Slashdot Mirror
Universe's Dark Ages May Not Be Invisible After All
StartsWithABang writes: The Universe had two periods where light was abundant, separated by the cosmic dark ages. The first came at the moment of the hot Big Bang, as the Universe was flooded with (among the matter, antimatter and everything else imaginable) a sea of high-energy photons, including a large amount of visible light. As the Universe expanded and cooled, eventually the cosmic microwave background was emitted, leaving behind the barely visible, cooling photons. It took between 50 and 100 million years for the first stars to turn on, so in between these two epochs of the Universe being flooded with light, we had the dark ages. Yet the dark ages may not be totally invisible, as the forbidden spin-flip-transition of hydrogen may illuminate this time period after all.
Islam is incompatible with Western Civilization - why are we tolerating it?
Banning Mosques is cultural self-defense.
Science requires two things:
1) Hypothesizing.
2) Testing those hypotheses.
Yet we rarely see both done when it comes to advanced astronomy and astrophysics.
Once we get beyond naming the planets, stars and other astral bodies, and once we get beyond predicting where they might be found at a given time, we've left the realm of science.
All we get is speculation, without any testing of this speculation. Sometimes, like in the case of the Big Bang, there is no way to test it, so it will forever be speculation.
When a critical element of science, namely testing one's hypotheses is missing, it makes me very unwilling to consider what's being practiced as being "science".
At the very bottom of the article there's a picture of the satellite transmitter from the GoldenEye James Bond movie made in the mid 90's.
Why would a fictional installation from a goddamn James Bond movie of all places be in an article about science?!