nerdfest · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, looks like that's it for their funding.

    1. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by oahazmatt · · Score: 2, Funny
      Well, looks like that's it for their funding.

      Not if the head of Nasa mentions the huge oil deposit on Mars.

      --
      Those who believe the Internet is private,
      find their privates are on the Internet.
    2. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by grub · · Score: 3, Funny


      The former media guy would have insisted on saying "NASA Confirms: Big Bang was Done by Jesus"

      --
      Trolling is a art,
    3. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by fireboy1919 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There's an ironic post. George Bush upset because these scientists are using science rather than religion?

      How do we gaze back to the infant universe? The cosmic microwave background is a fossilized record of what occurred way back when. Embedded in this light are subtle patterns that point to very specific conditions about the early universe.

      So...subtle patterns from something that happened long ago that may or may not have been affected by external forces on the way towards us. Patterns for which we are extrapolating initial conditions on the basis of what is equivalent to a very, very small number of observations in the grand timeline, and for which we only have a single location (this solar system) to sample from.

      All this to describe an event whose happening we don't really understand and which we have no way to either predict or test. What can we really do now that we couldn't before?

      We can see into space with a higher degree of accuracy, and finally, perhaps, test a few of the theories that we couldn't before (which are based on other theories that we still can't yet test). Don't get it wrong, though:
      Deciding that the universe is a particular age is still taking a leap of faith, no matter what age you think it is.

      --
      Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
    4. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Funny your post is an immediate dig at the President, whom you obviously disagree with.

      Glenn Beck Presents: Real American A-Holes

      Real American A-Holes...

      Today we salute you, Mr. Partisan Politician.

      Mr. Partisan Politician...

      Ignoring your job to make America better, you pledge allegiance to the flag with your right hand on your heart, and your left hand firmly buried in your party's lap.

      Yeah, strokin' the system...

      You've learned that because you're a Republican, all Democrats are philandering communists, or because you're a Democrat, Republicans are all homophobic raghead killers.

      Nuke the cab driver...

      After you memorize the party line, it's nothin' but fancy dinners, limo trips, and hot interns under your desk.

      I brought you some kneepads...

      Yes, whether your symbol is an elephant or a donkey, you're still all a collection of asses. So thank you, Mr. Partisan Politician. Maybe someday Republicans and Democrats can come together for something truly worthwhile, like pissing off the Green Party.

      Killing trees and burning styrofoam...

      Glennheiser Beck, United States of America.

    5. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by hunterx11 · · Score: 1

      Trying to figure out as best we can what the age of the universe is based on our observations and the best theories we can extrapolate from these observations isn't faith; it's science. Just because we don't know everything, it doesn't mean that we should stick our heads in the ground and pretend to know nothing.

      --
      English is easier said than done.
    6. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by geoffspear · · Score: 1
      Trusting empirical evidence and inductive reasoning requires plenty of faith. Science is predicated on the idea that if A is followed by B for every instance of A that's been observed, that A will continue to be followed by B forever. There is no logical reason to believe this; it's merely how we think the world works. (To be fair to scientists, no one would be able to function without this belief. But that doesn't make it True.)

      Of course, it's quite a leap to go from "science requires faith" to "you might as well accept metaphysical mumbo-jumbo with no evidence because it's just as good as accepting evidence."

      --
      Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
    7. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by fireboy1919 · · Score: 1

      I think we differ in view is what to think when "best" is roughly equivalent to "wild speculation with a small number of highly questionable supporting facts."

      My opinion there is that you should go ahead and assume that any theory that has been put forth is equally valid. I don't see why "God made it at a specific time" or "its always been there," or "it happened at a specific time all by itself" are all equally valid hypotheses in absence of real testability.

      Its interesting that you mention putting your head in the sand. I would consider holding one hypothesis as more valid than others in the absence of acceptable supporting evidence to be exactly that.

      When I don't know what to think, I don't bias myself by picking something just because I don't know. I'm willing to not know.

      --
      Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
    8. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by superiority · · Score: 1

      Dude. This was predicted. Finding this was a test. And more predictive = treated as more accurate. Geddit?

    9. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by hunterx11 · · Score: 1
      There is no logical reason to believe this; it's merely how we think the world works.

      We believe this because everything we observe follows this pattern. Even if this isn't sufficient proof to overcome hyperbolic doubt, even Hume accepted that it is the best thing we have. Besides, science isn't based on finding what's "True," but rather getting the closest to the truth we can, as I posted originally.

      --
      English is easier said than done.
    10. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by hunterx11 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I think we differ in view is what to think when "best" is roughly equivalent to "wild speculation with a small number of highly questionable supporting facts."

      I think you don't know much about science. The Big Bang theory is highly speculative, but to call it "wild speculation" is simply untrue--it is the most logically consistent explanation of phenomena we observe in the universe.

      My opinion there is that you should go ahead and assume that any theory that has been put forth is equally valid. I don't see why "God made it at a specific time" or "its always been there," or "it happened at a specific time all by itself" are all equally valid hypotheses in absence of real testability.

      Your opinion is flat-out wrong. You should give as much credence to theories as they deserve based on their merit. Science does not purport to explain what caused the Big Bang, only to describe how it happened.

      Its interesting that you mention putting your head in the sand. I would consider holding one hypothesis as more valid than others in the absence of acceptable supporting evidence to be exactly that.

      There are other hypotheses, such as the cosmological constant. However, the evidence points toward the Big Bang.

      When I don't know what to think, I don't bias myself by picking something just because I don't know. I'm willing to not know.

      You mean that you choose not to think at all instead of biasing yourself in favor of the evidence. Guess what? I don't know either, and I never claimed to.

      I don't know if your post was a troll, or if you really are so willfully ignorant. You missed my original point entirely; while we do not know for sure that the Big Bang occurred, it is the best explanation we have today, and the only reason it ignore it is in favor of faith.

      --
      English is easier said than done.
    11. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by yndrd1984 · · Score: 1
      There is no logical reason to believe this; it's merely how we think the world works.

      And there's no logical reason to believe that you're reading a post on slashdot. You could be dreaming - I've actually dreamt about replying to a post before.

      Science is predicated on the idea that if A is followed by B for every instance of A that's been observed, that A will continue to be followed by B forever.

      True (except that "forever" should be ", most likely"), but so is everyday life. Without the idea that the past in some way predicts the future we can't make any predictions at all. You probably believe "I need food to eat", but have you actually starved yourself to death to make sure? Oh, wait, even that won't prove it, because it might be different next time!

      Trusting empirical evidence and inductive reasoning requires plenty of faith.

      But no more faith than believing that you are looking at a computer. Remember Decart's demon and the brain in a vat? Belief in anything require some tiny bit of faith, but we usually reserve the word for things that are a little less certain.

      Of course, it's quite a leap to go from "science requires faith" to "you might as well accept metaphysical mumbo-jumbo with no evidence because it's just as good as accepting evidence."

      And I would say: Of course, it's quite a leap to go from "science requires some common-sense assumptions" to "faith". Science requires faith only in the sense that auto maintainance requires faith. The idea that cars need oil changes might be backed only by a vast conspiracy, and any personal experiences might just be coincidences, but is that a reasonable, logical belief?

    12. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by ComaVN · · Score: 1

      Exactly! Timecube should get equal time in physics classes!

      Finally someone who understands.

      --
      Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
    13. Re:GWB says 'Bad Scientists' by canadian_right · · Score: 1
      If there was inflation after the big bang then current theories PREDICT that the back-ground microwave radiation will have certain features. These features have been found. This is how science works. This is how theories are TESTED.

      They are sampling over large parts of the entire universe. They can point the microwave detector in whatever direction they want. They are making huge numbers of observations - not a small number.

      --
      Anarchists never rule
  5. How? by JDSalinger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How can the past be truly confirmed? -C

    1. Re:How? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anything you are looking at right now -- or in any way interacting with -- is already in the past. Light travels at a finite (albeit large) speed. As you read this your eyes are registering actions on the monitor that happened a nanosecond ago.

      Events that happen on a scale the size of the known universe are bound to leave behind distinct trails. The evidence is all right there if you know how to recognize it.

    2. Re:How? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >
      > Events that happen on a scale the size of the known universe
      > are bound to leave behind distinct trails. The evidence is
      > all right there if you know how to recognize it.
      >

      And what if we were in some kind of dream? There is no such thing as evidence.

    3. Re:How? by avanderveen · · Score: 0, Troll

      This is stupid there is still no solid scientific evidence of this working, besides where would the matter come from that caused the "Big Bang"? This theory is pretty far-fetched and should have been rejected years ago!

    4. Re:How? by ichigo+2.0 · · Score: 1

      This is stupid there is still no solid scientific evidence of this working, besides where would the matter come from that caused the "Big Bang"? This theory is pretty far-fetched and should have been rejected years ago!

      It's the best theory we've got. If we demanded 100%-proof from theories before we accept them, we'd still think the world is flat. Since you're so sure this theory is wrong, you must have a much better one, why don't you share it with us?

  6. Beware the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief by Kenja · · Score: 0

    Like all sane people I subscribe to the Great Green Arkleseizure theory of Universal origin.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
  7. Oh come on! by MikeyTheK · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This doesn't confirm anything. They have found evidence that may or may not be consistent with a particular hypothesis. Could someone please do a better job of editing the titles?

    --
    Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
    Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
  8. Kiddush Cup ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Doesn't he mean Yiddish Cup?

    1. Re:Kiddush Cup ? by dr_dank · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, I think he means Quiddich Cup. Bad enough that the religious zealots chime in, but now we have a new threat to science from the Harry Potter geeks.

      There is no use resisting, five points to Gryffyndor!

      --
      Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
    2. Re:Kiddush Cup ? by Bob+Cat+-+NYMPHS · · Score: 1

      Whoever modded you Informative is definitely not Jewish. At least no one accused NASA media of being controlled by Jews.

      http://www.judaica-mall.com/glossary-terms.htm

      Kiddush - The special blessing said over wine or grape juice, particularly on Shabbat, Havdalah, and Jewish holidays. The word comes from the root koof|dalet|shin which means "holy." The Kiddush fulfills the mitzvah to "remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." The Kiddush is recited on Friday evening before the meal, as one is not supposed to eat until after this blessing has been said.

  9. I sure agree by 2.7182 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How is it possible to "confirm" a big bang theory ? You'd have to go back and see it. Maybe "indirect evidence was found" is a better description.

    They'll probably change their stance a few years anyway about the whole thing.

    1. Re:I sure agree by lawpoop · · Score: 1

      They are measuring the light generated from the event itself. Isn't that the same as seeing it? ;)

      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
    2. Re:I sure agree by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Have you ever heard the word "inference"? You know, the same kind of process as you would use if you find a man lying on the ground with a pool of blood around his head and a bloodied hammer lying beside him.

      Big Bang cosmology is based upon three key lines of evidence:
      1. The red shift of distant galaxies demonstrates that the observable universe is expanding.
      2. Nucleosynthesis demonstrates that the large majority of the very lightest elements; hydrogen, helium and lithium are not the products of stars, but rather from some period when the universe was much hotter and denser than it was today.
      3. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, seen in *every* direction you care to look, is the clearest earmark that the Universe was much hotter and denser.

      So even if Big Bang cosmology is replaced, the replacement theory is going to have to explain these observations and the inference gained from them that the universe was much denser and hotter early in its history.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    3. Re:I sure agree by HTH+NE1 · · Score: 1

      They are measuring the light generated from the event itself. Isn't that the same as seeing it? ;)

      But if we're a part of the universe created by that event, and nothing travels faster than the speed of light, then how did we get here before the light from that event got here? If we're seeing it via reflections, how did what it's reflecting off of get out there ahead of it?

      --
      Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
    4. Re:I sure agree by lgw · · Score: 1

      The light wraps around the universe. Look far enough and you'll see the back of your head!

      Actually, the light being studied is the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is a snapshot of the universe at the moment it cooled to the point it was transparant for the first time (called Recombination), which was about 100 K years after the Big Bang IIRC. The temperature everwhere we look is extremely uniform, too uniform given the size of the universe at that time and the speed of light.

      A theory that the univers as a whole inflated at faster than the speed of light in it's early years was proposed to explain this. The new data supports the predictions made by this theory, but we're not actually looking back to light from the time the theory talks about. There's no light from before Recombination flying around anywhere.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    5. Re:I sure agree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      But if we're a part of the universe created by that event, and nothing travels faster than the speed of light, then how did we get here before the light from that event got here?

      You've got several errors in your assumptions.

      First off, the "Event" that caused the photons in the CMB isn't actually the singularity->universe transition at time zero, it's what happened thousands of years later, after charged particles formed neutral complexes and allowed photons to travel more than a fraction of a meter without being reabsorbed.

      Secondly, although nothing travels faster than light *through space*, there is nothing saying that the expansion of *space itself* can't push two objects away from each other at speeds faster than light. This is a vital part of inflation theory.

      So, at time zero, everywhere was 'here'. The Big Bang proper happened, making a slightly larger universe, so that 'here' and 'there' were separated by an infintessimal amount. In the first fractions of a second, space then expanded superluminally ("Inflation"), throwing 'here' and 'almost here' to widely different ends of the universe. Particles which just a second ago were light-nanoseconds apart now found themselves 15 billion light years apart. The Universe continued to be uniform, hot, and boring, slowly cooling for another several thousand years, untill protons and electrons bonded, turning the primordial plasma into a primordial gas, allowing the cosmic background radiation to pass through the gas unimpeded. Those photons kept moving practically unimpeded for 15+ billion years, slowly stretched and cooled by the subluminal cosmic expansion (Hubble/Doppler/Red shifting) to microwave frequencies, untill they hit a detector on a sattelite orbiting earth.

    6. Re:I sure agree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's interesting to note your use of the terms "evidence" instead of "observations" and "demonstrates" instead of "suggests".

      An alternative theory of cosmology which predicts these same observations was linked from Slashdot only a few weeks ago - see http://www.afmayer.net/.

    7. Re:I sure agree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So even if Big Bang cosmology is replaced, the replacement theory is going to have to explain these observations and the inference gained from them that the universe was much denser and hotter early in its history.

      Well, this can be easily explained as simply the Invisible Hand of the Market at work.

    8. Re:I sure agree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Naturally, I would guess that he had, in a fit of despair, beat himself to death with the hammer. Of course, its also possible that his untimely demise was the result of a construction mishap... However, one should not come to hasty conclusions about these things!

    9. Re:I sure agree by cb1066 · · Score: 1

      So that was done in January, see www.stamford.edu/~afmayer There was a post in Slash Dot that lead to this link around the time it was first available...Question is, when will NASA modernize its own science for the new explanation.

  10. Well, happy St. Patty's to you too! by Tibor+the+Hun · · Score: 5, Funny

    ---stars and galaxies separated by vast voids.' Thereby creating a 'structure' to the universe -- a kiddush cup. '...finds that the first stars---the forebears of all subsequent generations of stars and of life itself---were fully formed remarkably early, only about 400 million years after inflation. This is called the era of reionization, the point when the light from the first stars ionized hydrogen atoms, liberating electrons from the protons.

    Fantastic!
    I was looking for a pickup line for tonight!

    --
    If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
    1. Re:Well, happy St. Patty's to you too! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "How about I ionize your hydrogen atoms baby!, then you can liberate my electrons from their protons!"

      Yeah, that works!!!!!

    2. Re:Well, happy St. Patty's to you too! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "---stars and galaxies separated by vast voids.' Thereby creating a 'structure' to the universe -- a kiddush cup. '...finds that the first stars---the forebears of all subsequent generations of stars and of life itself---were fully formed remarkably early, only about 400 million years after inflation. This is called the era of reionization, the point when the light from the first stars ionized hydrogen atoms, liberating electrons from the protons.

      Fantastic!
      I was looking for a pickup line for tonight!"

      At first glance I'm not sure why this was modded insightful instead of funny...but as I've never had a pickup line that worked, and I've never tried this, maybe I'm missing something!

    3. Re:Well, happy St. Patty's to you too! by Tibor+the+Hun · · Score: 1

      I'll give you a hint that has worked for me.
      Dont ever tell the girl right away that you're in the computer field or math.
      Tell them you're in business, or marketing or something international. Not to impress them, but just to get the conversation flowing. Later on, you can tell them that you're involved with computers.
      And don't worry about the details, just ask her to tell you about herself.

      --
      If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
    4. Re:Well, happy St. Patty's to you too! by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Funny
      Dont ever tell the girl right away that you're in the computer field or math.
      Tell them you're in business, or marketing or something international. Not to impress them, but just to get the conversation flowing. Later on, you can tell them that you're involved with computers.

      Speaking as someone on the geekier end of the spectrum -- they just know.

      It's difficult not to use words like Grok in conversation, and even if I try to stare at her shoes, somehow the woman always seems to know.

      For some of us, our social awkwardness precedes us by several metres. ;-P
      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    5. Re:Well, happy St. Patty's to you too! by PitaBred · · Score: 1

      Relating to people is like a game ;) Learn the rules, get slapped a few times. You have more "lives" as long as you don't piss off her 6' , 250lb boyfriend

    6. Re:Well, happy St. Patty's to you too! by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      Certainly, that was a great pickup line. While she is standing there totally flabbergasted after hearing this, all you have to do is hit her on the head with a big stick and carry her into your lair... I mean your mom's basement. Hopefully I don't have to tell you what to do with her once you are down there?

    7. Re:Well, happy St. Patty's to you too! by irablum · · Score: 1

      To bring this full circle, Richard Feynmen had this advice to say about picking up women. "How to get a girl you meet at a bar to sleep with you? Just ask her "Will you sleep with me?" Before you waste money buying her drinks. She most likely will." Ira

    8. Re:Well, happy St. Patty's to you too! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just become a submissive in the BDSM scene. They don't mind geeky subbies. Dominatrices are the sexiest kind of matrices of all!

  11. A definite proof of the Big Bank theory by roman_mir · · Score: 2, Funny

    First I clicked on the link and there was this: Nothing for you to see here.

    Then I clicked and there was a story.

    It happened in less than a second, so we can call that a Big Bang.

    Q.E.D.

    1. Re:A definite proof of the Big Bank theory by TopShelf · · Score: 1

      Nonsense, that first message was simply the Designer's way of testing your faith...

      (note that with /., I hesitate to use the phrase Intelligent Designer)

      --
      Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
  12. Lets not forget. by Kenja · · Score: 2, Informative

    Lets not forget that in science you cant prove anything, only disprove. All you can do is postulate a theory and provide evidance to back it up.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    1. Re:Lets not forget. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


      was that a not-so-subtle attempt at trying to lighten the impact of the scientific data from a Creationist point? your posting history suggests that...

    2. Re:Lets not forget. by AviLazar · · Score: 1

      Where does it say that in science something can't be proven. Get a scientist and tell him to prove that water is made from two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen...he can prove it...He doesn't need to disprove anything else. Disproving is fine and dandy, but due to the nature of existance - pretty much every answer, except a select few, is the wrong answer. Given that dispproving something will help you eliminate issues, but you need to actually prove something to get a "hey look, 2+2 = 4"

      --

      I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
    3. Re:Lets not forget. by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 1

      Get a scientist and tell him to prove that water is made from two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen...he can prove it...

      No, he can't. He can show you an overwhelming amount of evidence that is consistent with the H2O theory, but that is not the same thing as proof. It is, however, as close to proof as anything in science ever gets.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    4. Re:Lets not forget. by lawpoop · · Score: 1

      "All you can do is postulate a theory and provide evidance to back it up."

      Well, it also helps if you have experiment(s) that were designed specifically to disprove the theory, and they didn't.

      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
    5. Re:Lets not forget. by Kenja · · Score: 1

      Yea thats a rough one. How would you go about disproving the big bang short of mesuring the movement of all objects and showing that they dont radiate out from a common center. But even thats not much to go on.

      --

      "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    6. Re:Lets not forget. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You say 2+2=4. My question is then, can 3+9=1? If you look at the math in reality it can. Because that is how I view it. The only reason you say 2+2=4 is because that is what you were taught to believe. :)

    7. Re:Lets not forget. by AviLazar · · Score: 1, Insightful

      No, he can't. He can show you an overwhelming amount of evidence that is consistent with the H2O theory, but that is not the same thing as proof. It is, however, as close to proof as anything in science ever gets.

      Why can't he? He can take the components, separate them and then show you with instruments that can read such materials. "See we were in a vacuum that had pure H2O. Now after applying the electrical process, we have some gas in there. My instruments are able to tell me that it is Hydrogen and Oxygen...in a 2-1 ratio.

      --

      I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
    8. Re:Lets not forget. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Correct. Remember, science only deals in probable truth, not absolute certainties. We may have 5 nines certainty that a scientific theory is correct, but we'll never reach 100% confidence because there is always the possibility our data is incomplete.

    9. Re:Lets not forget. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All that shows is that particular water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, not that all water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. By repeating the experiment, you can amass evidence that oxygen is made of hydrogen and oxygen, but that is not the same thing as a proof...

      Take some math courses to see the difference between evidence and proof.

    10. Re:Lets not forget. by Lord+Bitman · · Score: 2, Funny

      no, you jackass, it proves that the instruments produce the same measurements when measuring hydrogen and oxygen as they do when measuring evaporated water. The devil would be furious if he knew you were advocating so ineptly.

      --
      -- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
    11. Re:Lets not forget. by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Plenty of observations could falsify the Big Bang. If the CMBR were localized in one direction, then it would knock down a key pillar of the theory. If we could demonstrate some other means by which the vast amounts of hydrogen needed for the earliest stars to form other than by primitive nucleosynthesis, that would certainly cause severe problems.

      The Big Bang is falsifiable, though by this point, and with the vast number of observations done in the last three decades, it's hard to imagine any evidence now coming to light that would overthrow it. If it is replaced at all, then the new theory is still going to have explain the evidence, and that means that the new theory is still going to have to deal with a universe that was once incredibly hotter and denser than it is now.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    12. Re:Lets not forget. by Tony · · Score: 1

      Very true.

      However, if you have a bunch of competing hypothesis, and the evidence disproves all but one, you pretty much are stuck with the survivor as the working theory until something better comes along.

      So far, the evidence is pretty much against most other competing theories, including steady-state and creationist viewpoints.

      --
      Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
    13. Re:Lets not forget. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Doubt is integral to science. As soon as you have no doubt, you have left science and joined religion. Read Descartes and the nature of knowledge.

    14. Re:Lets not forget. by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 1

      Prove that you had a perfect vacuum in the chamber before you put the water in. (Good luck on this one.)

      Prove that your sample was pure water. (Ditto; water is really, really hard to purify.)

      Prove that your "electrical process" did not somehow introduce new material into the chamber.

      Prove that your instruments are reading the elements in the chamber, and their proportions, correctly.

      And after you're done proving all those things, prove that the techniques you used to prove them are correct.

      Etc. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Now, in practice, we tend to accept that our lab equipment is pretty much doing what it's supposed to (after calibration and testing, of course) because this approach seems to work. But this is not the same thing as proof.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    15. Re:Lets not forget. by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 1
      Why can't he? He can take the components, separate them and then show you with instruments that can read such materials. "See we were in a vacuum that had pure H2O. Now after applying the electrical process, we have some gas in there. My instruments are able to tell me that it is Hydrogen and Oxygen...in a 2-1 ratio.

      Congratulations, you have just proved that electricity transmutes the element "water" into the elements "hydrogen" and "oxygen".

      That tells us nothing about what's "really" going on at the atomic level. Remember, clear evidence for atoms was only gathered a relatively short time ago (1905 by Einstin, I believe). At this stage, we still only have "evidence" for the existence of atoms.

      The original poster is correct. There are very few things that can be definitively proven. Your own existence is the canonical case, some would also argue mathematics, and there are some interesting sub-cases to your own existence, such as the implications of being able to think in a language. But that's getting off the topic.

      --
      Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
    16. Re:Lets not forget. by yipper · · Score: 1

      According to the Wikpedia article on Big Bang,
      if anything ever shot down Hubble's redshift theory
      the whole thing would go boom.

      so to speak

    17. Re:Lets not forget. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1
      1905 by Einstin, I believe

      I suggest you read this page. Einstin[sic] had very little to do with it. The internal structure of atoms was fairly well understood (modulo quantum effects) before he came on the scene.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    18. Re:Lets not forget. by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 1
      Einstin[sic] had very little to do with it. The internal structure of atoms was fairly well understood (modulo quantum effects) before he came on the scene.

      Atoms was one theory among many competing theories at the time. Einstein provided the mathematical framework that pretty much blew away all the other theories and made Atoms the standard model. Instead of relying on Wikipedia (which does mention Einstein in 1905), do a google for "einstein proved the existence of atoms", which will most likely turn up more interesting information.

      --
      Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
    19. Re:Lets not forget. by dhalgren99 · · Score: 0

      Prove it!

    20. Re:Lets not forget. by Datamonstar · · Score: 1

      So... what you're saying is that people are free to believe what ever they want dispite any and all evidence provided?

      --
      The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
    21. Re:Lets not forget. by megrims · · Score: 1

      Evidence supports, it does not suggest.

    22. Re:Lets not forget. by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 1

      Well, people are free to believe whatever they want, of course, and they do, including many beliefs which are lacking in any evidence whatsoever. But that's not really the point. "Proof" in the sense that most people use the word is impossible in science; all we have is "preponderance of evidence" and "lack of disproof." This is, of course, good enough -- the main reason scientists fight so hard against the use of the word "proof" is because impossible-to-meet demands for proof tend to be used by anti-science types to attack the very well-supported theories which constitute our entire understanding of the natural world.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    23. Re:Lets not forget. by ShakaUVM · · Score: 1

      Incorrect. Some theories are falsifiable, some are provable. It generally has to do with the class of question we're talking about.

      Theory: At least dog has a green color. Provable, not falsifiable.
      Theory: All dogs have a green color. Falsifiable, not provable.

      It's a result of a wee bit too much positive materialism that we only consider theories "scientific" if they are falsifiable.

      The correct answer is that scientific theories can be either, IMO.

    24. Re:Lets not forget. by Datamonstar · · Score: 1

      I was agreeing with you. No matter how much proof you've got, you just cannot "prove" some things to some people. I believe in creation. I also believe much of science has presented to me.

      --
      The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
  13. 42 by mtenhagen · · Score: 4, Funny

    And we all know the answer will be 42, so why bother?

    --
    200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
    1. Re:42 by FusionDragon2099 · · Score: 1

      Yes, but what was the question again?

    2. Re:42 by Rude+Turnip · · Score: 1

      Yeah, really. Anyway, it's St. Patrick's Day, so why don't we all go out for pangalactic gargleblasters?

    3. Re:42 by HTH+NE1 · · Score: 1

      Think of a number, any number.

      --
      Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
  14. what? by jeffs72 · · Score: 3, Funny
    Peretz writes "NASA has a confirmed a theory of what took place post-Big Bang and time expansion. They claim: 'Over the course of millions of years, gravity exploited the density differences to create the structure of the universe---stars and galaxies separated by vast voids.' Thereby creating a 'structure' to the universe -- a kiddush cup. '...finds that the first stars---the forebears of all subsequent generations of stars and of life itself---were fully formed remarkably early, only about 400 million years after inflation. This is called the era of reionization, the point when the light from the first stars ionized hydrogen atoms, liberating electrons from the protons.'"

    Era of reionization? Time expansion? Doesn't Nasa know this is friday afternoon, time to go drinking and chase skirts? I can't think about this now!

    --
    This article has recently been linked from Slashdot. Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.
    1. Re:what? by Procrastin8er · · Score: 1, Funny

      By chase skirts I assume you mean look at porn on the Internet. This is /. after all. Most /.ers rarely leave their parents basement.

      --
      Slashdot - Where the slash is most definitely to the left.
  15. The Universe as a Kiddush Cup? by Erwos · · Score: 1

    I know some people who think their entire universe is STILL a kiddush cup![1]

    -Erwos

    [1] Interpret this as you will - upon reflection, there's a lot of meanings to it.

    --
    Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
    1. Re:The Universe as a Kiddush Cup? by Eli+Gottlieb · · Score: 1

      Apparently I'll be drinking wine out of some people's entire universe tonight! Yum, Universe!

    2. Re:The Universe as a Kiddush Cup? by hey! · · Score: 1

      Well, to mee it looks more like a cheap glass tumbler, like gas stations used to give away with every fill up.

      We're probably rattling around on the floor of God's back seat because (as astronomers will soon discover) our universe has the wrong football team logo on it.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  16. Dimensions... by Sargeant+Slaughter · · Score: 1

    I've never seen 4 dimensions represented on a 2 dimensional plane, preyy cool...

    --
    I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
  17. Sounds awefully familiar... by GillBates0 · · Score: 1
    The notion that a rapid period "inflation" preceded the Big Bang expansion was first put forth 25 years ago. [snip] Inflation poses that the universe expanded far faster than the speed of light and grew from a subatomic size to a golf-ball size. [snip]

    In simpler, day-to-day terms, what they're trying to say here is that Universe rapidly enlarged until it eventually blew the seal.

    --
    An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
    1. Re:Sounds awefully familiar... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...and the seal loved it!

  18. top down vs bottom up by i_should_be_working · · Score: 1

    To any cosmologists/astronomers:

    Which theory is supported by this? The one that says large scale structure in the universe formed first or that small scale structure formed and later clustered together to form super structures?

    And how does this relate to the universe's current acceleration, if at all?

    1. Re:top down vs bottom up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      These data, and essentially all other cosmological data, support "hierarchical" theories in which small-scale objects form first, then merge together to form larger objects. The usual analysis of this type of data is to compute angular correlations of temperature fluctuations in the microwave background radiation, which is one of the calculations this group did. The locations and heights of the peaks in this power spectrum show that there was a significant amount of dark matter present 400,000 years after the big bang that did not interact (electromagnetically) with the microwave background. Although this type of experiment can only probe very large scales (equivalent to clusters of galaxies and larger), combining it with other data can definitively rule out models in which the largest structures form first.

      The main way that the current acceleration of the expansion of the universe manifests itself in these data is in the location of one of the peaks in the power spectrum. In this new data, the peak location is very consistent with other data showing an accelerated expansion.

  19. ...and so the molecular Bible states, by WwWonka · · Score: 1

    This is called the era of reionization, the point when the light from the first stars ionized hydrogen atoms, liberating electrons from the protons.

    In the beginning
    electrons always overpowered the evils
    Of all proton's sins.......
    But in time
    The atoms grew weak
    And our systems fell to slums
    While proton's stood strong
    In the dusts of space
    Lurked the blackest of stars
    For he whom they feared
    Awaited them.......
    Now many many ions later
    Lay destroyed, beaten, beaten down,
    Only corpses of particles
    Ashes of dreams
    And blood-stained planets.......
    It has been written
    Those who have the youth
    Have the future
    So come now children of the electrons
    Be strong
    And shout at Stephen Hawking!

  20. Inflation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    That's pretty awesome, and a big deal. We now have experimental verification inflationary theory was correct.

    Now, the important question: Why is inflationary theory is correct? So the universe decides to expand massively and abnormally right after it begins to exist. Why? We still don't have any idea do we?

    1. Re:Inflation by Tony · · Score: 2, Funny

      So the universe decides to expand massively and abnormally right after it begins to exist. Why?

      It was depressed and binge-eating?

      --
      Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
    2. Re:Inflation by Bob3141592 · · Score: 1

      So the universe decides to expand massively and abnormally right after it begins to exist. Why?

      It was depressed and binge-eating?


      I prefer to think it just couldn't contain it's enthusiasm.

      --
      In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
    3. Re: Inflation by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

      > Now, the important question: Why is inflationary theory is correct? So the universe decides to expand massively and abnormally right after it begins to exist.

      Why do you call it 'abnormally'? We've got a sample size of 1.

      As to your question, presumably it's the result of a phase change in the growing universe. We already know of others, such as when it cooled down enough to be transparent to photons. Maybe inflation is what happens to universes at a certain temperature and density.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  21. Re:Confirmation by xiando · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    How is it possible to "confirm" a big bang theory ?

    Ten points to you for brilliant observation. Additionally, they don't even say they confirm the theory in any way what so ever - They only confirm that they think it is likely a good theory. And that doesn't mean as much as it used to, remember, NASA is among those telling you there is no massive covert black-ops weather modification program using chemical trails http://www.google.com/search?hl=no&q=chemtrails going on in all NATO http://www.google.com/search?hl=no&q=NATO%2Bnazi countries - even though I http://en.xiando.org/Chemtrails and half a million other people accross the world have taken literally thousands of pictures of such operations.

    Big Bang remains a nice theory. It may be true or it may be total hogwash - just like "evolution". I strongly encourage everyone to think for themselves, ask though questions and never believe ANYTHING NASA says is true just because they say it is.

  22. Now, would that be... by kclittle · · Score: 1
    ... a four dimensional kiddush cup, or an eleven dimensional one? (Or ten, according to your personal string-theory beliefs...)

    --
    Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
  23. Kiddush cup? The YTMND Connection?! by Crash24 · · Score: 1

    Thereby creating a 'structure' to the universe -- a kiddush cup.

    Don't you mean "Yiddish cup"?
  24. It Will Be Thrown Out By Kansas by Hoi+Polloi · · Score: 2, Funny

    Oh great, now the Kansas Board of Education will have to have another meeting.

    --
    It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
    1. Re:It Will Be Thrown Out By Kansas by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Jerk, I live in Kansas. When the Board meets, now all 7 Kansas citizens will have to show up to protest.

  25. Nasa Confirms that it Reaffirms Theory by digitaldc · · Score: 2, Funny

    Now what exactly happened billions of years ago? And what happened before that? And before that?

    *Head asplodes*

    --
    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
    1. Re:Nasa Confirms that it Reaffirms Theory by rscoggin · · Score: 1

      Oh hello there. I believe you misspelled "Fark" in your URL bar.

    2. Re:Nasa Confirms that it Reaffirms Theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SpaceTime did not exist more than 13.7 billion years ago.
      Period.

  26. Solipsist? by straponego · · Score: 1
    Everything you see, like this new evidence, comes via light. Some light sources are closer and more recent than others. But do you discard all evidence that comes in the form of photons?

    Okay, I know I'm simplifying by leaving out hallucinations, faulty organs, the false light you detect if you close your eyes and press your eyeballs with a finger, etc. Jeez, so many nitpickers around here...

  27. You heard it here first... by signal7 · · Score: 0

    Why is it so difficult to believe that the universe just always was in existance? Not everything requires a beginning and based on what I do know about the current evidence, it seems like it's getting increasingly difficult for scientists to continue to try and prove a big bang theory. Just my 2c...

    --

    --
    I have no sig.

    1. Re:You heard it here first... by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      Your two cents ain't worth a 1981 peso, my friend. I don't know what you're reading, but the inflationary model remains the very best explanation. If you have some alternate claim that explains nucleosynthesis, CMBR and distant galactic red shifts, I'm all ears.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    2. Re:You heard it here first... by geoffspear · · Score: 2, Insightful
      It's not difficult to believe that the universe has always existed. It's incredibly easy to believe that. You prove that yourself by believing it and dismissing any evidence to the contrary as "difficult".

      Do you really think scientists decided that the universe is probably expanding from a single point, and then decided to manufacture evidence to prove that belief to themselves? The whole idea that the universe is expanding was a shocking idea that was only accepted by astrophysicists when they concluded that experimental data could have no other explanation.

      You should make it clearer that when you say "based on what I do know" you mean "based on nothing".

      --
      Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
    3. Re:You heard it here first... by Lord+Bitman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      what strange definition of "universe" do you have that the term "always" would make sense outside of it? "The universe always existed" can't be anything but tautology. The universe is existence*.

      *whether the universe exists or not notwithstanding, of course.

      --
      -- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
    4. Re:You heard it here first... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Let's not forget the phrase "Big Bang" wasn't coined to promote the idea of an expanding universe with an origin, but to ridicule it.

    5. Re:You heard it here first... by Chrax · · Score: 1

      Because it's not a matter of belief, but one of evidence. If the evidence indicates that the universe has always been in existence, then our theories will change to accomodate that. As it is, it seems the evidence indicates that the universe is expanding and was at one point extremely dense, which would suggest that the universe was at one point comparatively small, which lends credence to the big bang theory.

    6. Re:You heard it here first... by Tony · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why is it so difficult to believe that the universe just always was in existance?

      The dame walked into my office with a sneer on her pretty pasty-white face. "You sure you know what you're talking about?" I sneered back.

      "Yeah," she said. She had the kind of teeth made for clenching, white and pearly and pressed firmly together. "Yeah, the way I see it, the Universe got a bum rap. They say it all exploded, but I don't believe it. Not my Universe, the big handsome lug." She went on like that for a while. It coulda been the whiskey, but I think she was just dumb in love with her own voice. She went on about how the Universe had to've always been, and nobody had no evidence to the contrary.

      She wound down after sixty minutes or so.

      "Look, Lady," I snapped. "I get paid by the hour. You owe me big. But I'll forget to send the bill if you just answer me one question."

      She squinted at me like her eyeballs got a taste of something sour. "What?" She spat the word out in a short blast of noise, like a bird honking for attention.

      "You ever break the second law of thermodynamics?"

      The question must've smacked her right between the eyes. "What're you implying?" She was suddenly, strangely coy.

      I pressed my advantage. "Your lovely little thing with the Universe. You ever break the second law of thermodynamics? Did you ever see the Universe break the second law of thermodynamics?"

      She shook her head like she had a boiled egg stuck in her ear. She admitted, "I have never done any such thing. It's impossible for a lady of my fine upbringing. I don't even understand what you are driving at, Mister Entropy."

      "Yeah, I know." I pointed toward the door. She took the hint, and left my office like a hot, wet squal in the middle of the Pacific. "That's the problem, " told the blank and empty space where she had been. "If you don't get it now, you'll probably never understand."

      --
      Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
    7. Re:You heard it here first... by Bob3141592 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why is it so difficult to believe that the universe just always was in existance?

      Well, there's Obler's Paradox for one.

      Saying the universe was always in existence implies an actual infinity, and the problems this brings up are, well, practically infinite! Like for example, if the universe has always been here, and it's increasing in entropy, how come it hasn't completely run down already?

      There's lots more. All it takes is a little reading and thinking to find lots more problems with a universe that's always been here.

      --
      In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
    8. Re:You heard it here first... by dildo · · Score: 1

      No. You're wrong.

      The evidence for a big bang (a horrible name) only mounts as time goes on. Scientists aren't trying to prove it; they already have. Now they are trying to figure out what happened afterward, what the early universe was like, and possibly what may have caused the big bang. You talk about the investigations of the big bang as if they were strenuous attempts to prove a religious doctrine. This isn't creation science.

      If you say that the big bang is not a proven thing, I am looking forward to your well-documented paper detailing your experimental evidence casting significant doubt on or refuting big bang theory. Such a paper would be published in Nature or Science and would cause a great deal of excitement. Until then, the Big Bang is a fact, just like gravity, thermodynamics, relativity, and evolution. Until then, you are a wanker or a crank.

      Nice philsophical point about the origin of the Universe: Bertrand Russell made it a long time ago in his book "Why I am not a Christian." (So no, I didn't hear it here first.)

      Scientists don't really have much to say about whether the universe has always existed or not. It is certainly a possibility that the universe has always existed. Scientists don't get hung up about asserting that the Universe has a beginning, only religious people do.

      It is possible that the Universe always was and never had a beginning. It is also possible that there is a God. It is also possible there is a teapot orbiting Mars right now. (Another crib from Russell.) Unfortunately, evidence for these three hypotheses has not yet appeared and there is little reason to believe that we will find any evidence for them. Therefore, Scientists have little reason to care about any of them. Their fascination with the "beginning" of the universe is largely due to the lack of a better word. You could say they are interested in the evolution of the present universe -- and unlike biological evolution, the evolution of the universe does not require an absolute beginning with a first moment (as opposed to biological evolution, which requires the existence of a common ancestor.)

      Now to quote Richard Dawkins: "Now I had better go off and do some digging in the garden."

    9. Re:You heard it here first... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Like for example, if the universe has always been here, and it's increasing in entropy, how come it hasn't completely run down already?

      Thinking about Entropy and the existence of the Universe is a mind-bending experience. Brian Greene talks about it in his most recent book (The Fabric of the Cosmos).

      It turns out that the arguments surrounding entropy's increase is time invariant. That is, although you can label time's arrow as forward in the direction entropy is increasing, if you take a given moment, and look at the arguments as to why entropy increases as time moves forward, you realize there is absolutely nothing that prevents you from making the same arguments as you run time backwards. That is, given the current moment, not only is it most likely that entropy will get bigger ten minutes from now, it is most probable that entropy was higher ten minutes ago.

      This leads to a quandry, because if we look at it from the -10min perspective, we would think that entropy would go even higher as we move toward the 'present', not get lower, as we expect from the present's perspective.

      One way out of this is to posit that there was some event (boundary condition, if you will), that set the universe's entropy at a low level at some time in the far distant past, and natural "entropy increases" has been running with it since (even if the universe existed prior to this point, it would still be a defining "big bang" like moment). The problem is, the further back you go, the lower you have to set the original entropy for it to reach our current low entropy state. This means there must have been something mighty special about the Big Bang which resulted in a very low entropy universe.

      Brian doesn't mention anything about it, but my layman's guess is that whatever drove inflation was the cause of the "anti-entropy" driving force, either by gaining a lot of entropy itself (so the sums cancel), or, to prevent infinite regress, by allowing a small entropy-decrease statistical fluctuation (allowed under the "offical" rules of thermodynamics) to be driven to the large-scale entropy decrease.

    10. Re:You heard it here first... by F�an�ro · · Score: 1

      The second law of thermodynamics is only a statistical law, meaning it is true only on average.
      A glass of lukewarm watter can separate into a hot and a cold half just by brownian motion, the chance for this is just incredible small.

      If you have a closed system in thermal equilibrum and you wait long enough, you will get any possible configuration of energy despite the laws of thermodynamics.

      The thermal equilibrum for the universe would probably be a giant black hole with almost all the mass of the universe, whose evaporation via hawking radiation is on average countered by the surrounding particles that fall into it.

      Waiting for this black hole to evaporate because by sheer chance no particles fall into it, and subsequently waiting for the particles from the ex-black hole to form galaxies will take looooooong, but the probability is not zero, so it will happen eventually.
      Given infinite time, it will happen again and again.

    11. Re:You heard it here first... by hawkfish · · Score: 1

      Roger Penrose discusses this in "The Emperor's New Mind". According to him, it is a consequence of General Relativity (the Weyl Tensor). The exposition is quite funny because he compares the entropy of the universe at t=0 with the odds against the solar system spontaneously occurring and the latter turns out to be more likely!

      --
      You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
    12. Re:You heard it here first... by Tim+C · · Score: 1

      If you have a closed system in thermal equilibrum and you wait long enough, you will get any possible configuration of energy despite the laws of thermodynamics.

      No, not despite the laws of thermodynamics, because of them, because they're statistical in nature.

      However, that's rather the point; the number of states that lead to a decrease of entropy is so infinitesimally small compared to the number of "normal" states that the chances are essentially zero.

    13. Re:You heard it here first... by x2A · · Score: 1

      The beginning does not imply the creation of. For example, the big bang occured at the beginning of time, ie, at one end of the dimension known as 'time', but this does not mean that creation occured then; it's mearly an edge to existance, that appears 'creation'like because of the way we perceive time.

      Nothing really gets created/destroyed (except combination/concepts), think about it, when was the last time you actually saw something being created (not transformed from other things that already existed)? Yes it's a play on words, a car is created, by putting things together in a certain way, but then in a certain way, a car is only the way things are put together - the parts exist before and after the creation of the car, so are kind of irrelevant... (I apologise for my low articulation score here! I know what I mean in an aroundabout kind of way!)

      --
      plug: Digital Media Players (UK)

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    14. Re:You heard it here first... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't forget the possibility that the universe may be open, in which case a global second law doesn't make sense.

      That would be cool: a bounded, open universe where you could sweep all the thermodynamic junk under the limit-set rug.

    15. Re:You heard it here first... by barawn · · Score: 1

      Well, there's Obler's Paradox for one.

      Olber's Paradox is actually easily solved using just dust extinction. Curiously, the Wikipedia article doesn't allow for this as a solution, as they say "well, that'd produce uniform radiation in another band, and we don't see that" even though we do: the cosmic infrared background radiation.

      You also could have an inflationary period (where space expands faster than the speed of light) which shoves all of the Universe outside of your cosmic horizon. That'd work, too.

      The better answer for "why don't we believe the Universe is eternal?" is the CMB. It's really hard to imagine the CMB being formed by anything other than the Universe in a compact, highly dense form.

    16. Re:You heard it here first... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A good example of the Obler's paradox is that if the universe were infinite, then light from far away stars would have had enough time to travel and the earth would be flooded with this light. This however doesn't appear to be the case.

    17. Re:You heard it here first... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'll bite and play Devil's advocate:

      The Hubble relation relates galaxy brightness to redshift, which is (for galaxies at least) more-or-less a good line. This is taken to mean that the galaxies are receeding from us, and therefore that the universe is expanding.

      But just as well it could be that light red-shifts as it travels very long distances, the so-called "tired light hypothesis" that Hubble's contemporary Fritz Zwicky favoured. Of course, in 1929 there were no explanations for such a distance-redshift loss, so the expansion explanation stuck. Now of course we have several mechanisms available to describe a non-scattering redshift loss.

      Another possible route is to explore a novel solution of General Relativity that results in a flat space with a curved time, the upshot of which is a distance-related time dilation. This niftily explains both the redshift of distant light and the time dilated Ia supernovae data. We also avoid Olbier's Paradox because after sufficient distance, light will eventually be redshifted so low that it turns into... wow check it out, an isotropic microwave glow of a few degrees Kelvin (the CMB).

      So now that we have a non-expanding universe, we don't have a 12by limit to its age. So we don't have to shoe-horn enormous 5-10 billion ly structures of super-superclusters into that insuffient amount of time. Gravity and large-scale EM plasma interactions can do the work for us in its own merry time.

      Arbitrarily inventing new phenomena to keep a pet theory afloat despite its inadequacies is not the way to go about science. Inflation, dark matter and dark energy should all be returned to wherever we sent epicycles, aether, flat-earthers and midichlorians. Possibly the only reason we still have the Big Bang at all is because nobody wants to lose that much face by starting all over from scratch.

      For instance, flat galactic rotation curves are successfully reproduced in galaxy models by assuming that galactic material is a plasma and applying magnetohydrodynamics (rather than assuming it's a neutral gas and having to invent a halo of invisible dark matter to get the gravity field to behave itself).

      We also don't have a problem with such advanced galactic evolution evident in the high redshift, very distant galaxies of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF). Occurring supposedly so early in the universe, yet they appear to have the same well-evolved stellar populations as local galaxies.

      Recent statistical analysis of 46,000 quasars using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) redshift data have shown inexplicable periodicities and a non-Hubble relation in the redshift data. BB will have a very interesting time explaining that.

      We can also avoid the self-contradictory BB nucleosynthesis model with its problematic D and 7Li amounts, even more problematic given the latest WMAP-derived CDM parameters. Nucleosynthesis can be derived from standard stellar models instead.

      It's amazing what odd little gems there are lying hidden in the more cobwebbed corners of arxiv.

    18. Re:You heard it here first... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now of course we have several mechanisms available to describe a non-scattering redshift loss.

      Yeah? What are they? I've never heard a viable non-scattering tired light theory, and certainly not one compatible with known time dilation results. And please recall that there are many more observations that imply a Big Bang than simply the Hubble relation.

      Another possible route is to explore a novel solution of General Relativity that results in a flat space with a curved time, the upshot of which is a distance-related time dilation.

      It doesn't make mathematical sense to speak of the curvature of time alone in general relativity, but if you mean flat space with a curved spacetime, that is a prediction of inflationary theory. It doesn't explain anything that conventional Big Bang cosmology does not because it is conventional Big Bang cosmology.

      So now that we have a non-expanding universe, we don't have a 12by limit to its age. So we don't have to shoe-horn enormous 5-10 billion ly structures of super-superclusters into that insuffient amount of time. Gravity and large-scale EM plasma interactions can do the work for us in its own merry time.

      Oh, I get it. You think that there is a static solution of Einstein's field equation with flat space. Well, there isn't (other than the Minkowski spacetime of special relativity, which has no gravity). In fact, flat space or not, there aren't any viable non-expanding cosmological solutions. Hawking proved a theorem to that effect.

      Arbitrarily inventing new phenomena to keep a pet theory afloat despite its inadequacies is not the way to go about science.

      In point of fact, the entire process of science consists of constructing new theories to correct the inadequacies of old ones.

      Inflation, dark matter and dark energy should all be returned to wherever we sent epicycles, aether, flat-earthers and midichlorians.

      Except that inflation, dark matter, and dark energy all have quite a bit of independent experimental evidence in their favor. Their only problem is that you, personally, don't happen to like them. There is no scientific problem with them.

      For instance, flat galactic rotation curves are successfully reproduced in galaxy models by assuming that galactic material is a plasma and applying magnetohydrodynamics

      Except (1) no, they are not, and (2) you have to do a hell of a lot better than galactic rotation curves in order to get rid of dark matter, which accounts for far, far more observations than just that. Many alternatives to flat rotation curves have been proposed (and unlike that plasma cosmology crackpottery, they actually work), but at best, they cannot provide explanations for any of the other phenomena which require dark matter, and usually fail miserably by contradicting other observations (that dark matter passes).

      We also don't have a problem with such advanced galactic evolution evident in the high redshift, very distant galaxies of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF). Occurring supposedly so early in the universe, yet they appear to have the same well-evolved stellar populations as local galaxies.

      You can't explain away all the other massive amounts of evidence that the universe was once smaller, hotter, and denser. And even if your claim was correct, what do you think it proves? Do you think that contradicts even known physics of stellar and galaxy formation, let alone the 14 billion year age of the universe?

      Recent statistical analysis of 46,000 quasars using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) redshift data have shown inexplicable periodicities and a non-Hubble relation in the redshift data. BB will have a very interesting time explaining that.

      Are you citing more of Arp's nonse

    19. Re:You heard it here first... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The CIBR can't account for the light of an eternal universe of stars being reemitted in the IR. At best, it accounts for what it accounts for: stellar light from the observable universe getting redshifted, and some fraction of it getting reemitted in IR.

      As for inflation, an expanding universe has always been a solution of Olbers' paradox.

      Anyway, we have no idea whether the universe is eternal. The CMB is only evidence of photon decoupling from a plasma phase. It doesn't say that time started at the Big Bang.

    20. Re:You heard it here first... by barawn · · Score: 1

      At best, it accounts for what it accounts for: stellar light from the observable universe getting redshifted, and some fraction of it getting reemitted in IR. ... preventing us from seeing the stars whose light gets completely absorbed.

      Now, if you're saying "the CIBR isn't bright enough to account for that", you're right. But that's a subtler problem than Olber's paradox.

      The CMB is only evidence of photon decoupling from a plasma phase.

      The CMB is evidence that there once weren't stars. That's finite enough for most people.

    21. Re:You heard it here first... by Mike+A. · · Score: 1
      The evidence for a big bang (a horrible name)...
      Amusingly enough, the name "Big Bang" was coined by steady-state enthusiast Fred Hoyle specifically to be a horrible name. link
      --

      --
      Do I look like I speak for my employer?
  28. NASA takes credit for universe by Animats · · Score: 1
    NASA announced today that NASA researchers were responsible for the creation of the universe. This adds to NASA's long history of innovations important to every American, including Teflon, Velcro, and Tang.

    NASA will be adding a new "Universe Discovery Center" to the NASAquest Children's Activity Center at NASA centers.

    1. Re:NASA takes credit for universe by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      the universe might or might not have had a definite beginning, until NASA tried to observe it, and they collapsed the probability function to a definite big bang happening. Some have suggested they might next like to see if the universe will end in the next five minutes, but, in the words of the Director: "After what we did to the beginning of the universe, the possibility of causing the end made us foul our britches"

  29. Re:Confirmation by MightyMartian · · Score: 1, Informative

    Oh good, I guy citing bullshit conspiracy theories talking about open minds. Minds should be open, but that doesn't mean having your brains spill over the floor.

    An expanding universe was suggested by General Relativity, but Einstein so thoroughly disliked that possibility he inserted a cosmological constant to make it go away. Well guess what, starting with the Hubble Expansion, every study and observation done since then has confirmed Big Bang cosmology. Our knowledge of nuclear physics demonstrates that the large amount of hydrogen, helium and lithium found in the universe could not have come from stellar formation, and hydrogen in particular must have been in the universe in large quantities for the first stars to even form. The black body radiation that can be found no matter which way you point a radio telescope demonstrates an epoch when the universe was much denser and hotter.

    Big Bang cosmology has ruled the roost since the 1960s because it's the one that fits the evidence. Yes, there are some holes in our understanding, particularly in attempting to explain the large scale structure today, but that hardly invalidates the theory in the larger scope, it just means we have to understand a good deal more about the earliest period of the expansion, and that's what this is about.

    Even if your nonsense chemical trail crap wasn't just more than the moronic ludicrous fantasies of a few nutballs, NASA is hardly the first or the only group studying the Big Bang, and the Big Bang was suggested by a theory developed decades before the development of radio astronomy.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  30. Actually: New evidence support Guth Theory... by Genady · · Score: 1

    Um... While NASA may be saying that the new evidence supports the big bang theory what they MEAN to say is that this new evidence supports the Theory of Inflation as proposed by Guth, et. al. The big bang is one thing, exponential expansion of spacetime, quite another.

    --


    What if it is just turtles all the way down?
  31. Re:Beware the Coming of the Great White Handkerchi by anotherzeb · · Score: 1

    I deny this theory on the basis that it conflicts with the true explanation that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster

    --
    Good luck sometimes arrives disguised as bad
  32. I'm still confused? by JackAxe · · Score: 1

    Like Zoidberg's house burning down at the bottom of the ocean, this only raises more question. :p

    <]=)

  33. Re:Kiddush cup!!! by Telepathetic+Man · · Score: 1

    No, I think they did mean Kiddush Cups.

    --
    Just because you can, does not mean you should.
  34. Witnesses at the time are not required. by Beltway+Prophet · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Suppose I'm sitting by a pond one day, busy coding on my laptop, when I hear a lound splash. I look up and see a couple of kids picking up rocks and a circular wave having a diameter that indicates it was formed about 5s ago. Well, I wasn't a witness to the event, but I could hypothesize that one of the kids threw a rock into the water. To confirm, I could roll up my pant legs and feel around in the soft muddy floor of the pond for a rock. Now I've got a supported theory. The rock turns out to be the same imported blue granite used to grit the path around the pond but not found natively in the area? Even more confirmation...

    1. Re:Witnesses at the time are not required. by yipper · · Score: 1

      ... or a fish jumped

      All you can say is that you think one cause
      was more or less likely than another.

      But, it's a nice pastoral scene to contemplate on a
      friday afternoon. I wish I was fishing now.

  35. This only confirms one thing.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Electrons want to be free!!!

  36. yeah, I had a big bong in college... by chivo243 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    the expansion weed was killer? I think...

    --
    Sig Hansen?
  37. Probality theory by linzeal · · Score: 1

    Because Karl Popper states unequivocally in his seminal work the Logic of Scientific Discovery that only theories that are falsifiable are open to scientific evaluation. At such a point the theory holds that it cannot be falsified it is not longer science. Note the period.

    1. Re:Probality theory by AviLazar · · Score: 1

      So, you are saying, that if someone creates a theory that is so sound proof, so accurate, so factual that it cannot be falsified it ceases to become science? I am sorry, I am not buying that. We have theories, in science, that are not disprovable. The moment something has been disproved it no longer qualifies to be a theory.

      --

      I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
    2. Re:Probality theory by linzeal · · Score: 1

      Name such a theory. I have taken over 6 years of college science and engineering classes and have never heard of such a "theory".

    3. Re:Probality theory by jtpalinmajere · · Score: 1

      You assume that just because they cannot be disproven now, with current knowledge and tools, that they never will be. Dealing in such absolutes is what disqualifies such a theory from being science and moreso as a belief... much like those that would make up a religion. Scientific theory is and always will be only as good as what we "know" and "have" prior to stating said theory.

    4. Re:Probality theory by lachlan76 · · Score: 1

      Cannot be falsified doesn't mean that there's no evidence, it means that there is no possible observation which, if it was found, would disprove it.

    5. Re:Probality theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because Karl Popper states unequivocally in his seminal work the Logic of Scientific Discovery that only theories that are falsifiable are open to scientific evaluation. At such a point the theory holds that it cannot be falsified it is not longer science.

      First off, no-one elected Karl Popper the sole arbiter of what was and was not science. Secondly, an amazon link doesn't lend much validity to anyone's arguments. (Any idiot can write a book.)

      Thirdly, I'm not sure where you're going with the subject line, but probability is a good example of why Popper's definition isn't worth much in practice. The statement "This perfectly normal looking coin is fair" is not falsifiable. Sure, you could flip it a million times, and get a million heads, but that doesn't mean it's not fair. There is a (very small, granted) nonzero chance a perfectly fair coin will give one, two, even ten million heads in a row. In fact, if the coin had a perfectly zero chance of giving a million heads in a row, you couldn't call it a fair coin, as it is biased against runs of heads. Sure you could argue that testing "is this coin fair?" isn't in the realm of Science, but only if you redefine Science from what it's conventionally used for. (e.g. You could define "Aardvarks" to mean the examination of that which is falsifiable, but that doesn't accomplish a whole lot.)

      Finally, WTF does any of this have to do with the GP's assertion that you can prove that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen?

    6. Re:Probality theory by Dimensio · · Score: 1

      So, you are saying, that if someone creates a theory that is so sound proof, so accurate, so factual that it cannot be falsified it ceases to become science?

      No. What is said is that it is impossible for an explanation conforming to the scientific method to ever satisfy your given criteria.

    7. Re:Probality theory by linzeal · · Score: 1
      Any idiot can write a book, what does that mean? So I can take a random person off the street and assign them a random subject and expect a work that stands up to the staunchest of critics in the field? I think you overstate your case sir.

      The epistemology of any philosophy let alone science is a daunting venture worthy of some note methinks. The fact that this book is the most referred to in all of the field would pretty well establish its currency. In light of contemporary endevours in the field there are many, but they have not advanced much beyond capitulating some aspects of probability theory for fuzzy sets and the like.

  38. sex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So it's all about sex. A very big bang. Does multiverse come to existence by a gang bang then ? No wonder people are so keenly researching the subject :)

  39. A quote: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    George Bush upset because these scientists are using science rather than religion?

    That seems to be the general trend of the last five years, yes.

    This is of course not to say that Bush will be upset at the findings of these particular scientists responsible for the NASA research in this article; after all, he will probably not even be made aware of them.

    Deciding that the universe is a particular age is still taking a leap of faith, no matter what age you think it is.

    "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is more wrong than both of them put together." -- Isaac Asimov.

    It is correct to say that a degree of uncertainty is present in all statements or theories about the past.

    It is silly to-- just because some degree of uncertainty is unavoidable--
    • deride a theory (say: the universe is several billion years old) which has been developed by a rigorous experimental methodology designed to ensure consistency with factual observations and supported by a large body of evidence
    • by claiming it is equal in worth to a statement (say: the universe is seven thousand years old) which is impossible to reasonably reconcile with even simple observations we make of the earth around us.
  40. What I'd Still Like Explained... by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 1
    What I'd still like explained in simple enough langauge for the average Slashdot reader is:

    If the Universe started out in one place, and expanded at less than the speed of light, how can we only now be receiving light from its early days?

    And while you're at it:

    If object A is moving one direction at .6c, and object B is moving the opposite direction at .6c, does each object appear to be moving at >1c from the other object?

    Thanks!

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
    1. Re:What I'd Still Like Explained... by FhnuZoag · · Score: 4, Informative

      If the Universe started out in one place, and expanded at less than the speed of light, how can we only now be receiving light from its early days?

      Because the Big bang was not an explosion. The universe didn't start in one place - it was one place, and that place - space itself - expanded.

      If object A is moving one direction at .6c, and object B is moving the opposite direction at .6c, does each object appear to be moving at >1c from the other object?

      No. Because by special relativity, velocities do not add in the Newtonian fashion. The wikipedia article on it is pretty good.

    2. Re:What I'd Still Like Explained... by wagnerer · · Score: 1
      If the Universe started out in one place, and expanded at less than the speed of light, how can we only now be receiving light from its early days?

      It's how the universe is currently expanding. Think of it as empty space being inserted between other bits of empty space everywhere. For example, you have three unmoving points in a line every 10m, say at 10m, 20m, 30m, .... trillion meters. The expansion comes along and inserts a centimeter between every point for each unit of time. As a result, even though each point never moves the distance between the 10m point and the trillion meter point, it can actually increase at a rate faster than the speed of light.

      But there are points that a distance away that it's taken light the time since the beginning of the universe to travel to our point.

      If object A is moving one direction at .6c, and object B is moving the opposite direction at .6c, does each object appear to be moving at >1c from the other object?

      This is just a standard special relativity question so the answer is pretty easy to calculate. The thing to remember is there is no absolute speed other than that of light, everything else depends on the frame of reference. You have three of them here, object A, object B, and the observer. So for the observer between the two both are going at .6c. At either object the observer is moving away at .6c and the other object is moving at .88c. This is calculated from the velocity addition formula v = (v1 + v2)/(1 + v1*v2/c^2)
    3. Re:What I'd Still Like Explained... by chivo243 · · Score: 0, Troll

      forgive my odd and stupid question, is that to say that two objects moving away from each in a linear fashion at the same speed, are not both moving half the speed from a fixed point?

      BTW, my isp blocks wikoimpedia, something to do with slander, libel, personal defamation... but I can still browse prOn!.... or I haven't looked because I am busy.

      --
      Sig Hansen?
    4. Re:What I'd Still Like Explained... by Copid · · Score: 1

      The problem arises at high speeds. If I walk away from a fixed point at 3 m/s and you walk away in the opposite direction 5 m/s, it's reasonable to assume that we will be moving away from each other at 8 m/s. In fact, it's essentially true. The problem occurs when we both take off at speeds more like 200,000,000 m/s away from a common point in opposite directions. The simple addition would say that we're moving away from each other at 400,000,000 m/s. At those velocities, the effects of relativity become important, so the actual velocity turns out to be quite a bit less than 400,000,000 m/s. The equation used to add velocities is described here. If you look carefully at the equation, you'll notice that for velocities significantly less than c (the speed of light), the equations more or less reduce to simple addition of velocities. At high veolcities, relativity becomes very relevant and all bets are off when it comes to intuition.

      --
      An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
    5. Re:What I'd Still Like Explained... by slagell · · Score: 1

      Not quite right, but close. Light always appears to the observer to be moving at the same constant speed (assume it is moving through a vacuum of course). Even if it is emitted from an object moving at .6c. Of course, the light will have a huge red shift becuase of this.
      It is this realization taht leads to all of the "strange" implications of the length and time dialation/contractions in special relativity.

    6. Re:What I'd Still Like Explained... by chivo243 · · Score: 0

      Thanks, I'm not too much of a physics student... but I guess at a certian threshold principles no longer apply, good link too.

      --
      Sig Hansen?
  41. Ok, somebody explain how this works. by yipper · · Score: 1

    Ok, I kind of get the drift of looking at light that
    has come from some far away place as seeing "back in time".

    The part I don't understand is: if this light and the matter
    which makes up the part of the universe nearby us, both
    were launched out at the same time from a single point, right?

    If the light is traveling at the speed of light, if the matter is
    traveling at something slower than the speed of light, then all
    light from that initial point would have long ago wizzed past us
    and now be long gone.

    So, how does this work?

    I never would have made a good cosmologist.. or cosmetologist either.

    1. Re:Ok, somebody explain how this works. by lgw · · Score: 1

      You're imagining a big empty universe with a tight clump of matter in one spot. This is not the model. The tight clump of matter is the universe. When the universe what 1 nanosecond old, you could head 1 foot in any direction and you'd be back where you started, having made a lap around the universe. Except that you couldn't actually make the journey, because the univers was expanding too fast. This new data, in fact, supports the idea that the size of the univers actually grew much faster than the speed of light for quite some time (but the matter what not whizzing past the light either, think of points marked on a rubber band when the rubber band is stretched).

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    2. Re:Ok, somebody explain how this works. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The universe (space) has expanded. The light is travelling across a 'surface' that is constantly increasing.

    3. Re:Ok, somebody explain how this works. by yipper · · Score: 1

      That's cool.

      But if it's expanding faster than the speed of light than
      light would never "make a lap" and you end up with the
      same question... any initial light outruns all the matter.

      If it's expanding much slower than the speed of light
      than that light is making a very large number of "laps" and it
      would be darn hard to tell which hunk of light going by
      has anything to do with the initial condition.

      Oh well, don't waste too much time trying to teach me
      this stuff. If it's not intuitively obvious I'll probably
      never get it.

    4. Re:Ok, somebody explain how this works. by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 2, Informative

      In the simplest terms I can put it...

      If racecar a is on a straight racetrack with racecar b they will stop and smash at the end of the track. One can be ahead or behind the other one.They are limited to remaining on the line of the track so they are moving in 1 dimensions.

      If racecar a is on a racetrack with racecar b, then each racecar is both ahead of and behind each other. They are limited to remaining on the line of the track but can turn so they are moving in 2 dimensions.

      Now-- instead of a racetrack, make them the inside of a sphere so they are whizzing around inside it. Instead of moving in a line (1d), they can move in 3 dimensions on the inside of the sphere but would percieve it as if they were moving in 2 dimensions (since they couldn't go down into the ground or up into the air). They can drive as far as they want with complete freedom forward, backwards, left and right, and still never get out of the sphere. Sort of like us on earth.

      Now-- cover the earth mentally with cars very close together and start them driving around at a maximum speed of 20 mph. Now... expand the earth to 10 times its size like a balloon (by blowing a lot of air or rock into it). The cars are suddenly 10 times as far apart-- some of them are now so far apart that at a maximum speed of 20 mph, they won't ever see all the earth or other cars if the earth keeps expanding.

      Finally- Add one more dimension (like going from a circle to a sphere only go to a .. er.. hyper? sphere) so the cars can move in 3 dimensions (left, right, up, down, forward, backwards) and yet still never get outside of the hypersphere. (if it helps, picture it as a normal sphere but if a beam of light would penetrate the surface, instead re-enters the sphere at a spot on the opposite side but really I think that there is no "surface" to penetrate.)

      That's the universe and that's light- it can go in all directions and never get out.

      Apologies to real scientists out there. B) Best i can do.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    5. Re:Ok, somebody explain how this works. by lgw · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's much easier to start by thinking about a universe that isn't expanding. The imporant concept is that the universe is "circular": move far enough in any direction and you'd be back where you started. Light just keeps moving until it hits something - there's no direction where light can go that it leaves the universe. The things we can see that are clearly very old and very far away are distributed more or less evenly across the sky.

      However, you can't see all the way back to the Big Bang - for the first 100 K years or so the universe was opaque, though every bit of it was glowing brightly (the same amount of matter in a much smaller universe meant the entire univers was effectively an opaque liquid for quite some time). The cosmic microwave background radiation that is being studied here is a snapshot of the moment (called Recombination) when that changed, and the universe became transparant.

      The rapid inflation of the universe (so the theory goes) happened long before Recombination, so the universe was already pretty large at that time. Nevertheless, light could have circled a universe that size many times in the age of the current universe. It doesn't work out that way, however, as the universe has been steadily expanding.

      Imagine the universe as a balloon, with stars as marks on the balloon and light as an ant crawling away from one of the marks. If the baloon is inflated rapidly it could take quite a long time indeed for the ant to make a circle, as the distance remaining in the circle is growing nearly as fast as the ant could walk. We don't think that any of the light we see has actually been around even one full "circle", but this model does explain why we see very old things in every direction.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  42. PR Mistake? by MorningDew76 · · Score: 1

    If NASA wants more money from Bush and Congress, finding more proof for the Big Bang surely isn't a good way to go about it.

  43. "Confirms" by Expert+Determination · · Score: 1

    Confirm doesn't imply 'prove'.

    --
    "The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
    1. Re:"Confirms" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Try a better dictionary:

      To support or establish the certainty or validity of; verify.

      Synonyms: confirm, corroborate, substantiate, authenticate, validate, verify
      These verbs mean to affirm the truth, accuracy, or genuineness of something. Confirm implies removal of all doubt.
    2. Re:"Confirms" by Expert+Determination · · Score: 1

      There's a lot of disagreement between the various definitions. Consider a statement like "The witnesses confirmed the victim's account". This clearly has no implication of proof, it merely indicates agreement and a strengthening of evidence. All of the definitions, but one, suggest an increase in the degree of strength rather than a final determination of truth or falsity.

      --
      "The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
  44. re-evaluate the use of "day" by 1800maxim · · Score: 2, Insightful

    To the mods: why was the parent marked Flamebait? Just because he admitted he is a fundamentalist? Posts that pointed out the same thing without authors expressing religious conviction got marked as "insightful" or "interesting". Learn a little bit of tolerance, it won't hurt.

    Now, to move on

    Although it is a rather common view, and in no way to critique you at all, may I suggest, respectfully, to investigate further and deeper the meaning of "day" throughout the Bible?

    Keeping all religious doctrines aside, day can mean various time periods of no specific length. At times a day is taken for a thousand years... At times it is taken simply to mean an undefined time period.

    A very basic description is the use of "judgment day". There is no indication it means anything other than a certain, undefined time period. That's it. There is more reasoning to it than just this, but I can't recall it. At one point I spent quite a bit of time reading various articles on this subject.

    And to all who will be jumping at this, claiming that now fundamentalists, creationists, or whatever other term you choose to use now are shifting their conviction... there was never any guarantee that the view (whoever devised it) of 6000-year-old earth was correct. So at the very least, hail the break-through! :) I chose to refer to creative days as creative stages, or creative time periods.

    1. Re:re-evaluate the use of "day" by jdavidb · · Score: 1

      To the mods: why was the parent marked Flamebait?

      Happens every time I mention religion; don't worry about it. In fact, it just happened earlier this week; check my recent posting history.

      Although it is a rather common view, and in no way to critique you at all, may I suggest, respectfully, to investigate further and deeper the meaning of "day" throughout the Bible?

      Hehe. You sound scared I'm going to blow a fuse for the suggestion or something. :)

      Been there, done that. Read my post real closely, and I basically said, "I'm pretty sure it's 6000 years, but if I'm wrong, no biggie." Implicit in that was "Yes, I've read all about the possible meanings of the word 'day,'" and "It's entirely possible I misunderstood."

      I do know for a fact that there are some screwballs out there claiming all kinds of crazy extra meaning for ancient Hebrew words. Some people know just enough Hebrew and Greek to be dangerous. So to me, Genesis 1 looks like the intended context is literal (though possibly not telling us the full story). But if something else was meant, it just means I failed to get something that was probably supposed to be obvious. No biggie.

      The big arguments about "day" take poetic prophetic passages and say, "See, 'day' doesn't always literally mean 'day'. Well, no it doesn't, but in general when it's not being used in prophecy, it does.

      A very basic description is the use of "judgment day". There is no indication it means anything other than a certain, undefined time period.

      Actually I tend to think of it as more of a "judgment instant," although I'm sure it will feel like it lasts for eternity. But I think we'll be outside of time itself at that point, so the distinctions begin to break down.

      Bending over and prepping myself for the modslap for daring to speak about religion again...

    2. Re:re-evaluate the use of "day" by 1800maxim · · Score: 1

      Well, to sum things up, that is just a technicality, i'm sure one's faith does not hang on it ;)

      Disregard the text below. It's just for the mods: science, big bang, evolution, experiment

      :D

    3. Re:re-evaluate the use of "day" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Day just sounds cool.

      "Judgement Day" as opposed to "Judgement Year"/"Judgement Millenium"/"Judgement Unspecified Time Period"

  45. Theistic implications of big-bang theory by geoffrobinson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When Big Bang theory was new, many didn't like it due to the harmony it had with theistic assumptions and arguments over the years. The universe had a beginning and that was bad news.

    But people got over it.

    --
    Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
  46. Moderators, read your guidelines by John+Jamieson · · Score: 1

    No one here has to like this guy if they don't want to, however, that does not make his admission of being a fundie "flamebait".

    As one other individual pointed out, his post is no different than many others, except for that one admission.

    We should not mod on a persons ethnicity, gender or religion!

    1. Re:Moderators, read your guidelines by jdavidb · · Score: 1

      I've got 50 karma to back it up. Don't worry about it.

      I make up for my fundamentalism by being a raving Free-software fanatic and a lunatic libertarian who advocates the legalization of drugs. On slashdot, it all balanaces out.

  47. Follow up article by moochfish · · Score: 2, Funny

    Upon closer inspection of the results, scientists found evidence of giant supergalactic noodles and meatballs.

    1. Re:Follow up article by corngrower · · Score: 1

      They weren't 'noodles', they were spaghetti. There's a difference. (Eggs are generally an ingredient in noodles, not in spagetti.)

  48. Re:Beware the Coming of the Great White Handkerchi by Scarletdown · · Score: 1

    The ultimate proof will come when bits of flotsam from the Big Bang Burger Chef finally reach Earth.

    --
    This space unintentionally left blank.
  49. Where is the "news"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So where is the news? This is right out of a science text book. Been "maintream" for years.

  50. Re: 6000 years old by HappyDrgn · · Score: 3, Informative

    You're correct. No where does the Bible directly say the earth is 6000 years old.
     
    This theory is based on (in my opinion an incorrect) belief that God created the earth, and then directly followed up by creating everything else, in literally 7 days earth time. Though no where is this stated or implied. Furthermore, time is defined as infinite to God in Genesis, where it's stated that 7 days can be equal to 7 years or 7 minutes.
     
    The 6000 year figure comes from listings of the ages of parents starting with Adam and Eve, which are given when heirs are born and upon death. This is documented in the Bible all the way up to the Kings (Known as chapters Kings I and Kings II). Historical documentation, and some on going religious calendars provide a pretty accurate way to translating dates. Most of this is based on the Bible as a historical document, if you believe the time lines are correct.
     
    Time frames from the Kings on rely on secular historical data, such as the resignation of King Solomon after the destruction of Solomon's temple by the Babylonians. By the time Jesus is born the history of *man* is calculated as being just under 4,000 years old.
     
    Taking everything at face value you *at best* could define when humans started to record history, and place it at 6,000 years. To define a time line for the universe... I think that's better left to scientists than cave men chiseling in stone...

  51. Re:Beware the Coming of the Great White Handkerchi by bmalia · · Score: 1

    Aachoo!

    --
    There's no place like ~/
  52. Re:Confirmation by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

    I'm impressed that my post brought out so many of the mentally retarded, knowledge hating moderators out there. I mean, what kind of person short of a moron or a schizophrenic takes the contrail crapola seriously?

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  53. I'm working on by EZLeeAmused · · Score: 1

    the big bong theory, which postulates that the universe was created by a higher life form. I'm still trying to reconcile this theory with intelligent design, but I keep running into indications that intelligence is sharply reduced by a big bong.

    --
    Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
  54. This post's title is stupid by slagell · · Score: 1

    The Big Bang theory isn't what is under question. It is a pretty solid theory, and very well accepted in the scientific community. It isn't exactly fringe science anymore. (Funny, though to think at one time the Catholic church was rooting for it because the alternative theory was of an eternal universe. They liked the universe having a beginning even if it was 15 billion years ago).

    The part that they are reaffirming is the theory of an infaltionary period post Big Bang that says most of the growth in space-time occured early in the history of the universe.

    For lay people interested in a good read about the history of the Big Bang Theory, I suggest a read of Simon Singh's book "Big Bang". It is almost as good as the "Code Book".

    1. Re:This post's title is stupid by jav1231 · · Score: 1

      "The Big Bang theory isn't what is under question. It is a pretty solid theory, and very well accepted in the scientific community." hehehe You're funny!..oh wait you're serious....uh..
      I will say you've got your classical argument down. "Sssshhhhh! Everyone keep talking about how everyone is doing it and Timmy will start smoking too!

  55. If you want to look this up, by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 2, Informative

    search for "Olbers' Paradox" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olber's_paradox).

    This is a helpful hint to curious people about to use Google and is not intended as a spelling flame.

  56. Some Info needed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From the article -
    Inflation poses that the universe expanded far faster than the speed of light and grew from a subatomic size to a golf-ball size almost instantaneously.


    How??
    Can anyone explain this to me , in slashdot layman terms ..

    1. Re:Some Info needed by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 1
      Can anyone explain this to me , in slashdot layman terms

      It makes the math work out.

  57. Turtles by Tsugumi · · Score: 1

    These NASA clowns are so out of date. Everyone knows we're being carried through infinity on the back of a tortoise. And it's turtles all the way down...

  58. Re: 6000 years old by jdavidb · · Score: 1

    This is documented in the Bible all the way up to the Kings (Known as chapters Kings I and Kings II).

    The writings you are describing are known as books, not chapters, and they are known as I Kings (First Kings) and II Kings (Second Kings), not Kings I and Kings II.

  59. Steady State Must Go! by Arandir · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    It is time we stopped tolerating the Steady State fundamentalists in our schools. We will continue falling behind in science and technology as a nation if we give in to those pushing the steady state agenda. The right wing nut bags are free to believe in steady state in the privacy of their own homes and churches, but they need to shut up about it in the public sphere. We need a complete separation of discredited theories and the state. This is all Bush's fault.

    --
    A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  60. Infinity solves its own problems by Pfhorrest · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Saying the universe was always in existence implies an actual infinity, and the problems this brings up are, well, practically infinite! Like for example, if the universe has always been here, and it's increasing in entropy, how come it hasn't completely run down already?

    The second law of thermodynamics is no longer considered a law per se, since we discovered that thermodynamic systems such as gasses are composed of atoms which collide with one another according to time-symmetric laws, not some continuous 'gas' stuff which obeys the 2nd law the way particles obey the law of gravity, say. The fact that entropy always seems to go up is merely a statistical law, namely, that the chances of it going back down are EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY unlikely, because of all possible arrangements of (for example) the atoms in a cloud of gas, most of them are in thermal equilibrium, and a vanishingly small number of possible states of that cloud of gas have all of them on one side, or some similarly low-entropy state.

    But such states are still possible. And given infinite time, anything possible will occur. So while a massive amount of energy suddenly conspiring to come together to form the super hot and dense 'initial state' of the Big Bang is vanishingly unlikely, in an eternity, it will eventually occur. An infinite number of times, in fact. So the 'universe' as we conceive it (or at least the part of it which we call 'the universe', that part which we have any hope of ever observing) is currently winding down from an extremely unlikely lapse of entropy, and an inconceivably long amount of time in the future, something just like that will happen again.

    And if you take infinite space for granted too, then something just like the Big Bang is happening right now, most likely somewhere so far away that everything we consider 'the universe' will be radiation and black holes (or possibly even just radiation, once the black holes all evaporate) by the time any effects of it can reach us. In fact, if space is infinite, then it's happening an infinite number of times *right now*.

    The apparent problems of physical infinities only arise if you fail to completely grasp the sheer, literally unimaginably large scale of 'infinity', and all of the implications that it brings with it. Infinity solves its own problems.

    Besides, the law of thermodynamics only states that entropy never goes UP. It could remain static over the entire universe, and just shift where the particular concentrations of energy are at a given time (changing local entropy). If you assume the law of conservation of information (which is the reciprocal or inverse of entropy) is true, then that seems like it's got to be the case, anyway, since an increase in universal entropy would mean a loss of information.

    --
    -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
    "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
    1. Re:Infinity solves its own problems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      isn't that like saying in an infinite amount of time you can speak every number? You can't of course. You're assuming a finite system. It seems to me that the evidence points towards a universe that over time increases the number of possible universes while leaving us with only the one universe as it actually exists.

    2. Re:Infinity solves its own problems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Good point. several of these posts seem to be making very invalid assumptions. Just as entropy increases over time so does the possible states of the universe. as bloody unlikely as some strange entropy trap which forms the universe back into its pre-big-bang state is(approaching zero). At this moment that near impossibility is more likely than it will ever be in the future as the best scientific observation predicts it. they are just grasping at straws to explain something they don't understand.

    3. Re:Infinity solves its own problems by Datamonstar · · Score: 1

      Then how come life did not already form in one of these "universes", advance and discover us?

      --
      The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
    4. Re:Infinity solves its own problems by Pfhorrest · · Score: 1

      Then how come life did not already form in one of these "universes", advance and discover us?

      Because the odds of two Big Bang like events happening close enough in space and time for there to be low enough entropy for intelligent beings from both running into each other, or even noticing anything from the others' "universe", are nearly infinitesimal. By the time the earliest light from any other distant "universe" (i.e. the light from their Big Bang) passes by even the earliest light from ours, the extremely unlikely organization of energy which presently characterizes our universe will have long since wound down.

      Basically: in all probability, we will never ever see another photon from another of these "universes" (nor will they see ours), because by the time any of them reach here, we will all be nothing but black holes and photons ourselves; possibly not even black holes.

      --
      -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
      "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
  61. Big Bang not incompatible with infinite time by Pfhorrest · · Score: 1

    I'd just like to add my own two cents to this entire discussion and point out to both sides (signal7 and everyone ridiculing him) that the universe being eternal or infinite is not contradictory with big bang theory, or at least, not with the events it describes and explains.

    All it means is that what we consider cosmological history is not the entirety of cosmological history, and that while everything in the observable universe may derive from the Big Bang, THAT event was not uncaused, but had predecessor events, going on back infinitely.

    Before anybody bitches that anything creating Big Bang conditions would violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics, I just wrote a post about that.

    Besides, if you want to accept the Big Bang as the ultimate start of time, then at that point you've got to reject the law of conservation of mass/energy. That law states that mass or energy (same thing) is neither created nor destroyed. Ergo, mass/energy was never created. This leaves us either that mass/energy does not exist, since it was never created; or that is has *always* existed. Since I think most people would like to say that mass/energy exists, it must have always existed; or the law of its conservation is wrong.

    "Big bang as the start of time" is practically modern-day Creationism, and almost begs for a 'First Cause' argument for God's existence to explain it. You've got to have an infinite and eternal thing in your explanation somewhere; why postulate additional entities when you can just say the universe itself is infinite?

    --
    -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
    "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
    1. Re:Big Bang not incompatible with infinite time by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      Stephen Hawking covers how this works in a Brief History of Time. It's pretty accessible. Roughly, time is a dimension, and at a point just before "Time 0" is curves back on itself. Or something like that, Hawking can explain better than I can.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  62. Re: 6000 years old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    hahahaha loser. who cares what you call them. the point was clear.

  63. bring it on! by cnflctd · · Score: 1

    Go ahead, bring your Bible into this. :) Science Nerds, Philosophy Nerds, Religion Nerds, Social Sciences Nerds. We all have tape on our glasses.

    It's the scientologists I can't stand. (F*ck you, Chef)

    --
    I'm cool like a fool in a swimming p-p-pfft-pool
  64. No, the cat does not "got my tongue." by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

    From TFA:

    > We're talking about when the universe was less than a
    > trillionth of a trillionth of a second old.

    This is why Isaac Asimov used to say, "The god of the Bible couldn't possibly have created the Universe. He's far too small!"

    You all are aware that, according to the Bible, you live inside a hollow shell of flat land and "firmament" above, holding the waters of chaos back, aren't you?

    And that this, in turn, is a modified story wherein the god slays the great chaos dragon Leviathan and splits his body in half, creating the land and the firmament, right? But the editors removed references to the battle with Leviathan from Genesis, but, oopsie! forgot to remove them from the poetic psalms.

    Ahhhh, who's listening. There's other Monday morning quarterbacking explanations that'll satisfy those who must continue to believe in unerring etc. etc. etc.

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    1. Re:No, the cat does not "got my tongue." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      You all are aware that, according to the Bible, you live inside a hollow shell of flat land and "firmament" above, holding the waters of chaos back, aren't you?

      Could you be more precise about the cordionates in the Bible for this claim? I don't see anything about the Earth being a flat piece of rock.

      http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=1&cha pter=1&version=31

    2. Re:No, the cat does not "got my tongue." by yermoungder · · Score: 1

      You could argue that "the earth was without form" is a "flat earth".

      http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesi s%201%20;&version=9;

  65. But who created all the things that went bang! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just wondering. What good are theories if we cannot explain how they were created. Ya know, the whole who create God thing :-)

  66. You see... by Kittie+Rose · · Score: 1

    This same reason, despite having a scientific mind(somewhat), is why I have trouble believing "Dead is dead". It's suggesting our conciousness could be one of the basic building blocks of the universe. It's obviously not a product of basic biology like some people assert, as that doesn't make any sense. If there is "another" element, then it can't be created or destroyed. If it's a basic building block, then it won't exactly change either. We are constantly percieving on some level, even if it's faster, or slower, or we don't remember it afterwards.

    --
    EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
    1. Re:You see... by x2A · · Score: 1

      is why I have trouble believing "Dead is dead"

      It shouldn't be... you are EVERYTHING that makes you you. For example, take a publicly traded company. If all the people who own shares for that company close it down, and come together to form a new company, could even do it in the same building, that new company would have all the same componants as the previous, but the previous company no longer exists... it's dead.

      In the same way, the molecules etc that make you up change around all the time... this is like people selling their shares of the company, and other people buying them. It's still the same company, even though it's components are changing allt the time. You are the unique way that everything that makes you is combined. The gas from one dying star could go towards making another, but it's still a different star; the first one has still died out.

      That which makes you you, will die, but that which you are made from, will continue to exist.

      As far as consciousness is concerned, this is an illusion. Zoom in or out, and you will see fundamentally the same thing. People will respond to you being infectious in fundamentally the same way as the cells in your body respond to the infection within your body. On a grand grand scale (which we'll have to jump forwards in time for), the planet's about to be hit and destroyed, so distant colonies send ships to evaquate people, the whole universe appears to be conscious. Consciousness is just one thing responding to another, it happens on every level, whilst our brains make it look like there's more to it, it's just the same fundamental thing occuring, in a more complex fasion.

      If you stop and try and picture it in as much it's whole as you can, you'll realise it's a far more amazing concept than it originally appears :-)

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
  67. Question... by Stalvenson · · Score: 1

    How can something be caused by nothing??

    1. Re:Question... by cnerd2025 · · Score: 1

      See, here on /., people will bash your head in if you ask the wrong questions. Of course, they fail to see that science, from the latin for "knowing", is all about questioning. Allegience to a given theory is completely proposterous in "real" science (although every scientist has his or her 'baby'). Your question is highly valid. And before some militant atheist comes and posts and bashes you, calling you a religious zealot or a "fundamentalist", I'd like to praise you for good questioning. Thank you.

    2. Re:Question... by doubletruncation · · Score: 1

      Not everything has a "cause" per se. For example a radioactive nucleus will decay in a completely random fashion, you can't predict when it will happen at all... it just happens, and only after you observe the decay can you say that it happened. You can determine a probability that the particle will decay in a given amount of time... but you can't predict exactly when it will decay so far as we know. Someone might say "well just because we can't predict it now doesn't mean there isn't a cause for it to decay at the moment it does...and maybe someday someone will come along and figure out how to predict when it will decay" - it doesn't really matter since the point is that it could well be that there is no way to predict it...and never will be a way to predict it...and logic wouldn't fail. Nature can be however it wants to be... There doesn't need to be a further simplification to observed processes that we can point to as explanations... That's ultimately why we have to approach these problems observationally - Cosmology could have been anything....no one would have guessed the big bang before it was discovered that the universe is expanding...or inflation before it was discovered that the cosmic microwave background is incredibly smooth on large angular scales... but given the observations that have been made over the last century it seems that the inflationary/big bang model works for describing nature as we observe. Ultimately it doesn't matter if there was a "cause" to the inflation in the first place... absent any observations to constrain the period before inflation we can't tell... It could be that there was a giant spaghetti monster that dreamed it all up... or it could be a very human-like "god" that knows everything and is everywhere and gets jealous and cares a lot about a group of people that lived on the inner part of the mediterranean 4000 years ago that did... or it could be that there are infinite universes that all pop up each with a different set of laws and we live in one with laws as they are because those laws make things like us... or it could be that time itself is more akin to a spatial dimension which doesn't extend infinitely in that direction (like a sphere) so there isn't really a beginning or end but we perceive a flow to time via entropy.... or it could just be that there was nothing and then there was something, I don't see how that is completely unimaginable... or it could be that our minds simply can't fathom what happened like a flatworm can't fathom that it's a flatworm.

  68. Re: 6000 years old by JPriest · · Score: 1
    God would have no concept of "7 days" or "7 rotations of the earth" because he did not live on earth (under construction).

    So the statement "7 days" no doubt came from a human, not from God or a human speaking on behalf of God. Maybe it was just a "prophet" slipping up?

    Has anyone ever investigated the bible for errors against when we now consider fact today? Or do they keep editing them out in new revisions?

    --
    Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
  69. The long awaited WMAP 3 year results by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So the 3 year results for WMAP are finally out. If you want to actually see what they are look at http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_mm/pub_papers/threeyear .html At a casual glance it looks like they are pretty much the same as their 1 year results (when combined with a whole host of other observations) which came out back in 2003 - namely the universe is still flat, dominated by dark energy, with 30 percent of the energy budget coming from non-baryonic dark matter. It seems that really all that's happened is that the error bars on the 6 cosmological parameters are now slightly smaller - as you would expect with more data... though not smaller by an order of magnitude. Maybe the biggest change is that they measure the epoch of reionization at a redshift of 7 now instead of way back at 15 or whatever it was before... that's more in line with what other measurements (and theory) has been suggesting. I'm I missing anything? Or is this basically a "Move Along. Nothing to see here." topic.

  70. Selection bias by Frozen+Void · · Score: 1

    This is not faith/ideology/science specific. Its common technique in rhetorical arguments, sort of "cherry-picking" the right evidence/data or making the evidence seem like its unique and authorative in a sea of options.
    see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_Bias

    WMAP may confirm a theory,but to completely proof it? That would be a new "truth",making Big Bang a sort of ideology-religion. This Evidence isn't goign to magically make Big Bang theory weak points disappear,we need theoretical breakthrough for it to happen(or get disproved).And i'm fairly sceptical of mainstream science to change that much. Someone who has a open-mind will find the flaws or proofs,
    which mainstream science will have to accept in fear of being seen as illogical(not quite a real science).

  71. Dvorkin do you ever shut up? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Please for the love of mankind. Shut your yap for a bit and get back to building wacky keyboards.

  72. Steady Bang? Solid State? by davidsyes · · Score: 1

    Damn, I thought there was a steady bang! How'd "Steady State" get there?

    Steady Bang, Solid State theory, anyone?

    Well, at least Nature had the sense of humor to give several meanings to "bang" that don't have to deal with guns or cannons or emerge from the hot end of a barrel...

    --
    Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
  73. re: Misunderstood reader - YABBC by tilde_e · · Score: 1

    No, you misunderstand the word "theory" if you get the impression that confirmation means proven. A theory is never proven, it can only be repeatedly refreshed with new supporting data, or disproven.

    This should be interpreted as Yet Another Big Bang Confirmation.

    From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

    In scientific usage, a theory does not mean an unsubstantiated guess or hunch, as it often does in other contexts. Scientific theories are never proven to be true, but can be disproven. All scientific understanding takes the form of hypotheses, or conjectures. A theory is in this context a set of hypotheses that are logically bound together, often having used the hypothetico-deductive method.

    Theories are typically ways of explaining why things happen, often, but not always, after their occurrence is no longer in scientific dispute.

  74. Spacetime and before that by JambisJubilee · · Score: 1

    I know you were joking, but I thought I'd take it seriously for a moment



    It really doesn't make sense to ask what happened before the big bang, because there was no "before the big bang." Consider the following:


    • Space and time are the same thing.
    • The universe is expanding.

    When the big bang occurred, time and space were created. Before the big bang, there was no time. Therefore any discussion about what happened before the big bang is moot, because time didn't exist. Events (as far as we know) cannot take place without time.


  75. What exploded in "Big Bang"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And where it came from? It could't come from "nowhere"...or could it??

  76. Universe expanding faster than C by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Inflation poses that the universe expanded far faster than the speed of light and grew from a subatomic size to a golf-ball size almost instantaneously.

    Could somebody please explain HOW the universe could expand at greater than the speed of light? Wouldn't the mass of the universe become infinite, it's length contract to two dimensions and time for the external observer appear to stop? Would being a relative observer (as we all were in some molecular form or another) change this? Wouldn't the amount of energy to create the inflation situation be infinite?

    Is it me, the article or was Einstien's theory missing something?

    1. Re:Universe expanding faster than C by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Could somebody please explain HOW the universe could expand at greater than the speed of light? Wouldn't the mass of the universe become infinite, it's length contract to two dimensions and time for the external observer appear to stop?
      No. Relativity places restrictions on how fast objects can move through space, but not on how fast space itself can expand.
  77. Luckily, here's Stephen "MC" Hawking... by Chris+Tucker · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...to explain it all to you:

    Big Bizang
    Words: MC Hawking & Fred Ciesla
    Music: Dark Matter

    In the beginning there was nothing, not even time.
    No planets, no stars, no hip-hop, no rhyme.
    Then there was a bang like the sound of my gatt,
    the universe was born and the shit was phat

    The universe began as a singularity,
    nobody knows what went on then G.
    For ten million, trillion, trillion, trillionths of a second
    the state of the universe cannot be reckoned.
    The fundamental forces were unified,
    we've no theory to describe that 'though I've tried,
    then the forces split and the universe was born,
    it was hotter than a priest watching kiddy-porn.
    Protons, neutrons and electrons came to pass,
    as photons collided changing energy to mass.
    Three minutes go by, temps a cool one billion,
    down from one hundred million, trillion, trillion.
    This reduced heat allowed a new event,
    the formation of heavier elements.
    Still it was millions of years, 'fore the first start glowed,
    if you're down with the bang sing along here we go!

    It was a big-pow, piz-ow,
    bang-a-dang, bigitty-digitty,
    boom, bigitty-boom,
    ka-boom, the big bizang.

    Hold on now what about inflation?
    Well that's a little tricky,
    and could use some explanation.
    Inflation, one could fairly state,
    was a time when the universe expanded at a rate,
    that was faster than the speed of light,
    but that over simplifies and it ain't quite right.
    Still for purposes here it will have to do,
    'cause I ain't got the time to explain it to you.

    The beginning of time and the birth of all matter,
    say it took seven days you're as mad as a hatter,
    it was millions of year 'fore the first star glowed,
    if you're down with the bang sing along here we go!

    --
    Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
  78. why ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    so assume that we know how everything started, what's next ? what's the point of knowing ?

  79. Re: 6000 years old by ComaVN · · Score: 1

    Has anyone ever investigated the bible for errors against when we now consider fact today?

    http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ (note there's a lot of far-fetched "errors" in there, but there's also a lot of true factual and logical contradictions)

    Or do they keep editing them out in new revisions?

    Not really, but (in Dutch at least) the newer translations tend to be somewhat friendlier in tone in the parts about women being submissive to men, etc.

    --
    Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
  80. Neatpick by aepervius · · Score: 1

    The entropy of a closed systemcan ONLY rise. You can't have any state of a system which lead to a decrease of entropy for that system, as long as it is closed. Now what can happen, and happens in our universe, is that WITHIN that closed system you can show that some region, if observed without considering the rest of the system, have a local decrease of entropy. But 1) they are not closed system per see and 2) from the increase of the fact that in the whole system entropy stay equal or rise, then for the outside region of the one you look at, entropy will rise even more. So no. However, that's rather the point; the number of states that lead to a decrease of entropy is so infinitesimally small compared to the number of "normal" states that the chances are essentially zero. this is false for any closed system. You can ONLY have an entropy difference rising or stable.

    --
    C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
    visit randi.org
    1. Re:Neatpick by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The original poster was correct. Entropy can decrease in a closed system; in fact, ergodicity requires that this be possible. It's just that, statistically, it is ridiculously improbable for this to happen. The probability is nonzero, however, and (again, by ergodicity) will eventually happen, after some incredibly long amount of time: all the gas molecules in a sealed room statistically will collect over in one corner of it, now and then.

  81. Big bang proofs dated 1400+ years ago? by umichguy · · Score: 1

    Verses in Quran revealed by God to His last prophet Mohammed over 1400 years ago talked about the origin of the universe as well as the end of it. http://www.harunyahya.com/create02.php
    Text below taken from: http://www.islam-guide.com/frm-ch1-1-c.htm
    The illuminating stars we see at night were, just as was the whole universe, in that 'smoke' material. God has said in the Quran:
    Then He turned to the heaven when it was smoke... (Quran, 41:11)
    Because the earth and the heavens above (the sun, the moon, stars, planets, galaxies, etc.) have been formed from this same 'smoke,' we conclude that the earth and the heavens were one connected entity. Then out of this homogeneous 'smoke,' they formed and separated from each other. God has said in the Quran:
    Have not those who disbelieved known that the heavens and the earth were one connected entity, then We separated them?... (Quran, 21:30)
    Dr. Alfred Kroner is one of the world's renowned geologists. He is Professor of Geology and the Chairman of the Department of Geology at the Institute of Geosciences, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. He said: "Thinking where Muhammad came from . . . I think it is almost impossible that he could have known about things like the common origin of the universe, because scientists have only found out within the last few years, with very complicated and advanced technological methods, that this is the case." .....

  82. Re: 6000 years old by Vexar · · Score: 1
    For the believers:

    where do we humans get the notion we can limit God's work to fit our own theories? I think that believers who think this have inherited a serious hubris problem. Further, the day-age theorist crowd (ones I liken to the US political Centrist types) is relying their entire belief system on a single mis-translation of a Hebrew word yom which appears in the Bible 359 times meaning the "sun-up,sun-down day," when in the context of an ordinal number. Furthermore, when God separated light from dark, this was the first day, same word, same meaning. Anything else suggests literary inconsistency, hardly a good way to start off a good book, much less any book purported to be the divinely inspired Word of God.

    For the non-believers:

    Try, really try, to sit down with the raw data in front of you from the NASA report, and temporarily shut out your awareness of the Big Bang theory, and see what other postulates that data can suggest. The best one I've heard thus far from this approach is that the speed of light is not a universal constant, it is a momentary constant, and the constant is currently slowing down. I don't really know what that will mean for our view on the world, but I think if it slowed down enough, a number of the stars in the sky could visibly disappear, because they would become quasars (I think that's the right word: stars moving faster than light?). Anyway, I believe scientists need to be open-minded and tolerant of other theories off the same data. Otherwise, they would be as guilty as the old Catholic church, which left no room for any science contrary to the church's current view of the world. See the trouble in which you find yourself when you close your mind?

  83. Re: 6000 years old by JPriest · · Score: 1
    that site is exactly what I was looking for. He created light on earth before creating the sun.

    1:16 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.
    Uh, the moon is not an independent light source, don't you think god would know that?
    And he spent "7 days" creating the earth but creates trillions of stars as an afterthought? Isn't it also a bit odd that the sun was not created before earth?
    Referring to the sun as "a big light in the sky" rather than the very large object the earth revolves around sounds more like that arrogant mantra of the people of that time than the word of god.
    There was no mention of the core of the earth either, the entire description is just an oversimplification of the way humans at that time viewed the earth. It sounds to me like the person that wrote that section (Genesis 1) thought earth was the center of the universe, don't you think this is something GOD should know is not true?

    Also, based on this description, the earth is at least 4 days older than every other star in the universe. We may not have absolute proof of the "Big Bang" but I am pretty sure it would be much less difficult to prove the earth did not exist before the rest of the universe.

    --
    Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
  84. Faith? by phliar · · Score: 1
    Deciding that the universe is a particular age is still taking a leap of faith, no matter what age you think it is.
    This is the way science works: we observe the universe around us. We ponder and cogitate and come up with a theory, i.e. a mathematical model, that accounts for what we see, and makes predictions about things we have not yet seen. If the prediction was right, the theory is good, and will be the accepted theory until we find an observation that doesn't fit, or come up with a new theory that does a better job of fitting the universe.

    Blackbody radiation is the classic example. "Classical" physics (i.e. pre-quantum) cannot model blackbody radiation spectra. Boltzmann, Planck et al came up with a new theory that does explain, so it supplanted classical physics.

    So we have a theory -- a mathematical model -- that fits all the strange and puzzling things we see out there, and this theory implies the Big Bang happened 15 billion years ago (or whatever). Until you come up with a better theory, that's the best estimate for the age for the universe. No "faith" required.

    --
    Unlimited growth == Cancer.
  85. Wars and more Wars (Creation Vs. Evolution) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can't believe this is like back to elementary school. Full circle with everybody taking the theory of evolution and big bang like its gospel because NASA and all its glory says so. Well the problem is we are still dealing with theory and until its fact we shouldn't get so excited and start the wars of Science and Creation. Its so last season, and dull you never get anywhere. Science is great, and so is belief.

  86. Get your Bible straight, 1:16 correctly reads . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And the Lord spake, saying, 'First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.'

    (At least that's what it should read - Maybe then I would follow the Lord.)