Slashdot Mirror
Has Cosmology Been Solved?
An anonymous reader writes "In 1998, Dr. Michael Turner published a famous paper titled 'Cosmology Solved? Quite Possibly!' where he outlined seven major issues cosmologists should address in the following ten years. Nine years later, he revisits the list in an interview with the Slackerpedia Galactica podcast. He summarizes progress on each issue, adds some new goals for the next ten years, and even suggests that cosmology is now more interesting than science fiction."
seven major issues cosmologists should address in the following ten years
1. Move to a better hosting service.
This has been well-settled for 6,000 years. God created the world in 7 days! Says so right in Genesis, chapter 1.
*smirk*
My blog
Welp, that was cosmology. Now on to human diseases, followed by understanding women....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
The universe is unfolding toward self-knowledge.
is "solved," is the day that field of inquiry ceases to be science, and BECOMES science fiction
science is a never ending inquiry into the unknown. there will always be the unknown
however, some of the higher level stuff of cosmology strikes me as a little too far out there to be called completely science. it is in many ways an intersection of philosophy, and math, and astronomy, and even religion
i think of cosmology as a sort of soft science, like sociology
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
..cosmology is now more interesting than science fiction Maybe a lot of science fiction. That's why we need a lot more SF with bitchin' rocket ship fights and purple aliens with five boobs. You know, good stuff.Best Windows Freeware
Well Tammy Fay baker certainly showed us the extreme upper limit of the field. Or are we talking about something else?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Hmmm... Peer through a telescope at night, or pilot a FTL starship through the universe dodging space pirates and hooking up with hot humanoid aliens.
Can't quite seem to make up my mind, here.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
"and even suggests that cosmology is now more interesting than science fiction."
Good, because I need some new documentaries to watch on Google Video.
Did not read the linked article. Seems to have been slashdotted. Wonder if he wrote, "I have a truly remarable solution for cosmology, unfortunately this website is too small to write down".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
God created the world in 6 days. He rested on the 7th. (What? You think it was easy?!?)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
WTF does the practice of beautifying the face and hair and skin have to do with science.... oh wait.. nm
Don't ever call anything "Slackerpedia Galactica" mmmkay?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
no, the universe is unfolding toward equilibrium.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Perhaps you've hit on one of the ways that religion is an asset from an evolutionary biology perspective. By giving nice canned answers to these unsolvable problems, you free people up to focus on things that are more directly relevant to their survival.
Any pre-religion cavemen who were sitting around wondering where we all came from probably either starved or got eaten pretty quickly...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
42?
3A 4E 22 05 C1 83 0B 7A
It's random, but my posting it here is probably considered illegal to someone.
on page 42.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Damn, I was hoping for makeup tips.
If 42 is the answer, what is the question?
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
42
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Thanks Alan!
Well, you blow in one end and move your fingers up and down the outside.
Well some "scientists" will tell you that they are smarter than God.
I'm sure a few may have implied that - I can't disagree with that - IMHO- as a Physics major.
These same ones know that it takes man thousands of hours to build a computer (which is a joke compared to even the brain of something as simple as a bumblebee), but the human brain evolved from a rock.
I don't understand. I think that god used Evolution as His tool. And He made all living creatures over Billions of Years. Using the timeline of God, we humans will ALWAYS be insignificant.
I wonder how they are going to explain a bunch of the population of the world disappearing all at once, scotty beamed them all up?
I am sorry. I do not understand .... unless, you are joking and making a reference to the Simpsons cartoon! Then, I understand!
No sir,
If you are serious with your argument, God is greater than science. Meaning, science is one explanation of God's will. There is no conflict.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
So we now know what the Great Attractor is?
It's like saying "Math has been solved". Wow, that's terrific!! Thanks for the tip.
So, Libra will experience a new uplifting happiness due to Saturn being in retrograde?
TFA vanished in the aether...
Will always be more interesting IMO. It is the human element (emotional, political, and intellectual) that dictates our advancement of research, application of technology, and willingness to integrate new understandings of our universe into the social fabric through education.
The human element is what separates a good science fiction story from an excercise in mental masturbation. On many occasions a solid sci-fi short or novella (my preferred lengths) have helped me gain a new angle on modern day issues.
While religious fervor is a huge culprit in the scisms developing in modern society (I only can speak for the American communities I am familiar with), it should be noted that many scientists spurn the importance of popularizers like Sagan. If anything we need more focus on making scientific progress a matter accesible to non-scientists who otherwise have access only to religious cosmologies.
Presenting new science in layman's terms does not have to = dumbing the information down. Good science fiction can accomplish this.
Regards.
While in principle, I agree with most of what you are trying to say, though I don't understand why you say that a thoroughly known science becomes sci-fi...
But in practice there are many fields, that while questions remain, the field itself has become very stagnant because, quite frankly, there isn't a whole lot of new and exciting knowledge or conceptualization to be done. Consider, for example, that nearly all of the Human Anatomy departments of US medical schools have either folded, or, more usually, mutated into something else, like departments of Cell and/or Developmental Biology. Its not because there aren't new findings in anatomy, nor new unanswered questions, and certainly not because human anatomy isn't taught anymore (every med student still needs to know it), but rather there really isn't enough new knowledge in anatomy per se, to warrant a continuing academic dept, or new faculty, or new graduate students -- we/they/the field has MOVED ON to related, but different branches of science.
You can also ask the question another way: Do we, as a society, ever learn/understand enough about a field of inquiry that we no longer deem it wise to continue funding and using precious resources to further vigorous inquiry, instead of moving on to other, more promising, less well understood fields of inquiry ? Well the answer from the NIH, the NSF, the private foundations, the university, the scientists, the Congress, etc, etc is most certain YES.
Read this: The Don Juan Bible. Once you study the bible enough, you'll understand women better than they understand themselves.
The Book of Don Juan (on that site) and the Book of SHuma Gora are also very good. All of it is free.
Definitely resulted in an audible chuckle. Thanks.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
#1: it's probably infinite, but even if it's not
#2: human behavior is emergent phenomenon, it's not set in stone. it makes new stuff, it fucks with the status quo, requiring mankind to develop a new understanding of things that are newly opened avenues of investigation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You only need to know one question to understand women - "Why?". They need to know why you didn't call, why you looked at that other girl in the short skirt, why you don't like her friends, why you don't send her flowers/gifts/notes every week like you used to, and most importantly why you treat her like crap (that's why they stay with jerks - "Why?")
And the question men hate the most - "What are you thinking?", is really just, "Why aren't you telling me what you're thinking?"
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
Our next generation space telescope hopes to be able to detect Earth sized planets 20-100 light years away, IIRC. Detect and see are two very different things (although I believe they hope to be able to perform spectroscopic analysis of those atmospheres). So, a telescope with 1,000x the angular resolution (possibly requiring 1,000,000x the light gathering capabilities - with modern interferometry there can now be a huge disparity between the two) will be required to detect Earth at 100,000 light years away. Also, light traveling around the black hole will be severely distorted.
Oh, and we have to find an appropriately placed black hole, too. Can't have anything getting in the way of line-of-sight, etc.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Didn't scientists say just before the discovery of quantum mechanics that nature had been pretty much figured out and the rest was just details?
I wish I could RTFA. Does his list include solving the Slashdotting Effect?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
mod parent up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I give you here the Ultimate Formula of Cosmology (tm), solve cosmology today!
* 20.05)
(2.01^13.12+76.339*162.23179)/(5.7902*6.55+24.102
PS: Should be solved only with low digit precision calculators, nature sucks at math.
Could you give me the chapter/verse of the rapture story that you're referring to?
Take your time...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
i'm not the one saying it's more interesting than science fiction. the cosmologist is. strange to think of hard math like that, huh?
furthermore, i think you are applying a rather narrow definition for cosmology. you say i wiki'd the definition, and therefore it's invalid
and? who the hell are you? on what authority is your narrow definition more valid?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There we go...
7 4828)/(5.7902*6.55+24.102*20.05)
(2.01^13.12+76.3389*162.2320023135951487704990351
Black holes tend to attract things, though. For example, there's a very nice black hole about 30,000 light years from here. Unfortunately, it just happens to be surrounded by the Milky Way galaxy's core. Hate it when that happens. ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
let the bugger speak in all his quasi-political-philosophical glory:
m sfeldquotes.htm
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
http://politicalhumor.about.com/cs/quotethis/a/ru
it has a mental and verbal cadence to it. i think rumsfeld would have had a better career as a poet, or a religious mystic, or a fortune cookie fortune author, or horoscope writer
maybe donald rumsfeld and yogi berra can team up and deliver us magical koans to contemplate the mysteries of life
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Right, and what was man's sin again? Oh yeah, it was eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God got mad and said, since you now know good and evil, I shall punish you and all of your descendants. But, ummm, if man didn't know good and evil prior to eating from the tree - how was he supposed to know it was wrong? Sure, God told him not to, but he didn't know that doing something he was told not to do was wrong. The inconstancy starts from the first book...
It's similar to the idea that "Christ came to save you"! Save you from what? He's here to save you from God! Well that's just swell. You'd think the guy who created the world in 6 days could have come up with a better way of "saving" humanity from himself than having a guy tortured and killed.
Yep, I know these aren't original points. Yep, I know I'm never going to sway a true believer with them either. I just like to point this out occasionally so other non-believing boot quakers like myself can have a nice laugh.
Right, because the Black Plague and World War 2 proved that if things are going bad, the end MUST be near! It must be fun to be in a doomsday cult!
fractals
the universe is fractal in nature
human beings ourselves, we are fountains of emergent phenomenon. you can describe human society in terms of starting formulae, and have no idea of the outcome. we create new and weird things in this universe that did not exist before, lending all the proof you need to conclude that the universe is open ended, not a pat and solvable math problem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
To be pendantic
To be pedantic , it's spelled p-e-d-a-n-t-i-c.
That would explain why I couldn't find it there. Thanks for the info.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
For the last time its...
"How many roads must a man walk down."
The mice agreed and now that's the answer ( I think they may have had a meeting)
..which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably designed for cooling the blood-T P
There are plenty of scientific areas where are pretty much as good as they get, that is, where the effort needed to make the models better is not really reasonable given what little improvements in predictive power it will get us.
Show Notes: Cosmology 5
From Slackerpedia Galactica
Release Date: May 16, 2007
MP3
Dr. Michael Turner is one of the figureheads of the modern cosmological scene. In 1998, he coined the term dark energy and published a paper asking the provocative question Is Cosmology Solved? Quite Possibly! In it, he outlined a checklist of seven major issues that need to be addressed in the next decade in order to answer "Yes". A rhetorical exercise, he didn't actually mean cosmology could be solved so easily, it was more of a challenge to the field to take it to the next step (read his Conclusion section for more). So in this interview, about nine years later, we ask him about the status of the seven major issues and then he adds some new questions to the list.
Dr. Turner is one of the nicest people we've ever interviewed. We think one can tell from listening to him.
* His original 1998 paper
This is the 5th interview in our series of interviews from the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics.
Er...tell me, just how can you know that?
I'm not the poster who wrote the item to which you are replying, but I can answer as a scientist.
We know that science is a never-ending inquiry into the unknown, not through insight or revelation or faith, but because that's built into the scientific method. We've defined it that way.
The scientific method provides us with a technique for modelling reality using totally abstract mathematical models, and then testing and correlating those models against the actual observed behaviour of reality.
This has absolutely nothing to do with actually knowing anything at all about the actual structure of reality herself --- in fact, we have no means of doing so (all testing of physical reality is at arm's length, we can't actually *see* or know the structure directly). We just approximate her behaviour ever more accurately, using our own models which just have a verified behavioural correlation and not any known actual physical correspondance.
So, the process of inquiry will go on forever simply because at no stage are we getting any closer to the real thing, since all we have are models. A new model for anything at all could be developed tomorrow, and reveal entirely new possibilities which the previous model didn't.
People who search for TRUTH don't actually understand Science, or at least they'll never be satisfied with it because it doesn't yield truths, it yields mathematical models of observed behaviour and clearcut physical correlations which we can use to do wonderful things, since physical behaviour is all that matters.
But from the scientist's perspective, this fundamental relationship that models are not reality is absolutely wonderful, because it means that absolutely nothing is impossible a priori. We just have to find a way to do it.
Inquiry will go on forever, unless we find a technique more powerful than the scientific method.
It's a wonderful field to be in.
1) Always ask what kind of party your client is going too.
2) Never use to much base. Less = More.
3) When styling the hair, get constant input from your client on the progress.
4) Lipstick should always be applied with a brush.
5) To much rouge can make anyone whorish.
6) Eyeliner should be applied liberally up until you see the first signs of clumping.
7) Finally, always be positive, even if you make a mistake. They always look fabulous!!!
We have a version of the Bible that is almost 2,000 years old (Dead Sea Scrolls). It hasn't changed much in the last 2,000 years. From the GP's post, I have no idea if he's a Christian. He's just pointing out that a lot of Biblical scholars are well aware of any apparent contradictions, and already have explanations for all of them.
My least favorite "gotcha" is when people try to claim that the Bible calculates pi to be 3. They don't seem to be able to understand that "round" and "perfect circle" do not mean the same thing. Anyways, the GP is right. Whether or not you're a Christian (I'm not), you're not going to find any "new" contradictions in the Bible. However, that doesn't mean you won't be able to make others aware of contradictions that they didn't know exist. Personally, I'm of mixed feelings on this. On one hand, most fundamentalism is anathema to science. OTOH, à la Kurt Vonnegut (who is now in Heaven), I do not wish to deprive others of their religious beliefs.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
>> followed by understanding women....
...
> Now, THAT'S science-fiction!
Bah! You people never get that right!
It's clearly fantasy
Why does God need a belly-button?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Err, it hasn't been solved - giddy up!
So, what was Gutenberg printing in 1454 if the Bible was only constructed 140 years ago? The Synod of Hippo in 393 CE is when the the New Testament became canon. The gospels and letters that make up that canon are generally thought to be written in the 1st and 2nd centuries.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I interpret "soft science" to mean a meritable field of study that is beyond the complete understanding of today's sciences. In other words, it is a potential field of science which cannot support any fundamental theories due to a lack of sciences offering sufficient explanations. Think about it - it is unavoidable that any experiment in sociology or cosmology will have innumerable variables that cannot be quantified.
Cosmology -- we cant say for sure why it makes sense. We can come closer to making sense of it, but a definite science of Cosmology and its subtleties is far away from our current reality.
Sociology -- Every person we talk to, every friend and enemy we make, every human interaction (direct or indirect) effects this. In addition, our subconscious in part governs all our actions. We dont fully understand human subconscious, so we definitely cant understand the collective subconscious. These are all limitations to sociology becoming a science.
I see no reason why, centuries from now after discovering many other sciences, these "soft sciences" couldn't become sciences.
the universe is not static. we, ourselves, human beings, are proof that the unvierse can result in some very strange unforeseen developments: parts of space aware of itself, and aware of its surroundings, and actively seeking to mold it
if you don't understand how fundamentally weird just our existence is in the universe, you don't grasp the really weird potential for what we might do (if we don't kill ourselves or meet with a killer asteroid in the next few cneturies before we get off this planet)
you lack imagination
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are three languages used in the original Bible: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. You have a point about losing stuff in translation (although I wouldn't say all meaning is lost), but there is no such thing as the "original" Latin with respect to the Bible.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
but i am doubting that cosmology is narrow in definition and a hard science
;-)
and i am not asserting that i have some greater claim at validity than you, in fact, all i do is point to the cosmologist who is the subject of thread we are commenting under, who compares it to science fiction
simply on the rationale of that guy's broad analysis and fanciful comparisons i am disputing you
but, in the end, debating the meaning of a word is a silly undertaking. all words encompassing abstract concepts have meanings which shift over time, have somewhat vague underpinnings, and have complex and overlapping interpretations for different people
so i simply say to you: you are correct. and i am correct. because neither of us "own" the word cosmology
it's a complex universe, this thing called language (wink, wink)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I really like the idea of a philosophical moth - or fruit fly to bring in another recent topic. I'm just picturing this moth with a leg stroking his antennae pondering deep philosophical questions. Who created the Sun? What is the significance of the "GE" logo?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Cosmetology and figured we were going to get some example of hair tips and pics of bimbos. My bad.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Think of a number. Any number.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
They don't tend to attract things any more than any other object with *equal* mass, but they do tend to have rather large amounts of mass - especially that one 30,000 light years away.
And, yeah, I just having fun with the two ways to interpret secretive - although I can't find any evidence to support a derivation from secrete, darn it.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Major mistake by most Christians - God is a spirit (John 4:24), without a physical body.
Adam's _spirit_ was created in God's image, not his physical body.
For all we know God could have taken an existing primate and created a spirit in that body.
Definitely not the latest. You'll find incarnations much more recent than that. The KJV was translated in 1611. NJKV was first published between 1979-1982. KJ21 was first (ironically) published in 1994. Ah, I found it - the Revised Version was translated in 1885. Interesting. Why did you single out that one? Perhaps you'll find this enlightening.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Well, Wikipedia is looking at you with a quizzical stare, but Google has a vague inclination about it. Me? Not a clue - I'm definitely no Bible scholar.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
For science to truly be a never-ending inquiry, then either the rules aren't finite, they're not consistent, or they're not fully knowable. And if they're not fully knowable, then we should recognize the point at which we can learn no more and stop wasting our time.
You couldn't be more wrong, in absolutely every single point you make.
Science and never-ending inquiry
Deuteronomy 13:6-10
...
So, yes, a true Christian is absolutely *required* to murder any close friend or relative who points out that their god is an idiotic delusion and they should grow up and start dealing with reality.
This is a fine example of taking quotes out of context in a subject matter one is unfamiliar with and is biased against. Perhaps you should look instead to John 8:1-11, the tale of the adultress where the Pharisees drag a woman accused of adultery before Jesus to demand that she be stoned in accordance with Deuteronomy 22:22. However, Jesus instead responds, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to cast a stone." When they leave in shame, he asks the woman if any still codemn her, and when she responsds that no one does, then he says, "Then neither do I condemn you, go now and sin no more."
There are many sections of the New Testament where portions of the Old Testament are reinterpreted or refuted. The food laws in Deuteronomy 14 are openly repealed in Acts 10. The mandate to stone to all breakers of the law is replaced by a message of forgiveness and redemption. To miss out on that is to wholly and completely miss the entire point of the gospel of Jesus. This is beyond twisting a few statements here and there. This is a blatant assertion that the message of Christianity is the exact opposite of the gospel of Jesus.
In other words: RTFB, newb. <g>
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
the universe of this thread has just collapsed to nothing
of course physical things are made from what already exists. but the observation is so flat as to be meaningless
if that was your whole point, you seem to have no point at all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When you figure it out, you should post it on Wikipedia. Good luck!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
wow, I've been reading all of these posts wondering how God and religion relate to cosmotology. My bad!
Which books are in the Bible has changed a few times, and still currently depends on which denomination you are. The contents in those books is not known to have changed, AFAIK. (I'm not claiming they haven't, I'm just saying I'm not aware of any evidence that they have.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
lesson 1: STOP FUCKING LAUGHING WHILE THE OTHER GUY IS TALKING.
"so the universe contains dark matter..."
"hehe, hehehe. hehehehe."
"and the ratio seems to be about 1/3:2/3..."
"hehehe, hehee. hehehehehe. ehehe."
"and the effect of this is..."
"hehehe. ehehehehe."
jesus fucking christ, that sounded like bevis and butthead.
When you get to the end, the implication is that two spaces after a full stop began to become less common about a hundred years ago, with the invention of the Linotype machine!
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
Throughout history some Christians have believed the end times are right around the corner. Not all. Not even a lot. In fact, if you look at the history a bit, the "end times" craze of what I believe is called premillenialism is quite a recent phenomenon.
In fact, there seems to be quite a large faction of Christianity that doesn't believe the end times are anywhere close, because the Christian religion is not yet dominant across the earth. And while agnostics tend to be distracted by all the flag-waving and chanting of the "get ready for the rapture" types, there's an entire other class you should find much more threatening: the ones who believe that one day their religion will triumph over the entire globe.
On the other hand, from what I can tell, most of these believe that Christianity will achieve this as a "victory of love", and most of them tent to be non-violent, anti-war types. Either way.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
Sure, the translations change. They should, since our language changes, and our understanding of the original language changes. I am not, however, aware of any evidence that the source documents themselves have changed. Obviously, there's a lot I'm not aware of, though. Otherwise (or perhaps including that), I agree with you completely - "It's an imprecise work of man from which we can gain some wisdom."
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
What I heard, was that someone did wing a rock at the adultress and knocked her out cold. Jesus turned around, and said "Mom, stay out of this".
This is the thing that always cracked me up about the "post the ten commandments in every possible corner" sect. I mean, the Old Testament is just that, the old one, and the New Testament is supposed to be "The Law 2.0" (Okay maybe convenant when Adam in Eden is Law v1.0, covenant out of Eden is 2.0, convenant with Noah 3.0, Moses 4.0 . This was a stable build, the various prophets did release upgrades and service packs, before we get the whole new God's Law 5.0: Jesus Christ Edition [If it waS ubuntu would it be Jumpin Jesus 5.0]...;) So I digress, but anyways, the 10 commandments is the old set of rules, the new rules are the Beatitudes. The first time I hear someone saying we should post "Blessed are the merciful" in a court room , "blessed are the poor" on wall street or "blessed are the peacemakers" at the Pentagon, I'll know I've met a true Christian. Poor lonely guy, I'll probably slap him on the back and buy him some coffee.
There are many sections of the New Testament where portions of the Old Testament are reinterpreted or refuted.
Which, of course, is just one of the many contradictions in the bible.
Hey, here's another:
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place." (Matthew 5:17 NAB)
So, sorry, but that directly contradicts your quote.
To miss out on that is to wholly and completely miss the entire point of the gospel of Jesus. This is beyond twisting a few statements here and there. This is a blatant assertion that the message of Christianity is the exact opposite of the gospel of Jesus.
Which is essentially the definition of a contradiction. Congratulations on noticing.
You can not follow both of those, yet you must to be a Christian.
In other words: RTFB, newb.
Perhaps you should read the whole thing instead of picking a few specific examples where he pardoned "sinners" and ignore the fact that he stated absolutely that *every single word* of the old testament law would stand *forever*.
Nice try, though.
Is the whole field of living systems infinite? Quite probably yes. That does not mean each and every subcategory is also infinite, although it can be.
Of course, there are some questions. For example, is human anatomy so well understood that it can be called a "dead" subject? (Dead in the sense of it is stagnant, it won't evolve or grow, in the same way that Latin is a dead subject, even though it has a lot of value in some disciplines.) Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how detailed something can be and still be anatomy and not some other branch of human biology. We've not mapped out all the regions of the brain, and we know from studies of tetrachromats that the brain can form in multiple ways, reassigning portions of itself. The anatomy of the brain is therefore not absolute, but is much more amorphous. Unless we know every possible condition that can physically reshape the brain, that is definitely not a dead area of research.
The brain seems to have mechanisms for which we have no identified pathway. For example, aluminium in the brain will cause the formation of tau protein knots - apparently some archaic form of protective mechanism against the metal that is normally disabled. Nobody, as far as I know, has identified what part of the brain is responsible for this protection, what re-enables it or when in the evolutionary trail it would have had any value. (In modern humans, it causes the brain to crush itself from the inside.)
Anything else? The stomach still causes problems - and, no, antacid won't fix them. Going by current structural knowledge, it is impossible for a prion to traverse the stomach wall. Current research on new-variant CJD requires that they can. Is our structural understanding incomplete or wrong?
Then there is the issue of stem cells. The body produces a lot of adult stem cells, but stem cells aren't specialized and it is unclear to me that they should be considered part of a structure that they have not yet joined.
I'm inclined to say that anatomy is close to being a dead subject, but that there are significant areas of uncertainty that need to be cleared up before research should be considered truly finished.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Re those working at the intersection of philosophy and math, do we need to buy them pencils?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
it allows me to go back in time and be my own great grand father!
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Ah, you are talking of Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the kiss of death:
More vividly, imagine science as if approaching an asymptote in some unknown number of dimensions via all sorts of interesting theories, all of which contribute to some sort of ecology of supporting ideas and technologies, but never can any or all provide an Absolute.
More vividly, imagine science as if approaching an asymptote in some unknown number of dimensions via all sorts of interesting theories, all of which contribute to some sort of ecology of supporting ideas and technologies, but never can any or all provide an Absolute.
You've got the right idea there, with the small proviso that the asymptote of understanding isn't fixed for all time, but varies as each new theory supercedes the last.
Evolving theories tend to overlap so that the asymptote grows in extent, as past observations are shown to be special cases of more extended ones. But occasionally the asyptote sprouts a completely new branch, even a disconnected one, such as when quantum mechanics appeared on the scene.
In general though, you're right. There is no Absolute, and our mathematical modelling tends to approach correlation with the observed behaviour of reality in an asymptotic manner.
imagine waking up one day to find that all the nasty, screwed up, conservative extremists have just ... DISAPPEARED !
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Further discoveries of cosmology lie in the 6th decimal place.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
I was obviously in an argumentative mood. Describing how they secrete instead of accrete would be too agreeable.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
If that person were a friend, and I thought that belief helped them to cope with life, then I would not want to change that belief. If I thought that belief hurt them more than it helped them, then that might be different.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
1,682 years is still not too far from "a couple thousand years", especially when you notice that there's only one signficant figure in that statement. :)
The point wasn't that the Bible is inerrant. The point was that you're very unlikely to find any new inconsistencies in it. Even if the Bible was changing up until Gutenberg's deed, that'd still be true.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Yes, that's the dedication, but this book doesn't have that. I don't remember the exact wording of the thing, but it's not the same as that I'm sure. I found that dedication during my google hunts yesterday. Either way, I'm pretty sure it is just a moderately old edition of the KJV Bible. I don't think it's really over 400 years old, but I know it's over 100 just from the dates written by my family. I think the odds are it's 150 years old at the most, but I havent' verified that yet.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Tis is probably redundant, but it's kinda hard to speed read an MP3 while on the phone.