Or maybe Wally’s “Tons of evidence for the big bang has accumulated over the years, and the fundies are in denial as much as ever.”
i truly thought it had something to do with turtles swimming to the shores of space and having one hell of a mega sex/mating romp (aka the big bang) upon where all the little turtles swam back into space before they just curled up into little balls and let stuff happen on its own.
…been reading too much…
so how do you ask a fundamentalist to “prove it”?
and how does a theory hold as substantial evidence for anything?
both scientist and fundamentalist, religious zealot, what have you… are guessing as far as i’m concerned. Hoping even. so where does the argument start when niether has a steady base to stand on? If i start my own stories of how the universe began, and teach that to an enclosed society kept from the rest of the world for a century or so, and let them pass that on, eventually it could turn into a whole other belief, set of religions, and they could create their own theories, back them up with other theories…
i suppose my ultimate ? is there won’t be an end to the debate ever unless either a god or other supreme/maybe just more advanced being comes down and gives us an answer. what do you do now?
ignore that fact, and continue to drift with clouds of science, or religion?
hmmmm…
The Universe isn’t flat, really, in the sense that people picture when they hear the word “flat.” All we get from this data is proof that the Universe is Euclidean. From Einstein to Hawking, before this, people have assumed that the edges of the Universe (and indeed, spacetime itself) was intrinsically curved, and the edges are infinitely curved. What this meant was that, as you approached the edges of the Universe, you came out on the other side. This new data refutes that idea, and it also supports the Inflationary Model. I don’t think this would be making news if the word “Euclidean” was used in place of “flat.” I actually think that people (read: Creationists) are gonna start using this as “evidence” that General Relativity is wrong. Of course, this wouldn’t happen if so many people didn’t use the “Picture a rubber sheet, and some lead weights” example.
I disagree. Science and religion don’t overlap when the religious establishment speaks only of spiritual matters. But when a religion tries to assert their ideas on the physical world then we do indeed have a conflict. Religion as an idea is separate from science, but religion in practice often crashes into science head on.
As an interested layman I understand that there are competing varieties of the Big Bang theory. One variation was the ultimate fate of the universe. End states predicted were continued expansion forever, an equilibrium state whereby gravity countered expansion but did not collapse the universe, and the Big Crunch. Can someone tell me why this observation supposedly eliminates the Big Crunch possibility?
I understood that the Big Crunch was dependant upon the amount of available mass in the universe. If the gravitational forces were powerful enough, they could eventually slow the universal expansion down, stop it, then gradually pull everything back together. How do the BOOMERANG pictures shoot this model down?
Asserting religious ideas about the physical world should be valid, don’t you think? For instance, some fundamentalists have seized upon the general relativity notion that all frames of reference are valid, and claim that their interpretation of scripture that the earth does not move is not in conflict with science. Seems OK to me. I admit that there may be a deeper underlying agenda, but this is only an example.
“Of what use is a newborn baby?”
I’ve forgotten the name of the man, but he demonstrated electromagnets to an audience of scientists and engineers in the 19th century. Someone wanted to know what use such a toy would be and he gave the above reply.
Does that answer your question, Jackel?
(BTW, it’s “Jackal”.)
(This post was SUPPOSED to begin with the above quote. I don’t know why it didn’t.) 
Sure, so long as the physical world acts like they say it should. If observations repeatedly give the proposed explanation the lie, then the proposition goes out the window.
Isn’t that what usually happens, though? Even Galileo had Jesuits and the Pope as supporters, at one time in his life. Almost no one denied the reality of the moons of Jupiter, once Galileo had pointed them out.
The problem is, being sure of what you’re throwing out the window. Scientists should never be sure, so how can you establish what to throw out? In the example I gave, the legend has Galileo stomping his foot in frustration, saying eppur si muove. His frustration arose because he hadn’t succeeded in proving that the earth moved, but we still haven’t proven it. If you could, it would invalidate general relativity, and there’d be a Nobel in the offing.
DSYoung said:
RM Mentock said:
I think both of you missed the point. As has been discussed ad nauseum in various threads around here, I don’t think any of us care if some religious folks want to say “I believe in creationism because I have faith.” Instead, when we talk about creationists and fundies and the like, we are talking about those who are trying to get creationism taught in public schools (and/or evolution removed), who are claiming to be able to back their claims with actual evidence, etc.
So DSYoung was quite right when he said:
But it simply had nothing to do with the discussion at hand. Jab was not talking about debating people who simply use faith, but with those who try to claim some evidence to back their claims. Did he explain this fully? No. As I said, this has been discussed many, many times here.
Ptahlis, it’s quite simple: If the Universe was more massive, it would be curved like a sphere. If the Universe was less massive, it would curve like a saddle. Since the Universe is evidently flat, its total mass must be right in the middle and it will expand forever in all directions in perfectly straight lines.
I got this from the CNN article I linked to in my first post (which is now the 8th post because of the Great Software Switch).
No, we haven’t proven anything. In science terms a fact is defined as information so supported that it would be foolish to disagree with. It was once considered a fact that the continents were immovable. Now we have continental drift.
Nothing can be considered proven if you define proof as being “immune from fanciful or tortuous explanations.” But the principles of parsimony and Occam’s Razor repeatedly demonstrate their efficacy in the real world. Relativity merely says that things must move in relation to one another. It basically states that there is no such thing as a fixed point, and therefore neither a fixed earth nor a fixed sun view is correct. The Heliocentric view is far more correct according to the principles noted above.
As to the idea that the earth doesn’t move, I can point you to a website: http://www.fixedearth.com. Very illuminating I must say, to see what some people will believe (or publish to make a buck off the credible, depending on your level of cynicism.) Some of it is quite funny. The author breathlessly goggles at the idea that the rotation of the earth means we must be going 1000 MILES AN HOUR!!! (Of course he doesn’t try to calculate how fast the sun would have to be going to encircle us daily, let alone the distant galaxies.) It’s full of NASA conspiracy talk and the like. Frankly, the author is a nut.
What has always nagged at me is an incomplete understanding of the expansion of space. (Which I am about to make embarrasingly obvious.) In inflationary models, (which the data was said to support) the expansion of space was thought to be very rapid early on, then gradually slowing ever since. Is there a constant expansion “pressure” or is it a dwindling force left from the Big Bang? Is there some reason to think that expansion will not continue to slow? According to what I have learned of gravity, it is a continuous force that diminishes with distance but NEVER reaches zero. If gravity does counteract the “force” of expansion to any degree, spatial expansion is noncontinuous and nonrenewable, and the force of gravity approaches but never reaches zero, then the universe would eventually have to collapse again once gravity slowed expansion to zero.
I believe this is a situation analogous to man-made spacecraft reaching escape velocity - once they’ve reached that point, then Earth’s gravity isn’t ever going to pull them back, even though their engines have run out of fuel.
“Instead, when we talk about creationists and fundies and the like, we are talking about those who are trying to get creationism taught in public schools (and/or evolution removed), who are claiming to be able to back their claims with actual evidence, etc.”
The only ones ive seen who are even remotely like that are pushing for the 10 commandments in schools.
Ive yet to see any creationists who are actually pushing for creationism to be taught in school because of evidence.
Asmodean said:
Well, then, I am forced to suggest that you are completely unfamiliar with the territory, and further suggest that you study up a bit.
Hmmm. I get the analogy, but that’s two specific objects in a universe of other gravitational forces. Since everything with mass is attracted to everything else with mass at any distance, albeit infinitessimally, I still do not understand the idea that it would not collapse again should the expansion of space be something that has no impetus beyond the big bang. I can certainly believe that I am wrong, but I just haven’t figured out why. I am of course assuming infinite time as well. Given the goofy interconnectedness postulated between space and time, maybe that’s not something I should be assuming. But I am still fogged.
Genuine kooks not withstanding, how would you explain this quote from Einstein and Infeld’s The Evolution of Physics (CS: coordinate system):
“The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, ‘the sun is at rest and the earth moves,’ or ‘the sun moves and the earth is at rest,’ would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.”
Bottom line is that the heliocentric view is not “more correct,” they’re equally correct.
[QUOTE]
**
By “more correct” I mean that one fits with the available evidence more closely than another, and can make predictions that vear fruit. The intitial state of the evidence available was that you walked outside and looked up and saw the sun move across the sky. Conclusion: The sun speeds around the earth. Zog the caveman would have to be considered seriously fuddled to believe otherwise.
Later, rather than just looking up, man made ever more exacting measurements of the apparent motion of sun, moon, and planets. Many systems attempted to explain the laws of motion based on a fixed earth. The one thing that they had in common was that they had to invent special rules for the planets which occasionally travelled backward in the sky. The rules that made Venus’ path across the sky look like it did had no bearing on the moon’s path across the sky, which in turn had no bearing on why Jupiter’s satellites did what they did. The Heliocentric viewpoint approximated the evidence far better. When Kepler figured out that orbits were ellipses instead of circles, he came up with a single formulation of planetary motion that simply explained the motion of all the observable bodies to a high degree of accuracy. Simply put, it fit the evidence better. It should be noted also that even in the Heliocentric viewpoint it was understood (from Newton on) that the sun was not absolutely fixed. It was known that the planets also exerted gravitational force upon the sun, causing it to move as well, albeit imperceptibly.
If I were to walk into my house, see a broken window, and then notice a baseball on the floor, I would postulate that the baseball entered the house via the window, causing the destruction of the window. That theory best approximates the evidence. Now I could also postulate that the window itself spontaneously birthed the baseball, but unfortunately shattered during the delivery procedure. I can prove neither one, but one is a simpler explanataion that is also predictive. I can set up video cameras to watch windows for signs of spontaneous baseball creation. I can also heave a few baseballs at windows and test that hypothesis.
As far as the quote about coordinate systems, it doesn’t mean much. A coordinate system is simply a means of measurement about an arbitrarily fixed point. It does not postulate that a point is absolutely fixed. I may define my F-16 as a fixed point and develop elaborate theories about how I make the universe rotate around me by jigging the stick.
As to the fixed earth argument-- Again, it is absolutely contradictory to the idea of relativity in that it argues that the earth does not, indeed cannot move. Relativity argues specifically that there are NO fixed points in absolute reality. The Heliocentric view was further refined by relativity in that it is understood that the equations governing planetary motion work with respect to the sun and that the entire system is also moving. The fixed earth world-view denies this, and thus cannot look to relativity to support it.
Your point seems to be that “all views are valid because everything is relative.” Everything is relative. That doesn’t mean that any explanation, however tortuously complicated, or artificially arrived at (The earth must be fixed because the Bible says so) is reasonable, acceptable as a predictor of future events, or should be deemed truthful or trustworthy. Via your apparent argument, I am just as correct as anyone else if I decide my football is the center of the universe, and the action of my arm when I throw a forward pass causes the entire earth to shift down and away from it.
I have a proof for the universe being flat, but I’ll post it later…
::flees::