HELP, i’m running out of things to say to stir up the debate - if anyone has any ideas, please let me know, otherwise i’m going to go & look for something else to add that might be interesting/controversial/funny.
I might even start a new debate if anyone wants to really slag me off…
“I think, therefore I am” - prove it!
Don’t strain yourself CJD. Have some patience and you will find your pace.
I’ve known people who dismiss any and all fossils found in China as “fakes created by Communists trying to prove their atheistic philosophy which is then promoted by dupes like the National Geographic,” or the science journal under discussion.
There’s simply no reasoning with such people. I usually just shake my head and walk away. They, of course, use my actions as “proof” that I lack convictions.
No, it means I’m tired of beating my head against brick walls. I find that it doesn’t feel good when I quit.
Fighting my own ignorance since 1957.
Go to: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/archaeopteryx990505.html for a report on how the (in)famous Archaeopteryx could have flown.
Very well, as it turns out. It simply would have leaped out of a tree and spread and flapped its wings like any modern-day bird.
Fighting my own ignorance since 1957.
BIGmatt,
I would be interested to know how you can see CJD’s reasoning behind there being “irrefutable proof for evolution and not creation”. For one, how does CJD know that evolution resulted from creation. I for one do not believe it did but I want to know how he can proove it, having not been present (as far as I am aware) at the time of the Big Bang. If I am wrong and CJD was infact present, would this not entirely alter this arguement anyway?
When the pain will finally cease
When my life will be at peace
LBROM: Whats this that i ‘said’… evolution came from creation???
“I think, therefore I am” - prove it!
I apologise CJD, what I actually meant was the exact opposite, how can you be sure that evolution did NOT evolve from creation. You simply can’t because if you argue the accepted theories on the big bang, then religion would argue that whilst the bible may not have been accurate and clear to the minutest detail, there is no proof that a so called “God” was not responsible for the initial explosion which created life as we know it. Remember, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The fact is that however much “scientific evidence” and how many statistical facts you throw at people, it won’t register at all or change the way people think if it isn’t what they wanted to hear eg. when religion argued continually against all rational evidence that pointed to the fact that the earth was the center to the universe.
Remember, I am not saying religion is right, but religion and science are the same thing, science is just a more up to date version now that we are in possesion of more material and better ways of studying it.
I apologise again and fear that I may have merged several points of conversation here but just remember CJD, that in 10 years time, people may totally disrepute what you are saying and if you refuse to be even slightly open minded about this, you may end up eating your words.
When the pain will finally cease
When my life will be at peace
RTFirefly wrote:
Descartes? Bah! He was every bit as much of a religious nut as Nicholas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler.
Now Francis Bacon, there was someone you could get behind! He was a real he-man in the inductive reasoning department. You wanna know how many teeth a horse has, you go out and count them. He da man!
Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.
tracer? Have you ever seen how much a horse drools when you start messing with its mouth? If I want to know how many teeth a horse has, I’ll ask my father-in-law the farrier.
Tom~
LRBOM,
I agree with your scepticism about ‘dark matter’. From what I can see, astrophysicists have ‘conjured up’ dark matter to account for various phoenomena that they have no other explanation for.
I can just imagine two astrophysicists discussing it now, and it would probably go something like:
“Wow! The edge of the galaxy is rotating at the same speed as the middle! How is that possible?”
“I don’t know… hang on a minute, it COULD do that IF there was a load of matter at the edge.”
“But we can’t see any of it”
“Yeah, you’re right… it MUST be INVISIBLE!”
“The public will never buy it if we say ‘invisible matter’ - we’ve got to call it something else…”
“Hey! How about DARK matter, that sounds believable doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, great idea!”
Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but ‘dark matter’ just seems like an excuse to me.
Also, if some theories are right, then the speed of light may have been different in the past and so may change in the future, and so the Universe could continually accellerate from our present perspective while not actually breaching the spped of light. That’s how I’d explain it, anyway…
“Now be quiet before I rather clumsily knight you with this meat cleaver” - Edmund Blackadder
Sorry, that should be SPEED of light, not ‘spped’ of light…
tomndebb wrote:
He wouldn’t necessarily know either, considering a farrier only has to look at a horse’s hoofs. (Hooves? What’s the damn plural of hoof?)
Ahh! Not so. Most farriers are used as front-line vets, as well as consultant trainers, “surveyors” and a host of other duties. Knowing a horses age (therefore looking at its teeth) plays a big part in knowing how to shoe a particular horse to bring out its best conformation.
(hooves)
Tom~
Bigmatt: Dark matter is not just something they conjured up, but something that observation and theory have come together on. When scientists look at the gravitational effects, they realize that they cannot be accounted for solely by the “shining” matter. That gravitational effect is real. It is certainly true that we cannot see all matter (if you were a number of light years away, you would not be able to see Earth or any of the other planets – just the sun). It is also true that there are billions and billions of particles with small mass that we cannot see. Yes, small mass, but with so many of them, they eventually add up to something. If you are interested in learning something about this, I would suggest you read Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science by John Gribbin. It’s new and tackles some of these questions in layman’s terms.
Regarding the speed of light, I know of no scientific theory that postulates a change in the speed of light over time.
Ok, now I know of one scientific theory that says the speed of light used to be faster. In one paper. With no other comments by other scientists yet.
But, gosh, Phaedrus, I thought your mission in life was to ignore me…
I am skeptical of Professor Moffat’s theory on the link provided above for several reasons. I defer to real physicists about these issues, as I am a rank amateur. The current “inflationary scenario” is described here[/url"], with the ramifications for “FTL” travel discussed [url=http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part9/section-10.html]here.
A couple of things from the website seemed a little strange. For example:
How’s that? The current inflationary scenario seems to explain things well enough without resorting to changes in the speed of light. Then there is also this passage about the edges of the universe being farther apart than light could have travelled:
Huh? As I understand it, the current theory proposes that more energy resulted when the universe “supercooled” below the critical value without breaking the symmetry between the forces (strong and weak nuclear and electromagnetic). This “extra” energy had a repulsive effect, not some antigravitional matter.
Besides, all we are talking about is a small fraction of a second in the early universe. Something like 10E-35 to 10E-24 seconds after the Big Bang. So I doubt this will help the creationists anyway. Maybe some of the real physicists on this message board could provide some insight.
Evidently I don’t know how to do the links right yet. They were supposed to be like this:
Current inflationary scenario
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part9/section-9.html
Ramifications for “FTL” travel
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part9/section-10.html
oh well…
David B-
the only reason that I said that dark matter SEEMED like an excuse to me (spot the emphasis) was because, to my knowledge, there are no solid observations or evidence for it. Under normal circumstances, I’m a natural cynic anyway, but when it comes to physics I tend to be quite open minded. The problem I have with dark matter is that as it is impossible in theory to observe these sub-atomic particles by normal means, it all seems a bit too ‘convenient’ for my liking. From where I’m standing (sitting?) we’re trying to explain phonomena thousands or even millions (or further) of light years away by using laws which were drawn up by observing the ‘local’ part of our galaxy.
I just think that sometimes new laws have to be made or old ones amended, instead of rigidly trying to wedge everything into (relatively) old laws.
“Now be quiet before I rather clumsily knight you with this meat cleaver” - Edmund Blackadder
But as long as the existing laws work, why try to dream up new ones? We know how gravity works. We know that not all matter “shines.” Thus when we see something being affected by gravity but we can’t see the source, it is no leap at all to say it is likely being caused by “dark” matter.
As far as your statement that there are no solid observations of dark matter – I urge you to look at the ground. As I mentioned before, from a long distance away, the Earth is not visible. That makes it dark matter. Do planets and the like make up all the dark matter? I dunno. But they are dark and they are matter, so…