I love how people who know practically nothing about the church or Christianity seem to think that they know everything about it. Fact of the matter is that the Roman Catholic church has been saying that the big bang model of the universe's origin and Darwinian theory are correct scientific theories for many years now. John Paul II said this much, it is not likely that someone who has been dubbed his "intellectual bedfellow" is going to say any different. It's time for people to do their homework.
Oh, I forgot...this is Slashdot.
"the idea of two neutron stars running into each other is pretty silly too"
Not at all. There is a very well-developed theory on this. 3/4 of the stars in our galaxy have a companion or more. For some of these, the two stars are massive enough to both collapse to neutron stars when they run out of nuclear energy. Since they're gravitationally bound, they will continue to orbit each other. However, the movement of these two stars will cause them to spiral inward because they will emit gravitational radiation and lose energy. In fact, the best confirmation of general relativity to date has been to measure the orbital decay time of a pair of neutron stars (yes, we have found a few of these) and check the results against Einstein.
Whether black holes exist or not, it's irrelevant to this question. It's all about neutron stars.
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I love how people who know practically nothing about the church or Christianity seem to think that they know everything about it. Fact of the matter is that the Roman Catholic church has been saying that the big bang model of the universe's origin and Darwinian theory are correct scientific theories for many years now. John Paul II said this much, it is not likely that someone who has been dubbed his "intellectual bedfellow" is going to say any different. It's time for people to do their homework. Oh, I forgot...this is Slashdot.
"the idea of two neutron stars running into each other is pretty silly too" Not at all. There is a very well-developed theory on this. 3/4 of the stars in our galaxy have a companion or more. For some of these, the two stars are massive enough to both collapse to neutron stars when they run out of nuclear energy. Since they're gravitationally bound, they will continue to orbit each other. However, the movement of these two stars will cause them to spiral inward because they will emit gravitational radiation and lose energy. In fact, the best confirmation of general relativity to date has been to measure the orbital decay time of a pair of neutron stars (yes, we have found a few of these) and check the results against Einstein. Whether black holes exist or not, it's irrelevant to this question. It's all about neutron stars.