Mars: didn't read my previous post or his edit, huh?

more like the last 5 posts

mental note must remember always to refresh before posting

gah, I haven't really kept my astronomy up-to-date since high-school

But IIRC all stars as seen from Earth are red-or-blue-shifted (almost all are red, but some are blue because of peculiar motion etc), right..?

[EDIT]
And distance has something to do with it - the stars the farthest from us are normally those that have had the most difference in velocity compared to us.

Not nessesaritly.. What if a star that was flung from its galaxy speeds by our solar system (really really fast). Now, I doubt its distance has anything to do with the color shift.

edit: AAAAAHHHHH!!!! Its the attack of the spelling nazis.

Only as mush as any over simplification is. (ie: no)

so if I understand you're trying to say they've seen the edge of the universe but it's not like it's all been examined or anything?

edit:

the second it's should probably it has, can you write it's for an it has? (checking with the grammer people)

Not only that, but some researchers that were trying to measure the matter in the universe noticed that the galaxies and whatnot at the edge of the universe are speeding up. (not slowing or staying at a constant speed as some/most thought)

edit:

Yeah, I've seen that one episode of "The Sliders" A couple times.

Yep me too. I always thought everyone knew this type of stuff. (or maybe I have actually been learning something in my lessons physics after all...)
Personally I find physics on the microscopic level much more interesting than on the macroscopic.

Well you can't see the edge of the universe.. you can only see as far as the speed of light allows. What you might percieve as the edge is is really not the edge at all... it may have been millions and billions of years ago, but the edge of the universe at this moment (and its arguable when this moment actually is) is invisible to us simply because light has not had nearly enough time to reach us from there so that we can actually see it. There are likely billions of stars so far away that light they emit has not had time to reach us... the enormous expanse that the universe is makes it unknowable, no matter how technologically advanced we become. There are many more tangible theories that agree with this.. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, for example.. (the liar's paradox)

And in the vein that this thread started in, I'm an Atheist.. and I agree with Matthew that a debate between a theist and an atheist is pointless except as an intellectual pursuit. (took years to come to that conclusion) BUT! I can make some interesting points for both sides... it's interesting to think about the laws of nature, and how measurable and predictable they prove to be under enough scrutiny. Of course there are things that are still beyond our grasp, but if you accept the assumption that all things in nature are ultimately measurable, and governed by natural constants (like physics).. and if you subscribe to the idea of a "beginning" as opossed to an infinite time-line, if you were to go back to this "begining" and set time in motion again.. wouldn't the very same time-line reoccur being that nature behaves in constant and measurable ways (presumably)? And would that not prove the concept of free-will to be false?

Of course there are a thousand ways to argue for and against that... just something interesting to chew on though..

Oh c'mon.. you have to give it up for the Bosons.:P

This was a popular scientific viewpoint prior to the 20th century. Newtonian Physics implied that nature was deterministic and so people wrangled over the free will problem much more than today. In the 20th century, quantum mechanics says that nature is not so. Nature is probabilistic (see my point above about Einstein's quote about God and dice) and in certain ways not truly measurable.

I find it interesting 23, sorry. Although I may find the hottest spice girl more interesting under the right circumstances...

And as for quantum mechanics, I think it's bunk. Just because we don't have a means to observe something without disturbing it doesn't mean, left to their own devices, things will still behave in a "probabilistic" manner. And then you come to the tree falling in the forest scenario. To me quantum mechanics means that the universe is unknowable, like I said before. You can't know something without observing it, and you can't observe something in it's natural state because the act of observing causes a disturbance. We can, however, observe the behavior of a system composed of unobservable elements without influencing the system. And from those observations you can derive the laws governing the system, which can only be "macro-laws" consisting of the unobservable forces at work in the system. Of the laws we've been able to describe with more certainty, they are all deterministic in nature. To suggest that there is a "probabilistic" force at work flies in the face of well grounded observations to the contrary. How is it possible that a system behaves in a predictable manner if it's constituents are truly random in nature? If you call something "probabilistic" you might as well call it "God". Probabilities by definition are a means to understand something you haven't directly meausred... to me, probabilities and God stop short of the truth, for lack of a better explanation.

YES!! Exactly! Do you have any idea how hard I have had to pound this into some people's skulls?!

This is where I hate athiests that say faith is for the weak (most recently told me on GameDev). Everyone needs faith in something to believe it's true; very little in this world is proven beyond doubt.

And since no one answered Michael Jensen (unless I missed it), your post count is in your profile.