An open universe, that is, one where spacetime doesn't contract back into a singularity (Big Bang), implies a fundamentally different spacetime geometry that the one of a Closed Universe.
Open Universe is Hyperbolic (Infinite)
A Closed Universe is Spheric (Finite but boundaryless)
This is what all the cosmology texts (at least those written before 1998) say, but it's an oversimplifaction.
Drawing the parallel between the geometry and the fate of the Universe only works if you can assume that the cosmological constant (or dark energy density) is zero. Only in that one special case do you get the "closed Universe recollapses" and "open Universe expands forever" duality.
If your dark energy density can be non-zero, then General Realtivity is just fine with a Unvierse that is geometrically closed but which expands forever.
Entire careers in physics are going straight down the shitter because of dark matter, because it doesn't exist. From the very first time I read about it, I thought "Geez, this sounds like a 3 year old trying to cover up the fact that he doesn't KNOW the reason why".
Uh.
The primary evidence for dark matter is that if you look at how galaxies move and how clusters of galaxies move, they should all be flying apart. They are moving too fast for the amount of gravity we calculate by adding up all the mass of the stars and the gas that we can see. Since galaxies and clusters are around all over the place, we know they're not falling apart. Ergo, there must be more gravity than can be accounted for from the material we can see.
The simplest, easiest, and most direct explanation is that there is more there than we can see. Matter not emitting light, thus called dark matter. There's nothing kludgy or ad-hoc about this, it's the most natural conclusion to make. The alternative is that Newtonian Gravity (or General Relativity, which has Newtonian Gravity as a limit in the relevant case)-- that theory which perfectly predicts the motions of planets, spacecraft, apples, and other things that we have lots of experience with-- must be wrong. There are people who believe this over Dark Matter, in fact, but to me, "stuff there that we haven't found yet" seems to be a much more likely and plausible explanation.
The evidence for why the dark matter can't all be baryonic (i.e. made up of "normal" stuff) is more indirect, but it comes out of other theories for the construction of the elements in the hot early Universe-- and this other theory itself has made predictions that match well what was observed.
It will be interesting to see how scientists who have staked their entire careers upon the existence of dark matter would react to the discovery that it does not in fact exist.
I doubt anybody has staked their entire career on dark matter.
However, a lot of people have a lot invested in it. And, for those reasons, it is good that they will resist challenges to it. Scientists don't believe Dark Matter just cause it sounds neat, but because there is a lot of evidence for it. The cosmological/expanding Universe evidence is probably the weakest and least convincing; the rotation curves of galaxies and the dynamics of clusters provide strong evidence that has nothing to do with the interpretations of the CMB that this article talks about.
If something else comes along, people will resist it, and that's good. If this other thing really is better and does a better job of answering the questions, people will move on to that. But the evidence will have to be strong, stronger than the evidence we have right now that Dark Matter exists. It is on the strength of that evidence that resistance will be based; it's not people trying to save their sinecure and their jobs, it's simply that they had good reason to be convinced of Dark Matter in the first place.
When Linux has 80% marketshare and is a true force to be reckoned with, then perhaps the community will be able to afford sarcasm and get away with it, but in the meantime, there must be other, more constructive ways to entice vendors to embrace open-source.
...like, for instance, not buying NVidia at all, and restricting yourself to a Radeon 9200 or lower so that you *can* use open-source drivers. That's very constructive market feedback. Buy what does what you want.
Why not just pull IE from the market altogether and tell everybody to download Mozilla and get on with their lives?
Not only would all the IE security problems be gone (in favor of Mozilla security problems, granted, but I suspect those would be more tractable), but we'd also finally have everybody using a browser that actually supported web standards! (Yeah, IE is pretty close nowadays, but I found out recently that simple Java 1.4 applet embedding just won't work from IE if you use the basic codetype="application/java" standard, even if you've downoaded Java 1.4, whereas it does work from Mozilla.)
but realistically, the government would never spend the insane amount of money to install cameras all over the public area of America, especially not high-tech eye-scanning ones.
Agreed. But don't estimate the money-spending abilities of corporate marketing departments as they attempt to identify and target consumers. (Which, by and large, was what was scanning whatshisname in Minority Report.)
If you're not happy being paranoid about marketing departments, consider that once the cameras are there, it's real easy for whatever random government organization to use PATRIOT IX to get that data without a warrant, but with a gag order that prevents your being told they got the data.
Becuase you can change your password a whole lot easier than you can change your DNA.
The flip side of not being able to lose or forget your biometrics is that you can't change it when it gets stolen. And, yes, people will find ways to spoof biometric authentication schemes into believing that they have your data. Whether it's fake fingerprints, or (more likely) some sort of data hack that sendst the computer the right bitstream for a given person's biometric data, once yours is gone, you're just hosed forever.
If your password or PIN gets stolen, you can make a new password, or get a new ATM card and a new PIN, and cancel the old ones. Once your biometric info is stolen or spoofed, you have the choice of cancelling it and not being able to authenticate anywhere, or just accpeting that your identity is stolen and will stay stolen.
Biometrics are great if *combined* with a password. But by themselves, they're foolish for strong authentication. Just because your fingerprints are on your hand doesn't mean that there isn't a pattern there that could be stolen and stored somewhere by bad actors.
I don't think I'm the only person thinking this: what if SCO planted their code in Linux? Maybe they were planning this all along.
Occam's Razor for conspiracy theorists suggests that one should never ascribe to conspiracy what can be ascribed to incompetence. SCO/Caldera submtted a bunch of code to the Linux kernel. Much later, Darl and company come along, see code in the Linux kernel that matches code they have copyright, and without a clue about what they are doing, thing that they've found a goldmine.
Assuredly SCO has given ample evidece of being blindingly incompetent in the past, such that sheer incompetence is hands-down the most plausible explanation here.
it just needs to be able to read Word documents properly (and OpenOffice comes close).
No it doesn't. What we need is for the world to stop treating a proprietary format as a generic interchange format.
If the only reason Linux is not "ready for the Desktop" is that "Microsoft dominates the desktop" than for any technical or usability reason, well, then, it's just time to storm in and take over. It's happened before. Microsoft Word wasn't always what "everybody uses", and it doesn't remain that way forevermore.
I think that many people are finally latching onto the concept that freedom to live safely is more important than freedom to be a criminal.
I have no objection to you holding an defending that position, but I do have an objection to your warping of the language.
"Freedom to live safely" is like "freedom to have enough to eat." This is freedom as a rhetorical tool. This isn't "freedom" in the sense of "liberty", which is what we are ostensively talking about when we talking about a tradition of freedom in the USA.
If you're going to argue that the modern world has made it such that safety and a chance of surviving necessitates some giving up of freedoms, then argue that. Don't pretend that you're arguing for some kind of freedom when you argue for that though.
This is an in-depth analysis of the arguments that Lerner presents in his book.
Lots of scientists question the Big Bang theory, all the time. Most of them come away with their questions answered by it. Many others come away thinking that there are still questions that science needs to address. A very few come away believing that their questions haven't been adequately answered, or that there is a better answer. It's just that the Big Bang theory is a simple, straightforward theory that happens to describe the observations we see, and does a very good job of explaining a number of disparate observations. Some still disagree with it, and indeed one of them wrote a review article in the latest issue of "Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics". They aren't ignored; they just don't have the weight of evidence on their side at the moment!
Secondly, wildly broad claims normally start, and increasingly narrow claims are made as one works down the ordered list. Therefore, the first thing you claim is going to be ridiculously broad. Generally speaking, the first few claims in a patent are not serious attempts to patent something. The last few claims are the ones of importance. And, what do you know, the title of the patent is...the first claim. So before anyone flames Microsoft, have you read claims 11-20? Oh, there's still plenty to complain about, but not as much as the article writer implies.
Which would be all well and good if we all had infinite money and lawyers at our beck and call in our employ. Then we can afford to go to court and point out that, well, that first claim is ridiculous.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, an overly broad patent which is ridiculous on the face of it still has the possibility of being approved by a judge. If you're a very small company facing Microsoft's legal division, do you pay the protection money, or do you risk the expense of going to court? I thought so. While a patent may not have force of law, it has the force of possibility of law that allows really huge bullies to dominate based on ridiculous claims. It is a very serious problem that the patent office grants patents with stupid, ridiculous, and should-be-untenable patents.
Of course not. All ready, all of the posts about this article have been screaming "TROLL!!" without even reading the fucking article. OSS zealots tend to be a bunch of immature kids.
Meanwhile, we've got NineNine here making a blanket statement about all the posts, clearly without having read them.
Furthermore, the FSF isn't demanding damages or money, they're only asking their licence to be obeyed. How is this "worse than commercial" like those clowns at SCO asking for big $$$ for supposed harm?
Indeed. On one side, we have the FSF saying, "everybody play fair and play by the rules." On the other side, we have proprietary companies saying, "Aha! You were caught! Cough up the protection money!"
And, yet, somehow, the author of the article seems to think that the FSF's approach is the more onerous and the more damaging to society.
Hello?
A fine example, in my opinion, of the complete perspective that a lot of American society has lost. What matters is the stock market and the business bottom line and how various people can fit into an economic model. Honesty, playing fair, and individual rights and responsibilities are laughed at as irrelevant at bessed, dismissed as intrusive and onerous at worst. Depressing, really.
Hrm, what are you saying about falsifiable? Falsifiable means that there is a way we can show it to be wrong. Just because a theory makes an accurate prediction about the future does not make it 'falsifiable'.
...and if that prediction would not have come out as the theory had indicated, what would you say had happened? Assuming that the failed prediction was verified and repeated, that sure as hell sounds like falsification to me.
Saying "there's aliens in the Alpha Centauri system", and the way to falsify it would be to visit the system and see that they aren't there - that's not falsifiable.
And why not? That would be a weak theory, with very little point at the present day because there's no other reason to suppose that at the moment, and it will be decades (at least) before we could check it. But it clearly is falsifiable, and you even give the experiment in principle that could be used to test it. The "this should happen" is "if we go to Alpha Centauri, then we should see aliens." That's a prediction of a future experiment that can be performed, and which could prove the theory false.
We don't have to watch a person be born to know that he was born (or somehow otherwise brought into existence)! We just have to go and see that he exists to verify a theory that states that he has been brought into existence.
The other things you've already said are not falsifiable, i.e. theories about origins, have been tested, and many theories have been thrown out while other theories have stood the test of evidence. Origins is far from off-limits for science, it's a long-standing active research area in which tremendous progress has been made.
It's space, nothing, a huge empty. If it's shaped like anything than what the hell is outside?
Space is funkier than you think.
There clearly is an "outside" of the solar system, and thre is an "outside" of the galaxy. Those outsides also exist in the same three spatial dimensions that you can use to describe the "inside" of the solar system or the galaxy.
A finite universe is a very different thing. It's like the surface of the Earth. Asking what is outside of the universe is like asking what is north of the north pole. Think about the surface of the earth as a *two-dimensional* world. We happen to be three-dimensional people who stick up into a third dimension off of that surface, but try to imagine that we're two dimensional creatures who can only move about on the surface and never leave it; indeed, the dimension that points "off" of the surface of the Earth isn't something that we can perceive or get to. We would say that our world is finite. We could in principle explore the whole surface and have seen all of it. If we keep going in one direction, we will eventually come back where we started. Even without doing that, we can easily measure the curvature of the Earth, by figuring out if parallel lines converge or diverge.
The 3d space of a closed universe is like the 2d space of the surface of the Earth. There is no "outside", at least not in the normal dimensions that we can get to and that affect us. A finite Universe is not "the ball of where galaxies are inside space", the way that the solar system is the region where planets and comets and such are inside space, or the way that the Galaxy is the region where stars, gas, and dark matter are inside space. A finite universe means that the space itself is finite.
Thanks for respecting that. Would you mind emailing me at sat at tyreth dot homelinux dot org? Usually when I post links, people feel a need to reply to me with arguments on the website, which also becomes tiresome. I'm happy to discuss in a more controlled way though:) If you tell me a bit about what you have seen and thought, I might be able to direct you more accurately to useful resources.
Ah, yes, the old "secret evidence" tactic. Don't post your links publicly because you're afraid of what people might say when they actually see them.
The same thing that led us all to believe we'd find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
* any discussion of origins is not scientific in nature. Science deals with the observable and falsifiable.
I fail to see how it is in principle impossible for a theory about origins to have observational or falsifiable consequences.
The theory of inflation (a version of Big Bang theory), for example, made the prediction that we would observe a flat geometry when we looked at the Cosmic Microwave Background. We did, and we saw it. This was a vindication of inflation (although there probably are still some viable alternative theories that aren't completely ruled out-- science is always a work in progress). The observable and the falsifiable does not only include those things that will happen in the future. We observe many things which are consequences of the past. If a theory can make a prediction of a future observation, that theory is entirely falsifiable-- all we have to do is do that future observation.
Before you dismiss entire branches of science out of hand, you might want to try to understand what science is.
OK, nevermind the part where you use a piece of sports equipment to describe the nature of the cosmos, let's look at the trouble with a finite universe: Conservation of Energy! We'd all go blind and burn to a freakin' crisp! The only reason the sky is black is because the universe is not only infinite, but it's also simultaneously expanding to absorb the energy. ("Absorb" is actually a poor choice of words, but its effect is similar.)
That was actually an objection to an infinite universe. An infinite, static universe that had always been here would have a sun-like radiation density everywhere on the sky; this is Olber's paradox; see, for example, http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/123/lecture-5/olb ers.html
The fact that the night sky is dark tells us either that the Universe is finite (without the peridodic boundry conditions that you'd get in modern versions of a finite Universe-- similar to the periodic boundry conditions that we have in the two dimensional space that is the surface of the Earth), that the universe is finite in age (so that light hasn't had time to reach us from the farthest reaches), or that it's expanding (so that redshift decreases the energy of more distant objects). Few cosmologists today disagree that that the Universe's age is finite, even though the simplest models supported by the data suggest it is infinite in extent.
For years creationists acknowledged that astrophysics was the weakest part of our research (sure, I know all the hundreds of replies I'll get about weaknesses in other areas - trust me, I've heard them before).
I know you've heard them before, but the biggest and most egregious one: claiming that what you do is anything resembling science.
Think what you will about the various results coming out of cosmology and whether or not the Universe is flat or finite or what Dark Energy is, there is just so much evidence that the Univese (and the Earth) is billions of years old and that life evolved from lower forms that it's batty to dismiss it. To dismiss it on religious grounds and then assert that what you're doing is science is downright fraudulent.
Slashdot Mirror
An open universe, that is, one where spacetime doesn't contract back into a singularity (Big Bang), implies a fundamentally different spacetime geometry that the one of a Closed Universe.
Open Universe is Hyperbolic (Infinite)
A Closed Universe is Spheric (Finite but boundaryless)
This is what all the cosmology texts (at least those written before 1998) say, but it's an oversimplifaction.
Drawing the parallel between the geometry and the fate of the Universe only works if you can assume that the cosmological constant (or dark energy density) is zero. Only in that one special case do you get the "closed Universe recollapses" and "open Universe expands forever" duality.
If your dark energy density can be non-zero, then General Realtivity is just fine with a Unvierse that is geometrically closed but which expands forever.
-Rob
Entire careers in physics are going straight down the shitter because of dark matter, because it doesn't exist. From the very first time I read about it, I thought "Geez, this sounds like a 3 year old trying to cover up the fact that he doesn't KNOW the reason why".
Uh.
The primary evidence for dark matter is that if you look at how galaxies move and how clusters of galaxies move, they should all be flying apart. They are moving too fast for the amount of gravity we calculate by adding up all the mass of the stars and the gas that we can see. Since galaxies and clusters are around all over the place, we know they're not falling apart. Ergo, there must be more gravity than can be accounted for from the material we can see.
The simplest, easiest, and most direct explanation is that there is more there than we can see. Matter not emitting light, thus called dark matter. There's nothing kludgy or ad-hoc about this, it's the most natural conclusion to make. The alternative is that Newtonian Gravity (or General Relativity, which has Newtonian Gravity as a limit in the relevant case)-- that theory which perfectly predicts the motions of planets, spacecraft, apples, and other things that we have lots of experience with-- must be wrong. There are people who believe this over Dark Matter, in fact, but to me, "stuff there that we haven't found yet" seems to be a much more likely and plausible explanation.
The evidence for why the dark matter can't all be baryonic (i.e. made up of "normal" stuff) is more indirect, but it comes out of other theories for the construction of the elements in the hot early Universe-- and this other theory itself has made predictions that match well what was observed.
-Rob
It will be interesting to see how scientists who have staked their entire careers upon the existence of dark matter would react to the discovery that it does not in fact exist.
I doubt anybody has staked their entire career on dark matter.
However, a lot of people have a lot invested in it. And, for those reasons, it is good that they will resist challenges to it. Scientists don't believe Dark Matter just cause it sounds neat, but because there is a lot of evidence for it. The cosmological/expanding Universe evidence is probably the weakest and least convincing; the rotation curves of galaxies and the dynamics of clusters provide strong evidence that has nothing to do with the interpretations of the CMB that this article talks about.
If something else comes along, people will resist it, and that's good. If this other thing really is better and does a better job of answering the questions, people will move on to that. But the evidence will have to be strong, stronger than the evidence we have right now that Dark Matter exists. It is on the strength of that evidence that resistance will be based; it's not people trying to save their sinecure and their jobs, it's simply that they had good reason to be convinced of Dark Matter in the first place.
-Rob
When Linux has 80% marketshare and is a true force to be reckoned with, then perhaps the community will be able to afford sarcasm and get away with it, but in the meantime, there must be other, more constructive ways to entice vendors to embrace open-source.
...like, for instance, not buying NVidia at all, and restricting yourself to a Radeon 9200 or lower so that you *can* use open-source drivers. That's very constructive market feedback. Buy what does what you want.
-Rob
sounds like a really childish behaviour to you.
sounds like real politics to me.
...the difference being?
-Rob
...copy protection only hurts and inconveniences legitimate users, but not the pirates? Who would've thought!
(Sheesh.)
-Rob
Why not just pull IE from the market altogether and tell everybody to download Mozilla and get on with their lives?
Not only would all the IE security problems be gone (in favor of Mozilla security problems, granted, but I suspect those would be more tractable), but we'd also finally have everybody using a browser that actually supported web standards! (Yeah, IE is pretty close nowadays, but I found out recently that simple Java 1.4 applet embedding just won't work from IE if you use the basic codetype="application/java" standard, even if you've downoaded Java 1.4, whereas it does work from Mozilla.)
-Rob
but realistically, the government would never spend the insane amount of money to install cameras all over the public area of America, especially not high-tech eye-scanning ones.
Agreed. But don't estimate the money-spending abilities of corporate marketing departments as they attempt to identify and target consumers. (Which, by and large, was what was scanning whatshisname in Minority Report.)
If you're not happy being paranoid about marketing departments, consider that once the cameras are there, it's real easy for whatever random government organization to use PATRIOT IX to get that data without a warrant, but with a gag order that prevents your being told they got the data.
-Rob
Becuase you can change your password a whole lot easier than you can change your DNA.
The flip side of not being able to lose or forget your biometrics is that you can't change it when it gets stolen. And, yes, people will find ways to spoof biometric authentication schemes into believing that they have your data. Whether it's fake fingerprints, or (more likely) some sort of data hack that sendst the computer the right bitstream for a given person's biometric data, once yours is gone, you're just hosed forever.
If your password or PIN gets stolen, you can make a new password, or get a new ATM card and a new PIN, and cancel the old ones. Once your biometric info is stolen or spoofed, you have the choice of cancelling it and not being able to authenticate anywhere, or just accpeting that your identity is stolen and will stay stolen.
Biometrics are great if *combined* with a password. But by themselves, they're foolish for strong authentication. Just because your fingerprints are on your hand doesn't mean that there isn't a pattern there that could be stolen and stored somewhere by bad actors.
-Rob
An article about information pollution, linked from Slashdot! Who would've thunk it?
-Rob
I don't think I'm the only person thinking this: what if SCO planted their code in Linux? Maybe they were planning this all along.
Occam's Razor for conspiracy theorists suggests that one should never ascribe to conspiracy what can be ascribed to incompetence. SCO/Caldera submtted a bunch of code to the Linux kernel. Much later, Darl and company come along, see code in the Linux kernel that matches code they have copyright, and without a clue about what they are doing, thing that they've found a goldmine.
Assuredly SCO has given ample evidece of being blindingly incompetent in the past, such that sheer incompetence is hands-down the most plausible explanation here.
-Rob
Public faith is important. The first step to that faith is a system which deserves it.
-Rob
it just needs to be able to read Word documents properly (and OpenOffice comes close).
No it doesn't. What we need is for the world to stop treating a proprietary format as a generic interchange format.
If the only reason Linux is not "ready for the Desktop" is that "Microsoft dominates the desktop" than for any technical or usability reason, well, then, it's just time to storm in and take over. It's happened before. Microsoft Word wasn't always what "everybody uses", and it doesn't remain that way forevermore.
-Rob
I think that many people are finally latching onto the concept that freedom to live safely is more important than freedom to be a criminal.
I have no objection to you holding an defending that position, but I do have an objection to your warping of the language.
"Freedom to live safely" is like "freedom to have enough to eat." This is freedom as a rhetorical tool. This isn't "freedom" in the sense of "liberty", which is what we are ostensively talking about when we talking about a tradition of freedom in the USA.
If you're going to argue that the modern world has made it such that safety and a chance of surviving necessitates some giving up of freedoms, then argue that. Don't pretend that you're arguing for some kind of freedom when you argue for that though.
-Rob
See this website:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.ht ml
This is an in-depth analysis of the arguments that Lerner presents in his book.
Lots of scientists question the Big Bang theory, all the time. Most of them come away with their questions answered by it. Many others come away thinking that there are still questions that science needs to address. A very few come away believing that their questions haven't been adequately answered, or that there is a better answer. It's just that the Big Bang theory is a simple, straightforward theory that happens to describe the observations we see, and does a very good job of explaining a number of disparate observations. Some still disagree with it, and indeed one of them wrote a review article in the latest issue of "Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics". They aren't ignored; they just don't have the weight of evidence on their side at the moment!
There's no conspiracy going on here. Move along.
-Rob
however if you talk FM, cable, Airwave where the Blasphemous word does not appear, they seem to be pretty okay with it.
They are??? Haven't you heard the words "analog hole?"
Mind you, that's not the kind of "hole" that comes to mind when I think about the **AA....
-Rob
Secondly, wildly broad claims normally start, and increasingly narrow claims are made as one works down the ordered list. Therefore, the first thing you claim is going to be ridiculously broad. Generally speaking, the first few claims in a patent are not serious attempts to patent something. The last few claims are the ones of importance. And, what do you know, the title of the patent is...the first claim. So before anyone flames Microsoft, have you read claims 11-20? Oh, there's still plenty to complain about, but not as much as the article writer implies.
Which would be all well and good if we all had infinite money and lawyers at our beck and call in our employ. Then we can afford to go to court and point out that, well, that first claim is ridiculous.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, an overly broad patent which is ridiculous on the face of it still has the possibility of being approved by a judge. If you're a very small company facing Microsoft's legal division, do you pay the protection money, or do you risk the expense of going to court? I thought so. While a patent may not have force of law, it has the force of possibility of law that allows really huge bullies to dominate based on ridiculous claims. It is a very serious problem that the patent office grants patents with stupid, ridiculous, and should-be-untenable patents.
-Rob
Of course not. All ready, all of the posts about this article have been screaming "TROLL!!" without even reading the fucking article. OSS zealots tend to be a bunch of immature kids.
Meanwhile, we've got NineNine here making a blanket statement about all the posts, clearly without having read them.
You can find immature kids everywhere.
-Rob
Furthermore, the FSF isn't demanding damages or money, they're only asking their licence to be obeyed. How is this "worse than commercial" like those clowns at SCO asking for big $$$ for supposed harm?
Indeed. On one side, we have the FSF saying, "everybody play fair and play by the rules." On the other side, we have proprietary companies saying, "Aha! You were caught! Cough up the protection money!"
And, yet, somehow, the author of the article seems to think that the FSF's approach is the more onerous and the more damaging to society.
Hello?
A fine example, in my opinion, of the complete perspective that a lot of American society has lost. What matters is the stock market and the business bottom line and how various people can fit into an economic model. Honesty, playing fair, and individual rights and responsibilities are laughed at as irrelevant at bessed, dismissed as intrusive and onerous at worst. Depressing, really.
-Rob
Hrm, what are you saying about falsifiable? Falsifiable means that there is a way we can show it to be wrong. Just because a theory makes an accurate prediction about the future does not make it 'falsifiable'.
...and if that prediction would not have come out as the theory had indicated, what would you say had happened? Assuming that the failed prediction was verified and repeated, that sure as hell sounds like falsification to me.
Saying "there's aliens in the Alpha Centauri system", and the way to falsify it would be to visit the system and see that they aren't there - that's not falsifiable.
And why not? That would be a weak theory, with very little point at the present day because there's no other reason to suppose that at the moment, and it will be decades (at least) before we could check it. But it clearly is falsifiable, and you even give the experiment in principle that could be used to test it. The "this should happen" is "if we go to Alpha Centauri, then we should see aliens." That's a prediction of a future experiment that can be performed, and which could prove the theory false.
We don't have to watch a person be born to know that he was born (or somehow otherwise brought into existence)! We just have to go and see that he exists to verify a theory that states that he has been brought into existence.
The other things you've already said are not falsifiable, i.e. theories about origins, have been tested, and many theories have been thrown out while other theories have stood the test of evidence. Origins is far from off-limits for science, it's a long-standing active research area in which tremendous progress has been made.
-Rob
It's space, nothing, a huge empty. If it's shaped like anything than what the hell is outside?
Space is funkier than you think.
There clearly is an "outside" of the solar system, and thre is an "outside" of the galaxy. Those outsides also exist in the same three spatial dimensions that you can use to describe the "inside" of the solar system or the galaxy.
A finite universe is a very different thing. It's like the surface of the Earth. Asking what is outside of the universe is like asking what is north of the north pole. Think about the surface of the earth as a *two-dimensional* world. We happen to be three-dimensional people who stick up into a third dimension off of that surface, but try to imagine that we're two dimensional creatures who can only move about on the surface and never leave it; indeed, the dimension that points "off" of the surface of the Earth isn't something that we can perceive or get to. We would say that our world is finite. We could in principle explore the whole surface and have seen all of it. If we keep going in one direction, we will eventually come back where we started. Even without doing that, we can easily measure the curvature of the Earth, by figuring out if parallel lines converge or diverge.
The 3d space of a closed universe is like the 2d space of the surface of the Earth. There is no "outside", at least not in the normal dimensions that we can get to and that affect us. A finite Universe is not "the ball of where galaxies are inside space", the way that the solar system is the region where planets and comets and such are inside space, or the way that the Galaxy is the region where stars, gas, and dark matter are inside space. A finite universe means that the space itself is finite.
-Rob
Thanks for respecting that. Would you mind emailing me at sat at tyreth dot homelinux dot org? Usually when I post links, people feel a need to reply to me with arguments on the website, which also becomes tiresome. I'm happy to discuss in a more controlled way though :) If you tell me a bit about what you have seen and thought, I might be able to direct you more accurately to useful resources.
Ah, yes, the old "secret evidence" tactic. Don't post your links publicly because you're afraid of what people might say when they actually see them.
The same thing that led us all to believe we'd find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
-Rob
* any discussion of origins is not scientific in nature. Science deals with the observable and falsifiable.
I fail to see how it is in principle impossible for a theory about origins to have observational or falsifiable consequences.
The theory of inflation (a version of Big Bang theory), for example, made the prediction that we would observe a flat geometry when we looked at the Cosmic Microwave Background. We did, and we saw it. This was a vindication of inflation (although there probably are still some viable alternative theories that aren't completely ruled out-- science is always a work in progress). The observable and the falsifiable does not only include those things that will happen in the future. We observe many things which are consequences of the past. If a theory can make a prediction of a future observation, that theory is entirely falsifiable-- all we have to do is do that future observation.
Before you dismiss entire branches of science out of hand, you might want to try to understand what science is.
-Rob
OK, nevermind the part where you use a piece of sports equipment to describe the nature of the cosmos, let's look at the trouble with a finite universe: Conservation of Energy! We'd all go blind and burn to a freakin' crisp! The only reason the sky is black is because the universe is not only infinite, but it's also simultaneously expanding to absorb the energy. ("Absorb" is actually a poor choice of words, but its effect is similar.)
That was actually an objection to an infinite universe. An infinite, static universe that had always been here would have a sun-like radiation density everywhere on the sky; this is Olber's paradox; see, for example, http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/123/lecture-5/olb ers.html
The fact that the night sky is dark tells us either that the Universe is finite (without the peridodic boundry conditions that you'd get in modern versions of a finite Universe-- similar to the periodic boundry conditions that we have in the two dimensional space that is the surface of the Earth), that the universe is finite in age (so that light hasn't had time to reach us from the farthest reaches), or that it's expanding (so that redshift decreases the energy of more distant objects). Few cosmologists today disagree that that the Universe's age is finite, even though the simplest models supported by the data suggest it is infinite in extent.-Rob
For years creationists acknowledged that astrophysics was the weakest part of our research (sure, I know all the hundreds of replies I'll get about weaknesses in other areas - trust me, I've heard them before).
I know you've heard them before, but the biggest and most egregious one: claiming that what you do is anything resembling science.
Think what you will about the various results coming out of cosmology and whether or not the Universe is flat or finite or what Dark Energy is, there is just so much evidence that the Univese (and the Earth) is billions of years old and that life evolved from lower forms that it's batty to dismiss it. To dismiss it on religious grounds and then assert that what you're doing is science is downright fraudulent.
-Rob