Cosmology: The Ultimate Reality Show

Scientists try to find the best explanation for the data. There is no data, cosmological or otherwise, supporting reincarnation and thus nothing for a scientist to explain.

There is no lack of interesting new data for cosmologists to explain. Ninth-four percent of the universe is made of dark matter, yet we don't really know what it is. There is a force that is pulling the universe apart at an increasing rate, but we don't know what it could be. Black holes must destroy all incoming information, yet some information leaks out all the same. These are interesting times.

Scientists along with anyone else are free to speculate about the implications of the data or theories trying to explain the data, but speculation is not science. Science may start with speculation, but it ends up tellings us much more.

Religion sticks with the speculation. If no one has a clue, then religion is as good as any other speculation, but only then.

Reality... That's the thing that when you stop believing, it's still there.

Much like gravity..

No matter how much you don't believe in gravity, you still won't take a step off a 20 story building.

Religion.. believe anything you want in a god, because simply nothing ever happens to change the fact, that god's not there. If something did happen, then god wouldn't be a belief.. It kinda moves over to the fact category.

ED: You said something that reminded me of what I was thinking about just the other day.
What if some seemingly all powerful being DID visit earth (no, I'm not a nut, since I think the odds of this actually happening are tiny beyond reason) and claimed to be "god". How would humans react? I think that every religious group would probably claim this so-called god as their own (at least until it did something harmful, but then, it would depend on who it harmed). Scientists, on the other hand, would want proof. But what would constitute proof? Maybe videotape of the creation of the universe?
Something less?

My point I guess is that even if "something happened", there are many of us who would remain skeptical about it actually being "god" rather than someone with a higher level of technology than our own.

By the way, I did read the NY times article refered to above, and just rolled my eyes, since now even more people will believe that this is the kind of stuff the average scientist works on, and not just some (what I refer to as) loony, almost religous, fringe (which seems to include most of the string theorists these days), which is the reality of the situation.

Of course, this kind of story makes for interesting press...

Einstein played with "thought experiments." Few would argue that these experiments won't bear much fruit well into the future. Much of our greatest advances have come as a result of intellectual meanderings. If we try to stick scientists in little boxes and encourage them not to wander, maybe they will be rebel with more frequency and bless us with even more amazing discoveries. Let's attack floating brains and infinite, multidimensional universes with great condesention!

By the way, God did visit us yesterday. As reported on television, a giant ufo (by some accounts, a mile long and dancing with lights) made an appearance in the skies over Texas, chased by jets.

The level of scientific literacy in the newspaper business is horrible.

Every time I see popular press coverage on journal or conference papers published with research results in energy, stem cells, or cancer research, I cringe, because I know there's a high likelyhood that there will be one or major errors due to the fact that writers in the popular press, with very rare exception, have little or no scientific training.

One of my favorite cases was when a major newspaper published an article saying that craig ventner was working on microbes that would turn CO2 into hydrogen.

The way the article was written made it sound like alchemy, when in fact the hydrogen came from good old H20, and the author could have explained that the microbes used CO2 as an ingredient in a chemical reaction with water and chemicals inside the microbe to produce hydrogen as a byproduct.

The author couldn't understand why scientists were so upset with what she had written.

To her, transmutation was just as good an explanation!!!

I shudder to think of the number of people who read her article and now are going around with a 16th century view of chemistry and science in general.

I got just one thing to say about "Under God." Please be sure you mean God and not Bible for Bible is a proved hoax. It's an insult to God to say the Bible is IT's word.

http://www.hoax-buster.org

Please don't say "one nation under Bible" or "one nation under Bible God." Yes indeed, all nations are under God, the sun God if no other.

The most grievous of sins is violations of the first commandment -No Strange Gods.

http://www.hoax-buster.org/sellyoursoul

Do Gods get any stranger than balls of fire in burning bushes? Ever been to a luau? Tiki Gods aren't even close to that strange. And, "Bearded Old Man on Fire God" or "Bearded Old Man Getting Hotfoot God"? Strange! Sinful!

The level of scientific literacy in the newspaper business is horrible.

Every time I see popular press coverage on journal or conference papers published with research results in energy, stem cells, or cancer research, I cringe, because I know there's a high likelyhood that there will be one or more major errors due to the fact that writers in the popular press, with very rare exception, have little or no scientific training.

One of my favorite cases was when the NYT published an article saying that Craig Ventner was working on microbes that would transform CO2 into hydrogen.

The way the article was written made it sound like alchemy, when in fact the hydrogen came from water, and the author could have explained in the same amount of words, or less, that the microbes used CO2 as an ingredient in a chemical reaction with water and chemicals inside the microbe, releasing hydrogen from the water as a reaction product.

This is very important, because a central point of chemistry is that ordinary chemical reactions cannot change one atom into another.

The way the author had written her article gate the reader the opposite impression of how things work. It described what Ventner was doing in the way an alchemist would.

The NYT's author couldn't understand why scientists were so upset with what she had written.

I shudder to think of the number of people who read her article and now are going around with a 16th century view of chemistry and science in general.

All good comments so far. I would just add what was near the beginning of that NY Times article that Hoffman left out, that no scientist believes this is how things really are. Like dividing a number by zero scientists get answers to their equations that seem impossible. Yet there it is, in the equation. Infinities abound in cosmology and physics and are a continual headache. Many can be ignored because we know the reality, but when talking about black holes, the size of the universe, etc, we know very little, so we cannot ignore any result.

Scientists know that sometimes answers can be ignored. Consider how many times during a calculation we need to solve a square root, and though we will get two answers we only use one. For example, the square root of 4 is 2 or -2, but if the question is about something real, we just toss the -2 away as an artifact and keep the answer, 2. But though the math said there were two possible answers, we just chose to ignore the one that made no sense. This article is about scientists trying to determine whether what they are seeing in their equations can be ignored.

In the case of the NY Times article not only is the math coming up with incredible answers, the math may not even be valid since we do not know the size of the universe, its structure or even the nature of time itself. So while these smart scientists struggle with their math and the nature of the cosmos, we can leave the infinities and floating brains to them while we live with daily realities, tossing mathematical artifacts when we need to get our jobs done, and not be pissed off everytime we get two answers to a math problem that should only have a single answer. For we do what the reality we live in requires while these scientists ponder possible realities we know little about.

As long as physics (and cosmology) are
the purviews of science fiction, there will be
no end to the nonsense and gibberish that
can be fitted into it/them. This will only end
when we go back to the early 20th Century
and "fix" the nonsense and gibberish which
caused science to become a mere sub-realm
of science fiction in the first place.

The correct path can be found at:
http://physics.sdrodrian.com

and at:
http://physics.sdrodrian.com/what_is_gravity.html

Mr. S D Rodrian

With my freshman physical-science-major arrogance, I'll never forget taking a schedule-filler course in beginning psychology. At our first class session the aging psychology professor requested that we identify at least one "cynosure" for humankind, which we would discuss in class next session.
After a sometimes heated verbal interaction during our next meeting, students identified direction-givers such as: education, religion, rational philosophy, objective science and the like. But our skillful Socrates nudged us toward two emerging conclusions, which are really very old.
1. Gain increasing understanding of ourselves and our world.
2. Gain increasing moral behavior by: a) promoting equity or fairness for all individuals and societies; b) reducing suffering for all sentient beings and contributing to their well-being; and c) practicing considerate reciprocity.
That freshman class was taken at the beginning of WW II. What should be axiomatic seems to be overshadowed periodically by our darker aspects. K. Stafford, Prof Emeritus (Psychology)

With my freshman physical-science-major arrogance, I'll never forget taking a schedule-filler course in beginning psychology. At our first class session the aging psychology professor requested that we identify at least one "cynosure" for humankind, which we would discuss in class next session.
After a sometimes heated verbal interaction during our next meeting, students identified direction-givers such as: education, religion, rational philosophy, objective science and the like. But our skillful Socrates nudged us toward two emerging conclusions, which are really very old.
1. Gain increasing understanding of ourselves and our world.
2. Gain increasing moral behavior by: a) promoting equity or fairness for all individuals and societies; b) reducing suffering for all sentient beings and contributing to their well-being; and c) practicing considerate reciprocity.
That freshman class was taken at the beginning of WW II. What should be axiomatic seems to be overshadowed periodically by our darker aspects. K. Stafford, Prof Emeritus (Psychology)

Lot's of ignorance displayed here by people. If you spent a bit of time and actually read the teleological arguments, you might find them interesting and educational. Allow me to summarize just one, often repeated, not not well understood and, certainly, not answered. The universe began with a "big bang", all of the amtter in the universe collected into a super dense mass that was not much larger than your fist. It expanded from that into the "early universe", a (roughly) sphere several thousand light years in diameter in something less than a nanosecond. Now, the speed of light provides an absolute limit for the velocity of matter; as matter approaches the speed of light the mass becomes infinite. So, something is amiss. Either of current understanding of physics is wrong, perhaps the laws of physics only happened *after* or as a consequence of the "big bang", or there is a creator or motive power that exists beyond or outside of and superceding the laws of phyics.

Likewise, the argument about CO2 being used for respiration fails becasue the bond is stronger than the energy potential. Plants make use of sunlight (an external energy source) to free that bond and create useable sugars and oxygen (NOT a waste product, but an energy sourced used by plants when sunlight isn't available). For a microbe to use CO2 would entail using an external energy source (a thermal vent or sunlight would do).

Life is one of the forces of the cosmos, like magnetism or nuclear force. All "religions" have some truth in their beliefs. To Christians, "eating the body of Christ" is nothing more than life sustaining itself by consuming itself. After all, one is not sustained by consuming that which was never alive. Let's say you swat a fly. Each compound and element of the fly remains after it is swatted, though grossly rearranged so that life can no longer motivate that particular package. What's missing? It's all there! Except life. And where did life go? Nowhere! Pinch yourself hard enough to shout "Ouch," and there you go, life just said "Ouch" to you. Though the package we call a fly is no longer capable of harboring life, life didn't go anywhere, just as when you turn off a light, electricity didn't go anywhere. The question to be asked then, is life, unlike electricity or magnetism, sentient. Could we still be of that mind wherein the earth is flat and the universe revolves around the earth?

Jacob, I think you have an intermittent short in your caps key.

MIKEB

The universe is even stranger than you suppose. The big bang did not explode into space; the big bang was an explosion OF space and time. Thus, during the initial big bang, nothing moved faster than the speed of light in space. Moreover, the explosion continues to this day and has even picked up speed after first slowing down.

There is a good article in Scientific American explaining this startling, head-spinning point.

It's hard to have a religion without any mystery. As we (the collective, scientific 'we') investigate and resolve some of the deepest mysteries of the universe (DNA, nuclear chromodynamics, general relativity) the conventional supports of religion (natural ignorance, the need to make narrative sense of the world) are kicked away one by one. Eliminate the 0.1% of mankind that is fluent in modern technology and where would we be? Chasing deer with sticks, that's where. And no global warming to worry about either.
Just my $0.02

Hewitt,

You started this thread by writing:

"Scientists try to find the best explanation for the data. There is no data, cosmological or otherwise, supporting reincarnation and thus nothing for a scientist to explain."

Oh, really?

You've made a very bold statement.

You might want to go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Cases_Suggestive_of_Reincarnation

and check all the references.

Regards.

Hewitt,

Here's a reference to a site which better describes Dr. Stevenson and his studies:

http://skepticalinvestigations.org/books/stevenson.htm

Hewitt et. al., maybe you can explain something to me. I understand the theory of the big bang, inflation, the slowdown, and now the acceleration of space(time?). Could you explain if my thinking here is wrong:

It seems to me that assuming that space normally expands, as has been speculated, then after the big bang, and the universe was filled with energy, there would have been little matter due to the extreme temperatures and density, and thus little gravity to stop it from expanding, thus inflation. Once the universe reached a larger size, and cooled, where particles endowed with the mass could exist, gravity appeared and slowed down the expansion. But the expansion was not stopped and as it slowly continues and gravity, of which there is a fixed amount in the universe, is being diluted due to the ever increasing size of the universe, separation of galaxies, etc, the expansion is accelerating as gravity becomes more diluted. As this continues space will eventually reach an expansion speed as great as inflation, ripping apart even atoms.

The last domain on which religion and the religious claim a monopoly may be under siege from science as well:
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/the-discover-interview-marc-hauser

"Was it a rational decision learned in childhood, or was it—as Harvard evolutionary biologist and cognitive neuroscientist Marc Hauser claims—based on instincts encoded in our brains by evolution? In his recent book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (HarperCollins), Hauser argues that millions of years of natural selection have molded a universal moral grammar within our brains that enables us to make rapid decisions about ethical dilemmas. (Read a review here.)"

Sully:

You seem to have some knowledge of science or at least math, (imaginary numbers are in order). Have you ever wondered if the Boehr theory of the atom is actually correct?

It would appear that no two particles of matter ever actually touch each other. And, there is no known limit on how small particles of matter can go. If there is no finest particle then matter does not exist. That's the next major breakthrough in physics.

It's as difficult to imagine a matter-less universe for the most learned scientist as it was for anyone to imagine a round earth just a heartbeat back in time. If the earth is not flat then people, everything will fall off the bottom -false notion that gravity is unidirectional. If there is no matter then the universe cannot exist -false notion that we are made out of matter.

There is no reality only perceived reality. Life is only a perception of what we think we know life to be. There must be something wrong with how we perceive life itself.

Scientist clones human. For the first time a human being has been cloned at a laboratory in California. The individual cloned was the scientist himself. He let the embryo live for about 5 days stating that if implanted in a woman it would have gone to maturity and been a duplicate of himself.

Prophecy: Einstein's brain will be used as a source of cells allowing him to be born again, millions of times.

Not to be outdone the Southern Baptist will clone in excess of a million Billy Grahams, as many as the original has skin cells, (they will do to Billy what they want to do to Haggard, skin him alive). All will pass their plates to president Bush and Chaney will give until the oil money runs out or well goes dry, whichever comes first.

BGone --

There is a limit on small things can do, namely the Planck limit which is about 10^-39 meters.

Theres also the particle wave duality as expressed in the de Broglie length while lets you know how wavelike a particle is, and which becomes a bigger effect the smaller you go, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which also has an effect on precisely you can know where something is.

Reality exists. If you have any doubt, jump off of something.

BGone --

There is a limit on small things can be, namely the Planck limit which is about 10^-39 meters.

Theres also the particle wave duality as expressed in the de Broglie length while lets you know how wavelike a particle is, and which becomes a bigger effect the smaller you go, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which also has an effect on precisely you can know where something is.

Reality exists. If you have any doubt, jump off of something.

SULLY

The big bang was not an explosion into existing space, but a rapid expansion of space and time. Thus, gravity, which operates over space and time, did not cause the expansion, slow the expansion, or cause it to speed up. One has to invoke another force.

Einstein spoke of the cosmological constant, but it's not constant and he later rejected it. Others speak of quintessence or dark energy. Since the universe is 94% dark matter, any functional theory must account for that, but we haven't a clue how to.