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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.'"
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:
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".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Well, looks like that's it for their funding.
How can the past be truly confirmed? -C
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.
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.
---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.
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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?"
And we all know the answer will be 42, so why bother?
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
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!
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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.
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
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
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?
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!
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?
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
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?
Thereby creating a 'structure' to the universe -- a kiddush cup.
Don't you mean "Yiddish cup"?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
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
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...
NASA will be adding a new "Universe Discovery Center" to the NASAquest Children's Activity Center at NASA centers.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
Like Zoidberg's house burning down at the bottom of the ocean, this only raises more question. :p
<]=)
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.
No, I think they did mean Kiddush Cups.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
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...
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.
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.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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--
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."
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.
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.
Confirm doesn't imply 'prove'.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
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.
:) I chose to refer to creative days as creative stages, or creative time periods.
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!
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.
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!
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."
Upon closer inspection of the results, scientists found evidence of giant supergalactic noodles and meatballs.
The ultimate proof will come when bits of flotsam from the Big Bang Burger Chef finally reach Earth.
This space unintentionally left blank.
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...
Aachoo!
There's no place like ~/
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
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."
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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."
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
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.
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
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!
How can something be caused by nothing??
It makes the math work out.
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.
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.
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).
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"
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.
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:
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.
...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!
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.
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
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."
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.
The latest Slashdot meme.
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.
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?
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.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
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.