http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMFsuBlkoIQ

Excuse me while I weep for humanity.

He still won 1500 euros. That should have been one of the first questions (in the break for the first safe winning).

Although, there was someone in the Australian edition who got the first question wrong even though the host edged him on "Is that your final answer?". I think it was something about which continent a particular mountain is on.

See, Americans aren't the only stupid ones.

joins in

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- http://www.pixelships.com

What, it's not the sun?

That's nothing. I was flicking through TV yesterday morning and came across UK Big Brother where a contestant asked, in all seriousness, 'Did you know that the moon is bigger than the universe?'

The woman he was speaking to seemed to believe him.

I'm shocked that he even won any money.

Can't really say anything else

It's not that surprising. Most people never think about anything past the stupid drama in their lives. So even if they knew something at one time, they've long forgotten it. Kinda like me with cars; I used to work on cars a lot, but it's been so long ago, now I couldn't distinguish a rachet from a box end wrench.

One can only hope that people were answering "The Sun" out of spite. But I doubt it:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/c7/fig07-07.htm

"The Universe began with a huge explosion. {True}"

We dont know if that is true. Its a fucking theory. Its not a fact. Its not proven. There are many theories on how the Universe was created. It was me! I AM GOD. Joke aside, it still crazy to say its true. It depends on personal opinion.

Oh boy, here we go.....

Oh Eris, not again.
Every single law of physics is a theory. Every item on that list is a theory. Please read up on what the word means.

No. The specifics of exactly what happened in the absolute beginning are debated, but cosmic expansion is very, very real.

True, but everything has more theories. How are you going to know which one is true?

Read up on what the word "theory" means. It does not mean "guess". It does not mean "hypothesis", "conjecture", or "suggestion". When talking about science, a theory is a consistent model for how some naturally observable phenomenon works that is solid, sound, and capable of predicting how things will go in the future. It is for all intents and purposes the strongest possible explanation for a particular phenomenon. Gravitation is a theory, yet I don't see anyone bringing forth any credible "alternatives".

Other theories: Thermodynamics, electromagnetic theory, quantum mechanics, plate tectonics... pretty much anything you can calculate.

... and out comes the high school philosophy. As I suspect that any attempt to explain the scientific method will be met with crude attempts at phenomenology, I will instead proceed to ignore you in this thread and hope that others do the same.

[EDIT]
Too late.

Yeah, I may come to regret it, but you know what a blue-eyed optimist I can be.

These are awfully passionate responses considering the word 'theory" isn't on the page. It says "true". It lies. So stuff it.

@gnomal, I was just trying to point out that we arent 100% true that it really was "a big explosion". So saying that its true is stupid still. Its a big guess. Period.

Okay, now that the idiots have come out in full force, I'm just going to take gnolam's advice. There's just no arguing with people who have their head in the sand and whose concept of "reason" extends as far as "the pink unicorns did it".

My thoughts exactly, actually. I wasn't at the beginning of the universe but I believe it exploded because scientists told me to! Gnolam's page says it's true so it must be! ZOMFG people don't believe my theory so I'm starting a church right now!

/sarcasm off

Seriously, what's the point of quizzing people on things they have zero first-hand knowledge or evidence for (mostly because they don't care and it has no impact on their lives), and then mocking them when they don't instantly agree with or believe the theories others come up with? Maybe they're stupid and uneducated. On the other hand, maybe they don't just listen to the first thing they're told just because it's "science". Maybe they liked challenging their inept middle-grade school science teacher. Maybe they like thinking about alternative theories. maybe they like messing with you. Maybe they just don't give a rip. But hey, mocking people is fun and elitist. On with it then.

EDIT: In the zealot's defense, it's "true" that each thing listed on the page is a scientific theory. That may be all they're saying, and that much is correct. Watching X-G and gnolam jump up and start preaching was still funny though.

I'm assuming that the woman in video was his wife. She knew the right answer and seemed very disappointed.

You call me an idiot because I dont believe that the Big bang happened? Well, if I am an idiot for having a diffrent opinion, and being right. ( I am, I assure you that there is no 100% proof it happened. ) Then you are an idiot at not respecting that. Plus youre an asshole.

I believe that "The scientists* told me so" (or rather, a slightly more complex version of that sentence) is reason enough to believe something.
The reason is that scientists*, unlike suppliers of other theories (like intelligent design) have a lot of accomplishments and abilities under their belt.
For example, scientists* can predict the rate at which heat will pass through a conductive rod, can a priest** do that? Scientists* can calculate how fast a braking car will stop, can a priest** do that? (etc.)
In a slightly naive simple version of things you could say that "I believe scientists* because their magic is stronger than that of other people".
So yeah, I "naively" believe scientists*.

As for the "I believe X, but how can you be sure?" crowd, how can you be sure of anything? How can you be sure you even existed a millisecond ago? How can you be sure you aren't mind controlled by green martians? (etc.)
The answer is, you can't.
And this is why True/False doesn't mean 100% without a single doubt True/False, but rather more like "True enough".

• - I don't actually mean all scientists, or any specific scientist. I'm referring more to theories that are widely accepted and believed to be true by the scientific community.

** - A priest was just an example, I don't mean specifically any member of any religion, but mostly none-scientists. I used priest just because ID (which is one example of a dispute between scientists and some other people) is a religion based theory.

Anyone with the correct training, or in this day and age anyone who can look it up on the Internet, can do either of these things. It's got nothing to do with the person, it's the information.

I might believe a scientist at face value depending on what he says, but if I call him on it he better be able to provide some evidence. If his evidence fails, I call BS on him. Like I would to anyone else in life, I suppose.

You mean, he can do that with a theory that isn't based on science? And make it work every time?
Explain those new theories please.
(I refer you to the * and ** in my post, which basically says that in my post "Scientists = scientific theories. Priests = rival theories")

You lost me. I'm talking about comparing "scientists" with "non-scientists" (or priests as you say), not "scientific theories" with "non-scientific theories". And I'm saying the former is a non-issue because science is theories and information, not this person or that. Technically, scientists should have zero credibility because they should be letting the theories speak for themselves.

PS: Theory XYZ doesn't need a competing theory for me to call BS on it, of course ...

Actually, given relativity, aren't all reference points valid? So its perfectly valid to describe the sun going around the earth from the reference point of earth. It is also valid to go the other way around. You could describe the motion of the solar system from the perspective of earth but its far easier to do it from the sun.

include <StdRant.h>

Who's to say that the universe was not always here? Sounds stupid and strange...but just think, we don't really have a clue when it comes to the study of the universe!

We don't understand how the "skin" of the sun is hotter than the surface, we now have evidence that the supposed "red shift" is not an accurate way to tell if our universe is moving apart (proven several times in the lab), we don't know about black holes (like where this matter goes after it is "eaten"), etc. We have all of these theories and then just call them fact. It is sad, really sad.

Try to wrap this around your heads: The universe always was, still is, and always will be. It is the beginning and the end. Our "version" of the universe may "die", but on the whole...it will always be.

Black holes "eat" the universe and it's matter...and I would like to believe that this matter is ejected into other parts of the universe and/or into other realities or what have you.

I believe that this reality is not the only one. This would be an explanation as to why people have déjà vu and other such phenomenon...other realities tear and collide with each other and you get all kinds of fun little side effects like this.

We can't see the whole picture, so we can't even BEGIN to understand the physics and mechanics involved in our universe to make such assertions that the universe was created by a BIG BANG!

That's not relativity, it's just defining your frame of reference. But your point is reasonably valid. If I stand on earth and watch the sky then I'll see the sun go around it. But I take it they meant "going round" as in "orbiting".

Nobody says it wasn't. The big bang theory just states that all the matter in it used to be compressed into an unmeasurably dense point and at some point started shooting outwards. For the purposes of measuring stuff, they define that time to be t=0.

There's no reason to believe the matter has gone anywhere. Just because we can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't still all there.

Cite your evidence. I think most intelligent people would accept not only that there are things they don't know, but that there are things they can't know for sure. So we all walk around basing our beliefs on the most convincing evidence while accepting we may be wrong. With that in mind, a simple assertion isn't very convincing.

Incidentally, I read an argument the other day (in some mainstream media, so quite possibly a load of populist rubbish that someone more knowledgable can debunk easily) that it may not be helpful to model the big bang as t=0 because there is some incompatibility between the amount of mass that was crammed together and quantum physics. They claim it makes more sense to think that the big bang was just some sort of transition between a previous overall format of the mass and the current universe.

How does the Big Bang "theory" fit this then? The big bang isn't observable, as it (if it did happen at all) happened years ago and has not reoccurred since.

Where did the unmeasueably dense matter come from? Lets say this matter came from matter X, where did matter X come from? Lets say matter Y. Where did matter Y come from? Lets say matter Z. You get the point, this would go into infinity.

And so, if you believe that something has to be 'created' then the chain that I described is infinite. Is that possible? The chain is only finite if something can just 'be'.

If matter was created, we have an unending chain of creators. Or if matter always was, then how did we get to the present? We should be stuck in the infinite past.

So the only logical conclusion is that we don't really exist at all. That's my theory.

This thread makes me want to watch through Star Trek again.

The "Big Bang" theory came about because scientists studied the movement of various bodies in the universe, and discovered there was a trend of objects moving away from each other, which seems counter-intuitive because of the laws of gravity. Either something in the past pushed the universe outward (a "big bang") or the theory of gravity is flawed too.

However, the big bang theory doesn't really talk about the creation of the universe, it's only concerned with how the universe got to be in the state it's in today. The theory itself says that the universe existed before the big bang, as a super-condensed ball of matter. A corresponding theory is the "big crunch" which says that eventually the gravity of all this matter will pull it back together, but recent evidence suggest otherwise.

All of these things are theory. Especially the ones I've mentioned, which have been unobservable in human history. But never forget one of the most fundamental things about scientific theory: someone can, at any given time, come up and shatter a theory with new facts, or a new way to look at the old facts. Remember, it was once accept scientific theory that maggots spawned from nowhere on raw meat, so don't believe something just because it's labeled "scientific theory".

We essentially agree. But here's my commentary anyway:

There's no reason to assume it came from anywhere. It only came from somewhere if it wasn't there originally. And we have no evidence on that either way.

Only if you believe that everything has to be created.

I have no basis on which to answer that question.

This comment is why I think we agree.

My main point re: the big bang is that it's just a theory about what is happening to the observable universe. Once you have a model of how the universe is progressing, you've worked an idea of time into your model and can predict what you think the universe did at your time 0. Time 0 is inherently the start of the trends you can observe, and not necessarily a beginning in itself.

For example, suppose I see a box sitting on the ground, completely still. Then I can make the prediction that it won't move in the future unless it is disturbed, i.e. it is stationary. I can use the fact that it is stationary to work back and conclude that at time t=0 it came to rest there. That doesn't mean I can predict how it was moving before it became stationary. And it definitely doesn't mean that I claim I can predict how it was moving before it became stationary. So saying that I don't know how it became stationary doesn't mean that my assertion that it become stationary and is evolving from having become stationary is invalid.

Sorry! Very contrived example, I know.

I think the real problem with all this speculation is that it seems extremely unlikely that there aren't a million forces in play that are unimaginable and imperceivable to humankind. So we probably aren't operating on all the information. Which is likely to make some things unknowable, and make everything else subject to acceptance of that fact.

It's one of the many reasons that science is completely compatible with religion.

Very well said! I totally agree. The last part was very well said. Signature worthy!

Sure, since beliefs formed before the scientific method was even conceived are relevant, because... wait, they aren't.

I will now leave this thread for good, to weep for the death of reason.

Stop that. Sense has no place here.

Exactly. To sum it up, we're trying to theorize without evidence, which goes completely against the scientific method.

I was using scientists and none-scientists as a sort of metaphor for scientific theories and none-scientific theories.
I agree that I wasn't entirely clear, so its my fault that you lost me(or is it I lost you? :S), but my original claim remains standing.

I'll write it down again to avoid further confusion:
Most scientific theories* are able to produce results that can be reproduced and fit their theories. (So if theory states that f=m*a, it is possible to show many examples in the real world in which f does equal m*a)
Since most scientific theories are able to do that, I think it is "okay" to believe other scientific theories that are not reproducible or observable, until a better scientific theory replaces it. (Like it is impossible to prove that at one point the entire mass of the universe was very concentrated)
-by scientific theories I mean theories that are accepted as true by most scientists*.
**-I won't define scientists, because that's just inviting wise-assery, and I'll take it that you know what I mean. (and if you don't, or attempt wise-assery anyway, I'll ignore you )

By scientific theories I mean theories that are falsifiable, reproducible, etc. Believing something because "scientists sez so" isn't real smart, and for more reasons than just that ...

While they are practically equivalent in the real world, I agree that your definition is far superior.
I guess I just wasn't in the correct mode of thought to supply the more correct definition. (And if you knew all of the stuff that went through my head while reading this thread you wouldn't be surprised )

First: Science can be wrong. That's why it's science. It tries to do the best job it can with what we know at the time. I don't know why it's somehow perceived as a negative thing that theories change when they're found to be wrong.

Second: The Big Bang Theory only seeks to explain the state of the early universe -- not where matter "came from".

Third: You can't apply the same logic of matter changing state to the creation of matter itself.

When we say that we create something, we don't actually create anything at all. There is no new energy and (most likely) no new matter -- just changing what already exists. But somehow our intuition tells us that for every painting there must be a painter, every book must have a writer, blahblahblahblah....

So we ignore logic and say that the energy had to come from somewhere -- a double leap of faith, because we don't even know that energy has the ability to "come to be", for all we care it may as well be another dimension by which to measure the universe, no more a tangible quantity than your height; and not only that it can come to be, but that it must, to satisfy our misplaced intuition. (Oh, hey, and then we even invent something else to attribute the creation to -- a third leap of faith... Kierkegaard would be proud!)

You've done a wonderful job of using the obvious to explain why we called BS on gnolam's page. I thank you for your tireless efforts.

It seems to me:

Everything we know suggests that matter and energy are neither created or destroyed.
It seems very problematic to suppose that matter exists into the infinite past.

However, those two statements come to a contradiction, ergo one of them must be false. Either energy/matter were at some point "created" or it must actually be possible for energy to exist into the infinite past.

From my perspective, it seems much more plausible to suppose that matter came into existence then to suppose an infinite past, but I'm not sure I have a really good reason for that.

But if it was created, then that would mean that there is an infinite chain of creating. Like I said above. And that goes against our logic too, doesent it? Well, I think that this it the question of all questions. Only Budha knows the answer!

That's my point. Somewhere at least once the rules were broken.

Otherwise known as the Big Bang, Horrendous Space Kablooie, or Il Kaboom Grosso.

That's Infinite God Recursion.

AE.

One might say that God always existed (by his nature), but matter didn't (by definition). So it doesn't really imply infinite recursion.

However, you still have the same two fundamental problems:

• If God or matter always existed into infinity past, then how exactly have we gotten to the present?

• If God or matter requires a creator, then we have an infinite series of creators and nothing is resolved.

No matter how you look at the "beginning of the universe," you have to make some assumptions and build off of that. Of course not all assumptions are scientifically equal; some let you build with science, while others require you to invoke more faith.

But I have to laugh at anyone who thinks it's as simple and true as the "Big Bang Theory" (or whatever your favorite one is), as if it were as true as the theory of gravity. The "OMG!@!@ It's a theory just like the theory of 'you have to breath or you die'!!!" line.

And of course scientific uncertainty does not imply that there must be an "unscientific" answer. But I think atheists are sometimes too stuck up on their scientist overlords to admit that the details of the beginning of the universe are far from being "known"... and may never be known.

The answer.

Exactly...or we exist in the Matrix!

It's the classic question: Which came first? The chicken or the egg? You could say the egg because chickens lay eggs that hatch into baby chickens. You could also say chickens because how could you have a chicken without an egg? Eventually you will have to come to a point when you just have to have faith in something. Be it GOD or whatever. You could still believe in GOD and the "Big Bang" theory. GOD COULD have created the matter that started in the "Big Bang" and we end up where we are today.

In my post above, I was trying to say that if black holes ejected the matter they "eat" into another dimension or another part of our universe, then maybe at that point, it would be like a "Big Bang"...or at least to those people's perception. All that matter coming from a single point...the black hole's singularity!

Maybe there was always this set amount of matter that just keeps getting passed around between dimensions...most of which we could never see or even prove beyond a doubt. We know that black holes effect time and space...so why would this be so hard to believe? If the fabric of time and space was warped so badly it created or opened a path into other dimensions.

There could be a dimension for every action or inaction that we every would have made or didn't make. Just imagine that. A dimension of when you got shot in the face, a dimension where you married you high school sweetheart, a dimension where you where never even born! Maybe it is ALL just perception....OUR reality is one that we decide to follow consciously or not. The other dimensions (or realities or whatever you want to call them) are all taking place at the same time as this.

It is like a huge computer program that is running. The individual programs don't necessarily no about each other, but the OS knows about each process. The OS as the universe or GOD or whatever you want to believe. The processes and programs are us....

Who knows...maybe when you DO actually figure out the meaning of it all, you just cease to exist. The reality of it all would just be too mind blowing that you just are no more!

"Oohh no...what is that...no! NO! It can't BE...IT CAN'T BE IT! IT JUST CAN'T BE! THIS IS NOT THE END OF ME!!! IT CAN'T B.............."-me

The egg. We had dinosaurs long before chickens.

Kibiz0r wins. No amount of faith will change this, but you can choose to believe otherwise, and be happy being wrong.

I think what the scientists actually do is flip a coin. Or roll a die, if there are more than two hypotheses. If there are three, they use a four sided die, but re-roll if it lands on the 4.

Scientist disagree about which hypothesis is true all the time. What they really do is break off into groups according to who believes what, then they set up barricades between the groups and gun down anyone who tries to cross those barricades, ensuring that the debate never gets solved or even moves forward. The guy on the video this thread is about doesn't like Copernicus, and went with the only other theory he'd heard of.

If everything needs a creator, then wouldn't God need one too?

Lets just say he didn't get any for a while.

I take exception to this. I delight in the unknown. I readily admit that I don't even subscribe to a theory explaining how the universe came to be. I do, however, put some stock in the Big Bang theory, because there is empirical evidence of it. That still says nothing about any "higher power" creating the universe or not.

We atheists do get a pretty bum rap. Other people get to define us because we refuse to define ourselves (how can we, the only thing that we share in common is that we don't believe in God!) and did you know that we're the #1 most distrusted group in the US, above gays and Muslims!

It's kind of funny, though... both sides see the other in the exact same way:
"Look at them, they think they know everything."
"They think they are the center of the universe."
"How can they possibly be moral?"
etc, etc...

But it's kind of fun having that sort of variety, where one person can believe God created everything, another believes it was a crystalline pink rhinoceros with a magical chemistry set, or not even having an answer at all but just marveling at the question. I'm of the particular school of thought that, if we had an answer, it wouldn't be a question worth asking.

Science, I think, is misunderstood. There are lots of people that think science is man's attempt at posturing as if we know everything, but if you look at the scientific method, I think you'll realize that that's the complete opposite of what it's all about. Science says "Okay, the universe is a huge and very complicated place, and we're probably never going to make sense of it all. So we might as well just accept that we're going to be wrong, a lot. In fact, we're probably never going to be right, but we'll at least have a vague idea of which direction is closer to the truth."

And I think that mystery is why atheists are quick to rally behind it. Religion mostly says that something is definitely true or false, or that something is absolutely unknowable. And whether it answers the question or not, it's off the table -- end of discussion.

I don't think atheists, for the most part, have any problem admitting that there's a lot we don't know, and that most of what we think we know is going to be disproved later on. I think we have a problem not trying to know.

But I'll concede that everyone needs a drug of some sort to get through life. I've got mine and you've got yours. Television, religion, stuffing your face until you can barely fit through the door... we're all intoxicating ourselves somehow... but I think it's a lot easier to do that if you think there's something better waiting on the other side. If this is all there is, you damn well better make the best of it and do whatever you can to help others do the same.

This is one of the funniest arguments with Christians. I can't count the number of arguments I've had that went like this...

Me: How do you know God exists?
Christian Soldier: God has to exist. Something had to create the universe. It couldn't always exist!
Me: Then what created God?
Christian Solider: God has always existed.

There's nothing hard to understand about that argument. The thinking is that God is eternal by his very nature, but matter is not. God is not matter, so he has the ability to always exist whereas matter does not.

Of course it doesn't prove the existence of God because their definition of matter not being eternal is just an assumption.

But just rolling your eyes at the argument as if it were a contradiction just shows your own ignorance, even if you are ultimately correct.

I've never understood the universe to be "matter". I generally consider the universe to represent everything.

In any case, how is it that one thing can exist forever and another can't? There's no logic in that alone. An explanation is needed.

One is supernatural, the other is not.

Everbody has to make assumptions about the origins of the universe. Creationists assume that matter (term used loosely) is not eternal and that time had some beginning point (at creation). Because of this, they see the need of a supernatural God that created the universe.

There's no explanation needed. It's by definition.

Edit: Nevermind, Matthew clarified himself...

Oh yes, the beyond-science argument.

What does that have to do with reality?

_{Mmmmz, Canadian beer. ;D}

A big Canadian "eh?" to that. [Okay, so I know you Canadians just use eh! as a method of agreement at the end of every sentence, but it always sounds like a bewildered utterance, which is how I'm using it.]

If you are going to debate (ie: not ignorant arguing) something with someone, you have to make points from within their frame of reference. Since you can not prove or disprove their assumptions, you have to find contradictions and faults within their system. (Unless, of course, both sides are clearly trying to defend their own assumptions. But most people are not equipped to do that, so you're better off not even going there.)

And yes, it can be impossible if the person uses God as a crutch, but you'll find that not everyone does. And for the people that do, you're just wasting your time anyway.

It's a cheap cop-out, but it's true. Both sides have the same problem (neither God nor The Big Bang are an "origin" at all) but theists can appeal to something outside the rules.

Geez, and I was missing this religious/science war because of a misleading thread title?

</li>
I believe that there is a God, but in the same way our lives do not circle around Him, His does not circle around us. Therefore, I make this assumption: God could have provoked the Big Bang, but the Big Bang could not have provoked God. So, I simplify creation in two statements: the universe could have been created by an entity beyond our knowledge and understanding (God), or it could have been created by chance (Big Bang). If God created us, he could have created us by design to either follow His will as slaves, or as truly independent beings; or by chance (he may have wanted to create something else and created Adam and Eva by mistake). If we were born by chance, it would mean we are here by chance, and that we exist by chance, that everything is happening by chance, and that we can't control our lives: even the decision to turn left or right, buy a book, read a newspaper or just sleep or answer this thread is product of chance, and not our will.

Since I refuse to believe I don't control my life, and that today I ate hamburgers just because the universe took that turn and not because I decided that, I take the only option that allows me a glimpse of hope: that there is a God who created us by design, giving us free will to do what we want.

(Edited: And regarding the original topic, these TV programs have tough qualification rounds, so if a guy who does not know the Moon rotates around the Earth is sat there, it is because the producers wanted him there knowing the fact he was an idiot. The problem is the audience... I suggest euthanasia)

I believe in God. What's more, i am convinced he exists, although the reasons are too long and complicated to go into. My point in posting is that religion and science don't have to be enemies. Obviously everyday observation shows us that science has got some facts right, but there are a lot more things we don't know than things we do know. How did the universe come to exist? Our science can't explain it without doing something that our science says is impossible. Well, who created all the natural laws and facts that our science is built on? God created it. He's beyond science. Not beyond science as in "Science can't explain it, so it must be religion", I mean beyond science in the same way that we, as programmers, are beyond the mechanics of the games we make. How much do you think Mario and Link know about humanity?

If you don't believe in God, just ignore this post. I'm not one of those Christians who goes around trying to convert people, or looking down on people who have different beliefs.

I'll end this thread with God's own magic words:

DEUS EX MACHINA!

Not to hijack this thread or anything, but: Anyone else notice that was written on the treasure chest at the end of Dodgeball?

Tomorrow (or later today, depending on how you look at it), when the beer is out of me, I'm sure I'll have a counter-argument for all of you.

Actually, its used in this case as well. Its a very versatile utterance. It can be a statement, a question, or whatever you want it to be!

Can it be an expletive, such as "Eh you, you mother-eher!"?

FUCKIN EH!

I think that's what really irks atheists about religious people. That the religious approach tends more towards "we are right by definition" rather than actually explaining things.
Maybe its the simplistic nature of the approach that's annoying?
"See, if you drop something it falls to the earth because of a force known as gravity, gravity work like [explanations follow]"
"If you drop something it falls to the earth because god made it so"
"Metals have their specific properties because they have free electrons moving through the matter, making them more conductive. The electrons pull on the protons of the metal nuclei, but are still free, thus producing a matter that can bend but doesn't break easily. Oh, and electrons and protons are attracted because [etc.]"
"Metals are strong, bendable and conductive because god made them so"
Obviously, I'm over-simplifying things and slightly generalizing (so don't be offended), but I think that its that specific approach that upsets atheists the most.
I know it certainly upsets me, because I tend to enjoy a good debate, and there's no debate with arguments that quickly boil down to "I'm right by definition".

False.
Remember, looking to the distant universe means looking backwards in time since the speed of light is finite. If we could look back far enough, we could see the big bang itself (though highly redshifted). Can we? What do we expect to see?
Extrapolating backward from theory based on observation, we might expect the density of the universe to increase backwards in time. At some point, we expect the universe to become opaque (or "optically thick" to use the technical term) and we cannot view earlier events than this so-called recombination for the same reason you cannot see far in a dense fog. But we can still make a prediction for what that "fog" would look like and look for it. It should look like a more or less isotropic radiation field with a frequency corresponding to a temperature of about 2.7 K.
Can we detect such a radiation field? Why yes, we can - it's called the cosmic microwave background radiation (Penzias & Wilson, 1978 Nobel prize).

Does that mean the big bang model is right? No, but it means that it is consistent with observations and that predictions from the model are confirmed. That's a strong hint.

Although the universe was optically thick to photons, it was not so for neutrinos - one of the reasons people are building neutrino detectors: to see what happened before recombination and test the model further.

I've never really understood how looking into the past by viewing the distant universe could possibly allow one to view to any time period even close to The Big Bang. Wouldn't any light concerning that event have started out moving faster than our galaxy (therefore making it further ahead and unobservable)? Along the same lines, wouldn't we have been passed by light from, say, about half of the lifespan of the known universe as well (I may be being generous or stingy, I don't want to look up any numbers)? I'm probably missing something here, but how is that possible?

Anyway, on the whole subject, I usually say that I simply am not arrogant enough to believe I could ever know exactly what happened fifty years ago, let alone a few billion. That isn't to say anyone is wrong, just that I don't care how much evidence they have for whatever idea they are pushing as it takes far too much faith to believe it.

BTW, just got around to watching the video in the OP; funny stuff. The comments made it out to possibly be a fake though. Almost looks like a bad dub job with the lips not quite lining up with the speaking, but then I'm not French so what would I know of it? Still funny.

Current determinations of the age of the universe suggest it is 13.7Gyr old. Light that has travelled a distance of 13.7Gyr has been in transit since the universe began. In other words, looking at events that are 13.7 billion lightyears distant means you are looking at events that took place at the time the big bang was created.
What you're missing is that light always moves at the speed of light, independent of the observer and that the big bang did not occur at a specific location in space (in other words, it didn't happen 'here' or 'there', it happened everywhere).

Yeah, but wouldn't that light have already passed by Earth?

That is my belief as a Christian too.

No. That's the point. If we are looking at stuff that is 13.7 billion light years away, we're looking at what happend 13.7 billion years ago.

Now, that is about the extent of my understanding of the space time stuff. I understand the idea behind it, but it is mind boggling to think of space as 4d space/time.

Also, I thought Big Bang happened and was long over, without taking into account if it is still going on or not, and without remembering the whole space/time aspect. Is the big bang "still going on?" By that, I mean can we still look billions of light years out and see the universe expanding?

The universe is still expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang, that's how it was detected. The big bang is not quite like a bomb exploding; it's more like inflating a balloon.

That is where I'm lost. I really don't see how all matter could be condensed into an infinitely dense point and still have that point be everywhere. It fits with the theory that one could view back to the origin of time, but not with common sense.

The point was everything, time and space were both in it. When the point expanded, it became the universe. Maybe your common sense tries to imagine a point in the space, but there was no space to be "at".

It still doesn't seem to fit at all. Well, I suppose if I could make sense out of it then there would be no incentive at all to finish my time machine.

Common sense is often wrong. If you were to guide yourself only by it, you'd claim the the sun does orbit around Earth.

Very true, but this seems to be one of the things I just can't wrap my head around. Not that it matters.

So what is the universe expanding into? And where is it expanding from?

The former is a given, so I don't see how anyone's "missing" it. And I'm baffled as to how The Big Bang did not happen at a more-or-less specific location. If it happened everywhere, it didn't bang. I thought the point was that the universe originated from an extremely dense and hot state. "Dense" implies to me it occupied a (relatively) small location. Want to elaborate?

Exactly! It is ALL relative to the person/thing viewing it. Space is relative, time is relative, etc.

There are strange things we are just beginning to learn about in quantum physics such as particles that are seemingly not connected together, but when one is made to rotate clockwise the other rotates counterclockwise...with NO known forces at work...from great distances away! Incredible!

Not only that, but I saw, on one of the science channels awhile back, particles that simple seem to not exist if seen! They are just gone as soon as they are "looked at". Imagine the possibilities for this in secured messaging. You could send data at regular intervals. If the "packet(s)" are gone, then someone has intercepted the "packet".

If these "crazy" new things are just now being discovered, I would love to see what is still awaiting us to find out! Maybe that is how you can just "feel" when someone is looking at you!

That's because we are inside it, rather than looking at the explosion from the outside. Everywhere was the single point. Well, maybe. The laws of physics we know are very likely to break down when you get close to a singularity.

Not to say those aren't intreaguing questions, but they're metaphysical questions rather than physical. Physically, the universe is not expanding "into" anything and not "from" anything - there is nothing outside the universe, or rather, if there was, it would make no difference since there is no way to communicate with what the universe would be expanding into if it were expanding into it (because you could only do that by transferring information faster than light, which you cannot).

Missing as in "not taking into consideration" in the line of reasoning.

Well, I suppose it depends on wether you believe that we occupy a special location in space time. From our perspective, the universe is expanding away from us in all directions. That either means we're exactly at the centre of the universe, or (if you beleive the universe looks more or less the same wherever you are), every point in space is moving away from every other point.
Imagine you had a ball of dough with raisins in it (you can imagine it as being infinitely small if you want). Place it in the oven and the dough will rise (expand). Using the raisins as your fixed markers, you will see that they are all moving away from one another. Now, did the expansion of teh bread begin at a pecific location? No, it started everywhere at once (more or less).
The analogy is crude and flawed, but it brings the basic idea across.

Not in the sense of the type of explosion you'd see on Earth, no. The name "big bang" is catchy and captures the imagination, but it's an analogy, not an accurate description of what happened.

The intuitive picture is not easy; the mathematical one in a sense is easier.
It didn't occupy a location, because all of space was compressed together. The normal way to think about this is to look from the outside in and see the explosion go off at a particular location before your mind's eye. But that's not what's happening, since we are inside and see space expanding away from us in all directions.
The mathematical description assigns the spatial coordinates of the universe a "scale factor" (say R) by which all distances are scaled (so coordinates (x y z) would be scaled (Rx Ry Rz). This scale factor changes with time: at the big bang it was 0 (so the universe occupied a single point) while for later times it is non-zero and increasing with time. So all distances scale and become larger with time.
Well, almost all of them. The size of atoms (the Bohrradius), the de Broglie wavelengths or the wavelength of transitions in atomic spectra (for instance) are not seen to scale with the universe (and a good thing for us too, because if they did the entire universe would be scale invariant and look the same now as it did 13.7 billion years ago).

Don Freeman, why did you have #include <Intelligence.h>? I've seen no evidence of it's use.

Was this not a given? It sounds like semantics at this point. It was at a single location. Now it's big and spread out. Sure, "Everywhere was the single point", but it was still a single fuggin' point and you're not going to see the "singularity" in the present unless you're on the edge of the mess, even given your raisin-bread analogy.

I understand the word. I don't understand how anyone's missing it.

I still want to know what's outside of "space".

What's before time?

I can understand that the universe is just a scaled up version of what it was when it occupied a single point, but that still doesn't make any clearer how a picture of this single point could possibly be viewed. Unless the speed of light were scaled as well, I entirely fail to see how light from 13.7 billion light years ago which originated at much the same point as we could possibly still be behind us (relatively speaking, of course) considering that light should not (to the best of my knowledge) apply to the scale.

The land before time

It's impossible to know, since we can't detect or communicate with anything outside our space (at the present time).

Who knows? Maybe there are other Universes outside our own.

I'll steal an analogy from Hawking and say: Asking what's "outside of space" or "before time" (or for that matter, before the Big Bang) is like asking what's north of the North Pole.

@The Big Bang

IMO, time never began and the 'universe' was never created. Until we know otherwise I imagine space and time to be infinite. Space never changes so if you applied a coordinate to a particular spot in 3-dimensional space that spot would always be the same. However, matter and energy move throughout that space.

Without studying the theory thoroughly, I believe the Big Bang did happen at a particular place (because IIRC scientists can trace the galaxies' movements back to an origin point). In other words, the universe always was and the matter that we now know to be galaxies and the like were somehow formed during the Big Bang. As I recall, matter, light, everything, is really just energy and I believe that energy just always was. Perhaps over time the energy that makes up our galaxies, etc., will be released back into pure energy, eventually collapsing in on itself and resulting in another Big Bang.

All this talk of space and time being created by the Big Bang are IMO just as silly as God. I've never seen or heard of any indication that space nor time actually begin or end.

@Viewing The Past

I agree that it's probably not feasible to see the Big Bang or the like. That light would have moved past us long ago and/or have been altered by matter and energy collisions. I don't see it as a feasible expectation to really ever see the Big Bang event that brought us our galaxies. It might be feasible to recreate it in the distant future or perhaps model it with computers, though that's also somewhat far fetched.

Olbers' paradox.

Hubble's law.

At a glance, that doesn't seem to contradict what I said at all... It might help for you to summarize.

At a glance, Olbers' paradox seems to claim that if the universe were infinite and dotted with stars the night sky would be bright because every part of it would have a star behind it. I never suggested that space were infinitely dotted with stars... Only that space itself is infinite. I probably don't understand what the actual point of it is...

Again, summarize. I have better things to do then read Wikipedia articles poorly explaining things that I don't even know are related.

It would probably help understanding those articles if I knew what it means in general... I don't know what I'm looking at or looking for...

If the Universe has existed forever, the light of every star in the sky would have reached us by now, and at night the sky would be white, not black. We see a black sky at night because the light from all the stars in the sky hasn't reached us yet.

The speed of light is finite, so it takes time for the light from all the stars to reach us. That means that there has not been enough time (an eternity of time) for the light to travel. Thus the Universe has not existed "forever".

If light from a particular star hasn't reached Earth yet then it suggests that the star didn't exist forever as opposed to the universe.

At the same time, for the sky to actually be white (i.e. bright as opposed to dark) that would require light to come from all directions around Earth, meaning that any line you could draw through space away from Earth would align with a star. I could be wrong, since I haven't really studied astronomy, etc., but I don't think that's the case.

It's has not been used yet in the while ( myUniverse.StillExists() ) loop. It gets called in the myUniverse.EnableLife(LifeForm_Intelligent) function, which may or may not be called at all (myUniverse.RandomizeLife() function is used to get a random scenario...got to have a little bit of surprise. )

Just because light takes time to move, THAT is your reason the universe has not existed "forever"?!? Time and space can be twisted and warped....black holes do this daily.

Edit:
We will probably never know what created what or if the universe has been here forever...we might not really want to know that answer.

My biggest reason for believing in a GOD is that this CAN'T be it. Just look at all the crap that goes on. The meaning of life would be just so pointless... What would be the point in living at all if this life we have here is it?

I don't care if you prove me wrong...I WILL NOT accept that this is all there is, nothing to look forward to, no comfort after this cruel world is gone. If the meaning of life is to just procreate and fill the universe with our kind...well, if this is true...then WHY?

If this is it, then the universe will NOT be here forever...and therefore neither will we. That is like eating a huge dinner before being killed...why? You are gonna be dead anyway, so what does it matter? Why go on as a species if we are only here for a blink of an eye anyway?

Maybe it is just the existence of consciousness that created it all....seems weird, but think of those particles that exist away from each other and are still controlled by some unknown force. We would never know for sure if this is the case, because of the fact that you have a conscious effect on the universe by just existing. Now THAT is a mind fuck!:o

I'm not sure as to what happened, but we don't know even a quarter of a percent of the physics and other sciences involved in our universe. There may be some form of advanced math that we will learn in the future that proves that objects CAN spontaneously be created. Either way, I am sure we are a LONG time away from PROVING what is true.

Why, that doesn't sound very scientific! /sarcasm

Surely there must be some theory since it would seem to me that whatever's out there would have some impact on our own space.

Space loops, then? Do you hit a brick wall, maybe? Does empty space go on forever instead?

First of all, what do you mean by the meaning of life? You can't even begin to answer that question until you know what the meaning of life means.

People looking for a reason to live won't find it in the distant universe, a book, nor an illusionary super-being. It's programmed into our brains (I use the term brains loosely here - even simple organisms have a similar reason for living...) and that's really all there is.

Augh...the meaning of life paradox.::) I mean...a reason to live. What would be the point if there was no place to exist after this, to know that we mattered in some way?
Ultimately the reason we even want to know HOW the universe was created is that we can find out the meaning of WHY we are here. Are we to just have fun and do whatever we want with no morale compass or is there a reason to the madness other than just because someone said so? Not being Atheist, I don't have the insight that someone without faith would have. I am not saying being an Atheist is right or wrong...I am just curious as to what drives you.???
I would like to understand all sides...even if I don't totally agree, we could all learn something from the discussion.::)

Actually, it does. Only religion claims to have answers for everything ("God did it").

Whatever is out there has no observable effect on our universe. That's why it is undetectable.

Religion actually does no such thing; that's just an old, cheap troll. But I thought we were trying to keep religion out of this.

I said nothing about detectability. And it does have an effect on our universe, either by limiting it or by allowing it unlimited expansion (or perhaps exerting some other force). There must be a theory.

If it existed on another plane of existence, we wouldn't be able to tell anyway...at least not very easily. (that last part added for the 23yrold3yrold);D

Maybe Atheist refuse to believe in GOD because they don't want to feel like they are not the ones in control.;)

Added:

Yeah...They could have Romulan cloaking technology.::);D

I don't expect you to understand this, though.

Allow me to direct you to Douglas Adams.

Awesome! I should have seen that one coming...I LOVE that movie (and book). The old British movie was MUCH better than the newer one!

I figured out what started the universe!!! Clicky

I don't really want to get into the whole science vs guesswork thing,except to say that technology is pretty good evidence that science works. "Just a theory" doesn't really seem like such a strong statement when you find out that the theory allows us to cure diseases and do billions of calculations in a second... That's better than any other system of belief has been able to grant us.

But back to the original post - I think it was a bogus question. What is revolving around what is just a matter of perspective. If you have two massive objects in space, they will revolve around each other. Just because one is bigger than the other does not mean that the smaller one rotates around the bigger one. They both pull on each other - equally. From our reference frame, both the moon and the sun revolve around the earth. So all you guys talking about how "sad" this is can go stick it.

For all intents and purposes, space goes on forever in every direction. Space expands faster than anything that can travel in it. You can shine a light beam in any direction, and provided that it doesn't hit anything along the way, it will continue on that direction forever. There is no spacial boundary to space.

Similarly, there cannot be anything outside the Universe, since the Universe encompasses everything, by definition. That is, if we ever detect anything from outside the Universe, it's only because we have an incomplete model of the Universe, which would then promptly be rectified.

It's like computer code knowing about our outside world...other than the hardware attached, and software to use that hardware...it would be impossible for the code to know anything about our world. You could create programs that are "alive", so in a sense, you would be it's GOD. It has no way of proving you exist...other than looking for actions/commands you enter into the computer. Does that mean you do not exist because your creation can't prove you exist?

And yes, all points can be seen to move around each other. The sun could be seen as moving around the earth from a different viewpoint. It's just all relative to the viewer.;)

Interesting thread. Curiosity invaded me so I was looking for information and I found this video which explains Eisteins's ideas. It's easily understandable and it also features a cool animation (in 3D!) with eye-candy effects.

ENJOY!

Allegro 0.9

Have you ever even played asteroids?

I think these theories about what came 'first' are all wrong.
Since time is not a physical thing, but a human perception of things, 'first' is not real. Time is just another dimension (as you probably know), like x, y, and z, and we don't try to figure out why the sun sometimes comes 'before' planets, and sometimes 'after'. It's just the planets orbit the sun. Sometimes they are between us and the sun (the closer ones anyway), sometimes they are the other side of the sun. Why are the 'physical' dimensions understood much more than time?
/rant

Back to topic:

The guy's answer makes sense, of course in a geocentric view, which is not wrong, yet kind of stupid. Lots of things are still geocentric in common way of speaking. Like speaking of sunrise and sunset times. It would be more stupid to talk about local Earth-rotating-revealing-Sun times or something similar.

Only thing that makes Sun the only right answer is that in the geocentric view all answers would be right. So the geocentric view simply doesn't apply to that particular quiz show.

He said

and the answer is no, because light moves with a constant speed. Light that was emitted 13.7 Gyrs ago from a point 13.7Gly distant has only just now reached us. Surely this is an obvious point?

That's exactly right. So the big bang did not happen at one particular point in space that you can point to right now. It happend everywhere, every single point was at the centre of the explosion when it happened. Surely that's just rephrasing what you just said?
When the fictional bread is in the oven and you look at it from the outside you have a frame of reference outside the bread that allows you to point to a specific location inside it. If your only frame of reference is inside the fictional bread, you cannot do this.

Nothing, or anything. The question makes no physical sense and is more properly a question of metaphysics. The question is the same as asking what the big bang looks like from the outside, a notion that doesn't make sense from the point of view of our universe.

No, that's just the thing. If there is something that has no detectable influence whatsoever, by what argument would you claim that it exists? Is there a difference between the thing existing and the thing not existing? If not, then as far as physics is concerned, it doesn't exist. Maybe all of space is filled with completely undetectable pink elephants, but if they're undetectable, who cares?

There isn't and we don't, really. Nothing in the universe gives a damn about what we do. It is therefor up to each person to give meaning to their lives in some way. If believing in a higher power does that for you, then good for you.

Ah, but is it really? It is a difficult point what "time" means outside of human perception, but it is definately not merely human perception. Think of the second law of thermodynamics, for instance.

Because spatial dimensions are very different from time dimensions. Time is not "just another" dimension. To give you a concrete example, you cannot move freely through time.
The difference is already explicit in the metric describing relativity, where distances are measured by (note that the sign of time is different). I think some formulations of string theory give more insight in this, but that's beyond my field of expertise (The Elegant Universe by Brian Green makes the point, I think).

I'm sorry to bring the thread on-topic again, but has anyone of you tried to reproduce the voting?

I did yesterday with my family, and i'm presenting you the results here!

Moon:  50%
Sun:   25%
Mars:  25%
Venus: 0%

Embarrassing - at least the majority got it right ...

And no rational person would, because it's nonsense. The North Pole is just some arbitrary location man invented; it's not like you can't keep going past it or go up or something. It's rubbish.

They're opposites, so kinda, yeah. I'm pretty sure that makes them different by definition.

If it were you wouldn't be correcting me. If the universe is 13.7G years old, light from 13.7Gly distance long since past us. Let me know when you find the Big Bang though.

This is the kind of discussion that makes allegro.cc stand out from other sites. Very informed discussion, well formed arguments.

I would like to point out a few things:

1) all thoughts about the universe's origin are equally illogical. We simply can not form a consistent theory about the universe, because the theory will contain the concepts of space and time, which are properties of our own universe.

2) the concept of God and heavenly creation is equally illogical to the concept of eternal universe. You see, creation implies the existence of time and space, of 'before' and 'after' states, of cause and effect. For someone to create something, it means he/she/it exists in a spacetime. So if God exists in a spacetime, and there is room for creation, God is lesser than the spacetime he is in, and therefore not infinite...which creates a whole lot of other issues.

3) if there is a God which created this universe, he must be God for all people. Then religions are meaningless, because they are in conflict.

4) quantum mechanics hint to a reality closer to the matrix, i.e. we are a video game of sorts...a simulation. For example, quantum mechanics say that particles take their shape only when there is an observer...that's similar to back face culling.

I draw meaning and purpose in life from my understanding of science. I don't believe in a personal god of any kind. There is no evidence whatsoever, and there is no reason for me to believe in any particular god outside of evidence either. I don't need to play make believe with some "big man in the sky" who controls the universe, looks after me if I follow some arcane set of rules, and punishes me if I have sex with someone.
There is plenty meaning to be found in the real world - the world that we can see, touch, smell, and understand. This world that is the same for everyone; the same conclusions can be drawn independently by everyone. I'm sorry if this sounds as though I'm insulting you through your point of view. But to tell you the truth, I feel insulted whenever someone claims that there is no meaning of life without God. So yeah, I guess we just have different ways of looking at the world, right?

Quantum mechanics does not say that. QM is a bit subtle... there's all the business about stuff only having certain properties when they are measured, but there is more too it than people usually talk about. Particular always have all of there properties of the time. They can have some quantum state, which is precise in all that it says. The problem is that the stuff we like to observe, the stuff we like to measure... it doesn't - - well.. lets just say that it depends on what we measure first. Stuff that seems independent, like position and momentum, turns out not to be independent, and so by measuring one, we stuff up the other. It's not that they didn't have the properties in the first place, it's just that those properties are fundamentally in a kind of conflict.
Look I find this difficult to explain this without reverting to technical mumbo jumbo... The point is that just that I don't think your #4 is really true. Maybe Evert or someone will say a bit more about this to anyone who is interested.

(note, the world could be "a simulation", but I don't think QM is evidence of this)

{"name":"593101","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/7\/474ccd59ae9beeb4f2c64ecc59ff6b56.png","w":718,"h":367,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/7\/474ccd59ae9beeb4f2c64ecc59ff6b56"}

This would make perfect sense if things were stagnant or the speed of light was relative, but neither of these are true as far as I know. How could something that happened 13.7Gyrs ago be just reaching us now if at the time of the event we were not 13.7Glys away but only an immeasurably small distance? As soon The Big Bang occurred, light emitted which would hold a picture of the event should have immediately passed all galaxies in the universe as they were all starting at the same point and moving slower than light. I can't see how it matters that the all were expanding away from each other simultaneously, as that would not slow down light in the least.

I don't feel this has been sufficiently explained at all. I apologize if I am being just being a dolt.

Not quite. There is a magnetic field around Earth which has poles and makes the compass work (but not at geographical poles), and while you could draw the grid of longitudes and latitudes arbitrarily, it makes a lot of sense to have the sun's height at midday of a given day be the same along a latitude (and longitudes crossing them at right angles).

There has also been expeditions to both poles and I believe people have walked up to and past them.

At a magnetic pole, the needle of the compass would probably spin around or point to some random direction as indeed any direction you'd face could be called north (or south).

There is a question that religious people tend to avoid answering: what is the meaning of saving your soul and going to paradise?.

Christianity has not told us a great deal about what happens in paradise. You get to live in peace for ever, but that's all we know. Does that mean that we stop being curious? we stop being creative?

And even if we can live our after life like this life, excluding the misery, what is the point of that?

I think QM says exactly that. Quantum uncertainty is another thing, I am talking about the collapse of the wave function.

It seems like the universe is not rendered (i.e. remains a probability) until observed.

Of course, this might be an illusion, and QM may go away if we can observe particles from other dimensions. And then perhaps we can find what binds particles together in quantum entanglement.

I think everyone prefers some kind of "afterlife" than obliviousness, or the fact that after death there is nothing left, you consciousness ceases to exist, to never even experience the "peace" of a paradise.

@Matthew. Youre argument that god has always existed is weird. I mean, lets say that 'god' would really exist. I think that if he would exist, then he would be a being that lives in another dimension. But that doesent mean that he wouldnt have to be created...

Its really meaningless talking about it really. As we will never know. Well, you already do, I guess. You have faith. I wont have that untill I die and see the man myself. ( IF I see him ) And kick him in the groin because of the mess hes left Earth to become!

Consider single-celled organisms. What is their purpose to live? Do you expect there to be a Heaven waiting for them? You shouldn't consider humans a special case (at least for the sake of this argument; that is a religious belief, not a scientific one). In other words, the point of living is living. As I said before, it is programmed into our brains and that's all there is.

I want to know how the universe was created to better understand it and, therefore, better exploit it. The more we know, the more powerful we become and the easier life gets.

It would also shut up the religious people if we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe was in fact formed through physical laws with no evidence for a super-being, but that's just a bonus.

What drives me are my dreams, aspirations, emotions, needs, wants, and Coca-Cola.

I'm well aware that I'm not in control. Probably moreso than believers because they believe in an all-powerful super-being that recognizes them and watches over them, etc. Atheists know they are on their own in this vast universe. If you really look at the big picture (i.e. the universe), Earth and mankind, etc., have no significance. If we die off will the universe cease to exist? I expect that the universe would continue to happen without us.

The code doesn't represent humans in this context; the program/software would. It's the actual execution that would represent humans. However, using this same example, it suggests that God would need a creator and God's creator would need a creator, etc., etc., etc., etc., forever.

I still haven't seen anything suggest that space changes.

I took the time to consider what Heaven could possible be and I arrived on nothing. I've already experienced Heaven on Earth. It didn't last very long, but I've experienced it nonetheless. There is nothing any God could give me to give me that feeling forever. There is no Heaven.

Besides, what are feelings anyway? Those are something believed to be interpreted by our brain. Without a brain there would be no feelings.

I totally agree with bamccaig here. We are animals. Why we live? To SURVIVE! Many people just dont see this. We put ourselfs above animals. The basic goal of life is still to reproduce and insure the survival of the species.

Oh no. There is no god. Let me get a rope and finish it all.

Maybe Cristhians refuse to admit there is not GOD because they dont want to admit that there is nothing after death. Except complet voidness. They cant live whitout guidance from a big man with a long beard and sandals.

You say this with such certainty. You have a lot of faith in your belief. You are no different from one who has faith in a different belief, which you appear to be trying to insult. Why the arrogance?

I pictured Merlin at the end of The Sword in the Stone when I read that. I do not view him as a god, however.

I pictured Marvin. In the end of So Long, And Thanks for the Fish.

But they're not. There is no difference if giant pink elephants exist "outside" the Universe or not. No interactions with our Universe is possible, and thus there are no effects or measurements possible. There is no way to confirm (or deny) the existence of pink elephants, or pink unicorns "outside".

Occam's razor still applies though: the simplest consistent explanation is that there doesn't exist an outside, and thus trying to reason about it is meaningless.

As I mentioned earlier, if there happens to be, at some point in the future, some measurable effect of pink unicorns from "outside" the Universe interacting with us, it would only be because our model of the Universe was ill-defined and did not include those pink unicorns to begin with. At that point, said pink unicorns would be inside the Universe, like everything else.

Not at all!

Going North is, by definition, heading towards the North Pole. Once you are at the North Pole, there is no more North to go to. Asking "what's North of the North Pole" is meaningless. No such point could exist. It's like asking "What's a positive number smaller than 0?"

We already did.

"Science" is commonly taken to be "what scientists do" and explains things correctly. Actually, the scientific method simply says that you come up with a theory to fit the facts, and see if it can predict what happens next.

You can check on the claimed period of pendulums, or chemical reactions, and a host of other things, what's hard is to build yourself a telescope big enough to grab a spectrum from a galaxy a couple billion light years away.

People don't have time to check on even the simple things (such as pendulums) so they have to take some stuff on faith.

And science has the advantage that whoever can prove a theory wrong gains fame and fortune.

Mathematics is "just a theory", but who's going to argue that 2 + 2 != 4?

The big bang is controversial, but it's much more likely to be modified as our knowledge grows instead of being thrown out entirely. Einsteins theories didn't make classical physics entirely wrong, but modified them slightly.

I heard scientists saying we use only a fraction of our brain's power, we could very well speak through thoughts in a thousand years. It may seem impossible now, but so many things were thought to be impossible in the past, and now are so common...

I am not sure that we, as humans, have experienced all the feelings we are able to, just as I don't think we have experienced all the illnesses we can suffer, in example.

That's rubbish. Human's evolution has come to its end. Evolution is the only mechanism that can give us mind reading (besides Allegro 5). And there's nothing in the environment that would demand it, making evolution develop it for us. And when scientists say that we only use a fraction of our brains, they probably mean they understand only a fraction of our brain activity. Again, there is a reason why evolution gave us this big brains.

Actually, 2+2=4 is axiomatically true (Peano axioms, etc), so proving it wrong would be quite a challenge.

Urban legend.

I think some famous pseudoscientist did say this, but it was based on incomplete data. For instance, computer vision systems are pointing out just how much unexpected computation is required to recognize, say, a childs toy top.

Kind of like the guy who "proved" steamships would never cross the Atlantic, but he based his calculations on wood fuel, not coal.

I'm quite sure I saw something on the news recently about a man who had most (I think it was upwards of 70%, but I am likely just making up this figure) of his brain destroyed over a long period of time by a tumor (or something of that sort) who could still function quite normally, albeit with an IQ of 70.

Of course, this isn't to say that we use only a fraction of our brain, only that the brain is quite good at making up for lost components.

That was the point.

So, there is, to you, a real difference between the existence of something that has no interaction with anything at all and the same thing not existing? What does the distinction consist of?

Well, to me it looks like you're saying the things right but without grasping their full meaning. For instance,

No!
Why? Because light takes 13.7Gyr to cross those 13.7Gly. That's the very definition of what a lightyear means. And this is so because the speed of light is finite and the same for all observers.

Tune your radio to 160.2 GHz.

Because the universe expands. Try asking the question backwards: how long has light travelled that reaches us now from a point that is 13.7Glyr distant? Answer: 13.7Gyr, or the age of the universe.

The universe expands with the speed of light, that's why. Well, and there were no galaxies to begin with anyway, but that's orthogonal to the point. Note though, cosmology in the very early universe is very uncertain and speculative.

Not at all. No one said this is easy, or even well understood. That's why some of the brightest people in the world are working on this and trying to understand it. I wouldn't claim to understand all the intricacies myself. It's hard.

It doesn't, but if it works for you, fine. What is meant by "the collapse of a wavefunction" is very ill defined. It's not clear. There was a recent popular article in New Scientist on the topic. Very speculative, but interesting too.

Anyway, time to get packing.

In the eighties, scientologists(evil) used a phrase similar to that in their advertisements to get people(victims) to pay them money so that they'd learn how to use the other 95% of their unused brainpower(get brainwashed and spent the rest of their life earning more money for scientology).

I will. When working in the group, 2+2=1.

(My apologies to anyone who is more familiar with group theory than I if I made a mistake. It has been two years since my last course, though I am taking another one this semester.)

Edit: The formula tags need to generate transparently colored images. Either that or it's a case of IE not obeying it...

I'm with relpatseht on this one, the bun analogy implies that there is a physical difference between outside of the universe and empty space within the universe. Bob's answer also implied that it is more of a mathematical location that couldn't exist until the universe expanded.
However when this is likened to not being able to detect pink elephants then it's more of a conceptual difference, it's outside the universe as we know or can detect.

This makes a big difference to the problem, you either believe that there was infinite unknown volume or there simply wasn't any volume to fill and expand into.

I would argue that either way light would have past us so it would still be impossible to see light from the big bang anyway but my personal view is that at the big bang point in time there was already infinite volume for the universe to expand into.

Just as I can believe that there was a before the big bang and that there was infinite time I can just as easily believe that there was infinite volume.

I personally find it hard to get my head around the idea that the volume of area that the universe was about to expand into didn't geometrically exist in the same way that there is no point more north than the north pole.

I would agree with the analogy if it were describing a point beyond infinity but not describing a point one foot from the big bang.

For all we know, everything that we can detect that appears to be moving away from that point, and everything far beyond our means to detect that is moving away from that point and every bit of evidence that leads us to believe that the universe is expanding from that point is all a tiny mote in comparison to the infinite volume of the universe as I understand the term.

It might be a definition problem, to me universe means one everything (including the unknown) to others it seems to mean known detectable space/pink elephants/whatever.

Regardless, light, if there was any, at the start of the big bang would have emitted in the shape of a sphere expanding at the speed of light, we would be inside that sphere so how could we see the outside of it coming towards us?

This is the crux of it for me, it's like saying that if a bus was traveling down the street at 30 mph (at constant speed and direction) towards us, then 1000 hours ago it must have been 30,000 miles away, well yes if that's where and when it started out.

If you saw light that old then you would be right, but since you can't it's moot. You could as easily double the age of the universe by saying if you saw light from 27.4Gyr, blah blah blah ...

Why do people like to say that atheists have faith in something? How does it require faith to not have faith in something?

I just don't get it. Does it make you uncomfortable or something?

Atheists have faith in science.

To draw a parallel between science and religion, which makes it easier to explain how the difference between the two is largely moot.

From the American Heritage Dictionary:

</li>
When I used the term I was referring to the first two definitions. You do not have to match all possible definitions of a word when using it in a sentence. I would say that the quote which I had referenced adequately displayed a strong belief in something without proof. That is, unless Vanneto has died and has seen what happens. The idea I was pushing is that neither side has evidence that they are right.

Again from the American Heritage Dictionary:

</li>

As I had always understood it, and which the dictionary seems to back me up on, by saying that you are an atheist you are saying that you specifically believe there are no gods. How can you say that this is not a belief lacking evidence? Do you have evidence that there are no gods?

Wow, too many friggin' posts.

Isn't it self-explanitory? In any case, it is interacting in some way, because you keep saying things like not having a theoretical reference point that could exist outside the Big Bang. Why not? What's stopping you?

The part you italicize is the part that convinces me you're wrong. One of us must be missing something here.

And the bits of universe forging the new ground is the light, I'd think.

If the Big Bang was just "everywhere" and light that left it 13.7Gly ago can still reach us, we should be able to see the thing on any clear night I imagine.

I'm not talking about COBE and that stuff. Evert said "Remember, looking to the distant universe means looking backwards in time since the speed of light is finite. If we could look back far enough, we could see the big bang itself (though highly redshifted)." I want to know by what logic this could possibly happen.

@Harry Carey:
What we have here is a difference in terminology.

I certainly put trust in science, for experiments I haven't performed, results I haven't personally witnessed. In that sense, I have faith, in the people that performed the experiments and made the observations, and the people who checked their work and subjected it to critique.

So I take it back. Yes, I do have faith. I'm not sure if that's the same sort of faith we're talking about with the supernatural, though. The faith I put into a hair product not burning off all my hair is evaluated immediately. Science thrives on experimentation, but religion you can only evaluate after you're dead, and therefore unable to share any result.

It might be a little misleading to call that sort of evaluable faith, "faith". Even for one-shot stuff like experimental drugs, there is some data such as the fact that the drug companies don't make money off of killing their customers, doctors generally don't try to kill their patients, etc...

Still, just like with the experimental drug, none of us patients were there when the drug was being created and tested, so we're more or less free to make our own decision. Myself, I'm not about to make any assertion on it, positive or negative, without evidence, so I'm sticking with the default position.

The one leap of faith I make is accepting that what I witness (while in my right mind, at least) is reality, and that the other people I encounter share a similar experience. I must accept it, or else go insane and create my own reality.

As for the definition of atheism, see http://atheism.about.com/od/atheismquestions/a/defining.htm

Or:

An atheist can have belief (even a belief that there is no God/Gods), but it's not a prerequisite to join the club.

I, personally, am what you'd call an agnostic atheist or a weak atheist. I don't believe in God, Invisible Pink Unicorns, Zeus, Thor, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster because I haven't seen any evidence. If I did, I'd accept it.

~~~

Edit: Hah, check out the first article in the Common Myths about Atheism and Atheists section...

Atheism is a Denial of God That Requires Faith

You guys are STILL beating this dead horse?

Note he didn't specify Z₃ so I'd assume N or Z. Regardless, I prefer Church Numerals.

http://www.cs.usm.maine.edu/class/cos370/handouts/lambda/node9.html

Uh... welcome to a.cc?

Atheists don't have to have faith in science.

Atheists don't need faith because their beliefs rest on logical proof or material evidence. Scientists need to explain themselves before their theories are accepted and the theories are only accepted so long as they make sense and work. Religion expects you to just believe because some people told you so...

Could somebody please explain to me where the notion that the universe is expanding came from? That doesn't make sense to me. The universe is everywhere so there's no need to expand. I also disagree with the ability to see the Big Bang that resulted in our current galaxy and others. Based on the fact that light travels way faster than anything else in the universe it would undoubtedly have passed our galaxy long ago.

Agreed. Every time I check back again there's WAY too much to read, let alone respond to...

I'd just like to add that the geographical poles have special significance as well. They define the axis of the earth's rotation. So north and south aren't completely arbitrary. (although, which one we choose to put on the top of our maps is completely arbitrary.)

I still disagree about QM saying that stuff doesn't have properties until they are observed. Actually, as it turns out, I'll probably be giving a talk at uni about quantum computing at the end of next week. In that talk I'd cover some of the subtleties that we're talking about; because those subtleties are vital for understanding what a QC can or can't do. For a start, if these things were only probabilities, then a QC would be no more useful than a classical (non-quantum) computer. In my field of research, I find it much more useful to discard the idea of a "wave function collapse" and instead just use the idea that "measurement" is the quantum system becoming entangled with me.

As for "finding what binds particles together in quantum entanglement"; I don't feel like that is really a meaningful quest. Quantum entanglement is just a normal everyday part of quantum mechanics. Why quantum mechanics is real (or not real, as the case may be) is an interesting philosophical question, but I feel that at this stage it isn't a scientific one.

I've got two more things I'd like to comment on:
1) Mathematics is not really "just a theory". Everything in maths is absolutely true. It is defined to be so. Maths is never ever ever wrong. A proof is a proof and a theorem is a theorem - that means they are always correct (unless someone actually stuffed up their calculations). The only uncertainty in maths appears when we try to apply it to the real world. For example: 2+2=4, always, that's pure maths and so it is unquestionably true. But 2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples; that is not pure maths any more. We are now talking about physical things, apples, and so this is a physical theory may need to be tested.

2) It is true that people "have faith" in science. There is no proof that says science is the way to find truth in the world. There is no theorem that says the the laws of the universe are not just completely random, or even designed to confuse us. But science does have a lot to back it up. Unlike many other belief systems, science is able to make useful testable predictions about the world. Science apparently works. I have faith that my microwave will heat my food, and that my bicycle we go faster if I peddle faster, and that my light bulb will turn on when I flick the switch - not because I believe in microwaves, bikes, and light bulbs; but because I have faith in science.

Simple. Look at far-away galaxies for a while, and try to measure their distance from us. No matter where you look, galaxies are not only moving away from us, but they are doing so ever faster. In fact, some really far galaxies appear to move away from us even faster than the speed of light. And thus, they exit our (ever expanding) bubble of percievable light

How is that possible? Simple: The Universe expands. In fact, space itself expands. Two immovable objects, with no momentum will still move apart given enough distance. That's because there's new space that is created and pushes out the "old" space such that distances increase. That effect is very very slight. You need billions of light-years of distance to notice it. And yet, it's there, and is measurable.

Wikipedia has a good article on the topic.

Not true, if only because of inflation. Imagine there is a flashlight pointed towards you, say ~1m away. Now imagine that the flashlight has an inifite battery so it can be kept turned on forever.

Now, what happens if that flashlight that's right next to you (say 1m away) goes through the initial phase of the early Universe? Well, assuming that it survives, you'll see that after 1 second, it'll be about ~10^26 meters away. That's faster than the speed of light. But yet, nothing really moved. New space was just created in between you and the flashlight. So now the light from the flashlight looks very redshifted, as individual photons take a lot longer (in fact, more and more time) to get to you. Even though they left the flashlight just after they were emitted and just before inflation, they'll still take ~10 billion years to reach you.

Fun!

(That said, the expansion factor of 10^26 occured for only 10^-33 seconds, so the Universe was still very small (10^-25 meters?) at the time and thus couldn't fit either you or a flashlight)

Youtube hosts a nifty video on the topic.

There is no outside. Thus, trying to reason about an outside is pointless. No such thing exists.

If the metric expands then light that is past us and is moving away from us is still further past us and is still moving away?

ed. I guess the question is, does light stay in the same space that is expanding, if not then the speed of light would constantly be affected by this metric change.

But isn't afterlife as pointless as this life?

Well, particles do not have a definitive position before they are observed, they have a probability. The double slit experiment clearly proves that. If it was otherwise, then the pattern on the surface behind the two slits would not be randomly constructed (assuming the electron firing gun is perfectly aligned, of course).

Perhaps now, but what about the future? perhaps a whole system of physics lies below QM, one that explains entanglement.

Yeah, does anyone know the answer to this? does matter expand proportionally to the universe? what about space between particles?

Thanks, Bob.

Maybe, but longer!

It's not the same as faith. A preacher once tried to argue that to me. He said that it's faith to believe that when you drop an apple it will fall towards the Earth. It's not that I have faith that it will fall. I know it will fall. I've never seen or heard of a case where the apple didn't fall (assuming the experiment is carried out correctly) and until I see the apple not fall it's proven to fall. For that reason, I know as well as anybody knows anything that the apple will fall. I am far more sure the apple will fall than any Christian can be sure there is a God. Why? Because I've seen the apple fall many times before. No Christian can honestly say they've seen God.

What if a bird intercepts the apple? Then you were wrong, so you couldn't possibly "know" the apple would fall, because it didn't. You thought one way without having witnessed the actual event. And that can be construed as faith. It's hardly on par with religious faith, though.

You're twisting it. it would be fairer to say you can't honestly say you've seen gravity. You can't lecture other people on what they've seen either. I don't know any Christians that have "seen God" but I know many who have seen and experienced some extraordinary stuff (and have been in that boat myself). I'm not going into details because we've done that thread and all people do is yell at me for it (since, you know, they're such experts). But back to the issue; yes, a lot of science is faith. I have faith in electrons. I have faith black holes exist. I have faith in a lot of scientific stuff that not one person here can give me a lick of concrete proof for (like the stuff on the page in gnolam's first post), but would call me a fool for not believing in. That's just how it is.

I need a reason not to be able to do it, since it became relevant to the discussion. The metric expansion of space is interesting and I guess that's one reason why people don't believe in empty space outside the universe (although really "empty" space in our universe is hardly empty with all the light, radiation, dark energy, etc supposedly out there so maybe outside the universe is just a lack of that) but almost everything about that seems based on speculation so it's rough convincing myself to care.

To clarify, I can honestly say I've seen the effects of gravity work when expected. In other words, gravity describes a force that can be observed and tested.

Nobody can honestly say they've seen the effects of God. Some people can assume, as you seem to have, that certain happenings were acts of God, but without any real proof or evidence you don't really know with any certainty that it was God.

Often when 'miraculous' things happen religious people immediately credit their God. It's really just a way of justifying their beliefs because really there was never any evidence or indication that God did it. Scientists generally take a more cautious approach and look for a way to explain why or how the miracle happened and science often has an explanation that doesn't involve God.

Electrons are able to be tested and observed. It is not faith, rather it is knowledge. It may be flawed knowledge, but it is still knowledge. We can harness electrons to do work for us so they must exist.

Today's science doesn't claim to be absolutely correct. It's a best explanation that works to an extent. It's always being tested and revised.

I don't know why people always get hung up playing with words.

The theistic argument that "atheists have faith too" is just missing the point. Of course atheists have faith in scientists in a similar way that religious people have faith in religious leaders. But who cares?

You have to follow the chain of faith to the end point. Ultimately, theists have faith that a god exists without scientific, testable proof. You might have anecdotal or circumstantial evidence, but you cannot test god. And more importantly, you cannot prove god to be false.

There is a stark contrast between "knowing God exists" and "knowing an apple will fall toward the ground." The former is a feeling you have; you have faith that God exists because of things you've seen. If one good, "unexplainable" thing happens, you feel that it is proof that God exists. But if a hundred bad, "unexplainable" things happen, you don't quit believing in God. There is no way for someone to disprove God to you. That is faith.

Regarding the latter, you can believe that an apple will fall toward the ground due to gravity. And you will always believe it to be true until someone proves otherwise. Even with less trivial examples (say electrons), the same thing is true; there is scientific reasoning behind believing they exist, and if someone proves it to be false, you'll stop believing it. That is not the same kind of faith as in the previous paragraph.

So to say "atheists have faith too" is just a stupid statement that doesn't make a religious faith any more "scientific" or credible.

I agree with what Matthew was just saying (about it not meaning a lot to say that "atheists have faith too".)

However, I still contest this claim that we know that the apple will fall. Ok, sure, we can be pretty damn confident, because we've seen it a thousand times. So in casual terms we can know that it will fall. But I am adamant in my claim that we can never be certain. As as been pointed out, apples don't always fall. Something might catch it, there may be a something else holding it up, we may be in a free falling reference frame... etc.
Scientists frequently get things wrong. The apple doesn't always fall (so to speak). Our predictions are only good when the theory include all of the relevant effects. We can never ever know something physical with absolute certainty. The best we can do is increase our confidence through experimentation, larger statistics, and stronger understanding.

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." - A. Einstein

One of the beauties of science is that when counter evidence is found (when the apple doesn't fall), the counter evidence is embraced and examined and used to improve the theories so that they can once again hold for all cases. Things don't get brushed under the carpet. What scientists believe today is not something written in a 1000 year old book; it is a continually improving set of theories that are capable of precisely describing all manner of phenomenon. Things like "super natural phenomenon" and "magic" are essentially none existent by definition. If something happens, then it counts as 'natural' as must be taken into account in scientific theories. If something does not happen then it just doesn't happen.

There have been countless surprises in science. So I would not claim that I "know" that the apple will fall. (Maybe that's not even what was meant when you guys were saying 'know' anyway. Oh well.)

-- edit --
I forgot to address this:

I agree that particles don't have a definite position before they are 'observed', but I disagree that they are actually just probabilities. Each particle can have a definite and precise quantum state (which typically will not involve a "definite position"); it's just the measurement outcomes that are probabilistic.

Obviously if the experiment is contaminated then the results may vary, but that doesn't change the fact that gravity is still pulling on the apple (and the Earth) and that is a proven fact. Could it theoretically change? Yes. Does that make it any less correct? No.

There is no God. If there was a God he would have destroyed this thread long ago......

See, Matthew? You are no God.

You're fighting definitions at this point. Why isn't there a positive number less than 0? Why is that a meaningless question?

Since we seem to have trouble distinguishing science and faith, please consult the following flowchart:

{"name":"2007-01-15%20--%20science%20vs%20faith.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/0\/50439e94a3eb5b905e09a4de3fa77b28.png","w":894,"h":700,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/0\/50439e94a3eb5b905e09a4de3fa77b28"}

If particles don't have a definitive position before they are 'observed', then you do you know that each particle has a definite and precise quantum state? each time you measure a particle, you get a seemingly random answer within the probability range of its function.

I have to insist on particles not be 'bullets' until observed. Do you have a link to a document which says that particles have a definitive and precise quantum state?

There is a difference between believing into something because you observed some effect and believing into something without having observed some effect.

We have not seen gravity, but we have seen its effect and can repeatedly demonstrate it in experiments. We also have formed a concrete mathematical theory which backs up the experiments.

On the other hand, we have nothing on God. No experiments, no effects, nothing. Just the word of people.

Extraordinary things may happen to us, but it does not mean they have to be attributed to God. Primitive people saw thunders and they thought "wow! extraordinary! it must be God", but we all know now what a thunder is, and we can make thunders ourselves.

It's a meaningless question because they're oxymorons. There's nothing about what I'm asking that's an oxymoron, except some people are taking for granted that it is anyway. I'm just curious why. I'm assuming it must be an oxymoron in some way for some speculated part of the wider theory to be true, but I was hoping someone could elaborate.

The former I'll grant you since you can't experiment on God so it's neither here nor there, but saying "no effect" is moronic, since you know well and good that you can't prove a negative. And 100% of known history is based on "word of people"; I don't see whining about that ...

Where is this documented, anyway? More dumb trolling ...

Anyway, I'm going to QFT Matthew here and leave. Religion shouldn't even be coming into this ....

Axilmar, about the definite quantum state thing, that's exactly what wave-functions and state-vectors are. They completely describe the quantum state. But even if we know the quantum state, we don't necessarily know what we'll get when we try to measure something. That's just one of the weird things about quantum mechanics. However, for any given state-vector, there are particular measurements for which the result can be predicted with absolute certainty - that's part of what I mean when I say that things have a precise quantum state.
For example, a particle in a "momentum eigenstate" will have some certain momentum but uncertain position. Conversely, a particle in a position eigenstate will have a certain position, but uncertain momentum.

The reason I'm asserting that these things have a precise quantum state and that they aren't just a bunch of probabilities is that I want to draw a clear distinction between a superposition and a mixture. I don't want to go into any more detail than I have already. I don't think any of this is relevant to the topic of this thread. Also, I won't give a specific reference. I'm confident enough that your favourite QM textbook would support what I'm saying.

You are missing one critical issue when you're comparing the scientific element of gravity, to the concept of God -- in relative terms, gravity is a simple act of two objects being pulled together whilst God is supposedly an entity of immense power and intelligence. Intelligence brings in many, many more variables into a test.

While some people who say "God does not exist." have their reasons which are valid; I think that God may just be operating on a person-to-person basis (from reasons which I wont say).

Firstly, history is (partly) based on the word of the people who witnessed this or that historical event, and secondly, their word is not taken for granted but compared critically against other sources, archaelogical finds etc. Historians know well that the first-hand sources may be wrong, biased, outright lying etc.

Of course, as with other sciences, there can only be pretty good understanding of the past, but no ultimate truth.

Ok, some very quick answers (I won't have time to say everything I'd want to)

That's the thing. The light comes from objects 13.7Gly distant. It took that long to reach us because the speed of light is constant. Which part didn't you get?

Yes, you are. I'll ask you a simple question: how long does light (given the constancy of the speed of light) take to travel 13.7Gly?

No, it's not. Why'd you think I asked? Think about it: if there is no measurable difference between something existing and something not existing, on what grounds would you claim its existence (note, this is philosophy rather than physics proper)?

You mean, not being able to refer to points outside the universe or before the big bang? There is a reason: the edge of the universe is an event horizon, the big bang is a singular point in space-time. Just as no law in physics can tell you what the inside of a black hole looks like, no law in physics can tell you what the outside of the universe looks like.

And you'd be correct. You can see it on the sky every day. Well, you could if you could see the afore-mentioned microwave background radiation, which is what 13.7Gyr of cosmic expansion has red-shifted the radiation into.

Anyway, a full explanation with all the details filled in of the above probably requires a full course on general relativity and cosmology, something I am neither qualified to give nor have time for, least of all for typing it in on these forums.

By definition, the Universe includes everything. Thus, asking what's outside the Universe is meaningless. There is no outside. If there were an "outside", it would actually be inside the Universe, by definition.

You can't prove the positive either. Or formulate a way to test it. In other words, it is untestable. Unprovable. Which gravity is not.

Zeus was the god of thunder.

Primitive people still worship the sun as a god.

They completely describe the probability function of the quantum state.

That's after measuring the particle, after the collapse of the wave function. What I originally talked about is about the state of matter before the collapse of the wave function: matter is in a state of existing/not existing, until observed; hence the famous cat "experiment". Which is similar to back face culling in computer games: the engine does not render all the detail until required.

QM, the origins of the universe, peoples' opinion about the universe, are all related.

When we are talking about the universe, we do not know if it really includes everything. It certainly includes everything made out of matter we know. In the Matrix, people do not know there is something that exists out of the universe they know.

The bit about the direction of this big bang light coming towards us, fine with the time and distance, I don't recall mention the vector bit (maybe I should re-read)

I'm assuming that the metric stuff was about light travelling towards us at the time of the big bang suddenly became very far away from us due to huge universal inflation and that this light is still travelling towards us today

I was under the impression they didn't directly measure the distances of galaxies, but used the redshift to calculate the distance based on the expansion rate. They can use apparent angular size and brightness in a statistical way to show that the small and dim (and supposedly farther away) galaxies have a larger redshift.

And I remember reading about some galaxy that appeared to move faster than light, but someone else showed how this galaxy could be moving away from us at such an angle that the observed position moved faster than the speed of light.

That's the problem. We still need to define "everything". Some use the words Universe and everything when they mean all matter. And all radiation. Big Bang supposedly created all that. And all that is spreading and expanding. And all that is matter and radiation and whatnot. But inbetween and outside? Is there just radiationless and matterless space there? Well, there is always radiation, since they've measured the 13 Gyears old light, which obviously is seen everywhere in our Universe (if you eat a lot of herring, blueberries and carrots). Or does the super-everything just curve around the Big-Bang-matter-radiation-stuff in such a way that there actually is no space outside - and no outside? Since space actually is curved around matter, it would make sense that there is no space outside the matter.

I guess this is a meaningless discussion as long as we don't get fully the theories of Einstein. F.i. it's more or less meaningless to imagine something "outside", because we can't get there now to check it out. If we travelled with infinite speed, it would still take 13 Gyears. So we would be late and the damn edge would escape the same speed as we'd approach it. Even if it felt like we would get there this very second.

How does it have a shape? How is it expanding? Maybe matter is just shrinking, or shedding material off its atoms to form dark energy.

Well, now we're not talking about light anymore. Now we're just back to the CMB.

Yeah, the parallels are strong, aren't they?

<snip response to axilmar> nm, said I was leaving ...

Konstantin did it in the 4th century, and we followed him, by substituting the Sabbath with the Sun's day. I believe the historic truth really is that he did it to accomodate Christianity to some Sun cult. Or vice versa. But whatever the historic reason was, as a Christian I have no problem celebrating Sunday as the day when Jesus resurrected.

_{* According to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation}

I know this was a page or so back, but...

The apple never falls to the ground. Don't you guys know anything about relativity? The ground falls to the apple!

The fact that these things don't have complete explanations yet does not mean that you cannot reason about them. For 300 years, gravity had no explanation about its nature. That didn't stop Newton from forming a theory with very successful applications that, in absence of large speeds or large masses, is equivalent to General Relativity.

Umm, CMB is light. It's entirely composed of photons.

I'm fairly sure we had gravity a lot longer than 300 years before Newton.

..... I'm conpuzzled now.

Okay, so on what basis did the scientists predict what the CMB would look like before they found it?

What I've been trying to say is that there is more to a quantum state than a bunch of probabilities. The wave function is not a probability function.

Also, Schrödinger's cat doesn't have a lot to do with particles existing and not existing at the same time. It's about the cat being in a superposition of dead and alive at the same time (ie. not an eigenstate of the "life" operator.)

One is a definition. The other is referring to a scientific theory.

Wikipedia to the rescue!

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBE

Can we reason about it or can't we? Word games ftl; you're better than that.

.... well that was disappointly underwhelming. I mean, it's fine and all as studies and theory and that go, but the predictions for the temperature/radiation fluctuated wildly, and it still doesn't give reasons for the most recent prediction before COBE (the only one that matched). From the way it's flaunted like a huge triumph of science I guess I expected more. Thanks for the link anyway, though.

Cosmology is so cool

Indeed.

What I am trying to say is that, the fact that we don't know exactly were particles are and what they are doing, unless required, seems a lot like not rendering surfaces in 3d games until they are required to be visible. It's like the universe saves computational resources, which is a hint towards the notion that the universe is some sort of simulation.

From a philosophical point of view, the universe need not have that behavior. Why should there be a collapse of the wave function? the universe could have operated the same way as now if particles were like bullets, i.e. all their attributes (momentum, spin etc) could be measured precisely at the same time. Why particles are waves until observed?

There are still many questions unanswered, but to get back to the original topic, for me, the fact that people can say the Sun revolves around Earth means that modern society has failed in very fundamental tasks.

Don't you get it? Everything MUST be unified! Waves and particles must be the same thing! Gravity and electromagnetism must be the same thing! And so on!

It doesn't matter how many horrible hacks you have to put in to make it so. Your code must be unnecessarily generic!

Oh and it's extra-cool to use lazy evaluation.

The universe would be a very different place without QM. There are loads of phenomenon which are only made possible by QM. It is possible to imagine some other universe that didn't follow QM, but it would just be different from ours. I can also imagine a universe which has no gravity, or no quarks.. they're just different.
Actually, one of the first times "quantum mechanics" came into science was when people were trying to describe the light radiated by hot objects. The model at the time had a big problem in that it predicted that basically anything would radiate an infinite amount of energy in the form of ultraviolet light. Max Planck got around this problem by postulating that the radiated light had to come out in discrete chunks.. Quantum mechanics saved the day; and that wasn't the only time. Here's another quick example: an atom consists of a small nucleus with a bunch of electrons zipping around it. Normal electrodynamics would suggest that the electrons should (very quickly) lose energy and spiral into the nucleus, but they never do. Niels Bohr helped fix up this problem by just assuming that the energy levels of an atom must be quantised. My point is that the universe without QM would need to change a bunch of other stuff as well or it just wouldn't work.

Since no one payed attention to me last time I'll say it again: the sun does revolve around the earth. (although it's pretty clear that the intended answer in the game show was the moon) -edit- I wasn't the first to say that.

Define "it". We can reason about scientific theories. We can argue about definitions, and we can reason with definitions, but we cannot scientifically reason about definitions.

If X includes all, then trying to positulate that there exists a Y outside of X is a pointless waste of time. There isn't, by definition. If you find such a Y, then it must necessarily be part of X.

The Big Bang Theory was postulated in 1931. So you can ignore the data points before that. For the others, they're all dependent on the age of the Universe, modulo some uncertainty. You'll notice that some of the numbers assume a 3 billion year old Universe, which is much younger than the current estimates.

The estimated temperatures converge after 1957, when the Universe's age was measured in the right order of magnitude.

Oh, absolutely. I did not say that though. I said that the universe could still be the same if particles did not exhibit wave behavior. This behavior hint to some strange philosophical conclusions, not unlike the Matrix.

Well, from one point of view, it does. We can have both at the same time (the Sun revolving around Earth and Earth revolving around the Sun, depending on viewpoint). In fact, almost everything revolves around everything. If you stand on one celestial body, you will see the sky rotate around you. But technically, it does not. It is the Earth that rotates around the Sun. If you watch the whole movement from a distance, you will see Earth rotating around the Sun. And that was the answer required in this case.

Meh and yawn. The universe was here long before we assigned a definition to the word "universe". I could ask the exact same thing I asked with different words if you liked. Wouldn't change what I said. Bottom line is if Evert is going to give me grief then something I said goes against theory, I want to know why. If you can't reason about it, why dispute it?

But.. But.. He is a god. Apparently a merciful one as he did not exercise his power of post-modification given to him by the greek god of the internets (See its deity).

I do believe you now owe him a sacrifice. Oh and you can't claim Kibiz0r as your sacrifice, I already sacrificed him.

And he wouldn't accept you as a sacrifice because of the const char* thread

With this post this thread beats this one as the longest thread I've ever seen on A.cc. Just out of curiosity, what's the record for the longest thread ever?

Probably this one: http://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/512601

Cool!

The second longest I remember would probably be the ChristmasHack '05 thread, at 403 posts: http://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/551991

Team Chess had 580, though.