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Astrophysicists Announce Major Discovery Of Big Bang's Smoking Gun (1 Viewer)

Andy Dufresne

Andy Dufresne

Footballguy
Link

Scientists have found the first direct evidence that the universe expanded incredibly quickly in the microseconds after the Big Bang.


They found these signatures of cosmic inflation as gravitational waves from the Big Bang from the cosmic microwave background radiation of our universe.

A press release from NASA says:

Astronomers are announcing today that they have acquired the first direct evidence that gravitational waves rippled through our infant universe during an explosive period of growth called inflation. This is the strongest confirmation yet of cosmic inflation theories, which say the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times, in less than the blink of an eye.

The major announcement came from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Here's the technical data and papers that go along with the announcement from the group at the Bicep (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) project.

"This work offers new insights into some of our most basic questions: Why do we exist? How did the universe begin?," astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who wasn't a member of the study team said in a statement about the Harvard-Smithsonian research. "These results are not only a smoking gun for inflation, they also tell us when inflation took place and how powerful the process was."

Researchers will be giving a press conference, streamed live starting at 11:55 a.m. EDT at this link and this back up link, though neither are working for us right now. From twitter, it's looking like they've started the press conference early, though we can't confirm that.

As the rumors have been saying, the discovery has to do with finding of evidence of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were produced in the early universe as it inflated explosively from a tiny dot. The imprint they left when the universe was born 13.82 billion years ago would give us an idea of what the universe was like when it just came into existence.
Click to expand...
I don't really know what it all means, but I still think it's cool.

 
Andy Dufresne said:
Link

Scientists have found the first direct evidence that the universe expanded incredibly quickly in the microseconds after the Big Bang.


They found these signatures of cosmic inflation as gravitational waves from the Big Bang from the cosmic microwave background radiation of our universe.

A press release from NASA says:

Astronomers are announcing today that they have acquired the first direct evidence that gravitational waves rippled through our infant universe during an explosive period of growth called inflation. This is the strongest confirmation yet of cosmic inflation theories, which say the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times, in less than the blink of an eye.

The major announcement came from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Here's the technical data and papers that go along with the announcement from the group at the Bicep (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) project.

"This work offers new insights into some of our most basic questions: Why do we exist? How did the universe begin?," astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who wasn't a member of the study team said in a statement about the Harvard-Smithsonian research. "These results are not only a smoking gun for inflation, they also tell us when inflation took place and how powerful the process was."

Researchers will be giving a press conference, streamed live starting at 11:55 a.m. EDT at this link and this back up link, though neither are working for us right now. From twitter, it's looking like they've started the press conference early, though we can't confirm that.

As the rumors have been saying, the discovery has to do with finding of evidence of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were produced in the early universe as it inflated explosively from a tiny dot. The imprint they left when the universe was born 13.82 billion years ago would give us an idea of what the universe was like when it just came into existence.
Click to expand...
I don't really know what it all means, but I still think it's cool.
Click to expand...
:thumbup:

 
Not really....but if you're attempting to muck up a thread in the first 5 posts, this is your best shot of doing so :thumbdown:

 
I'd like to thank Tim for making sure this train left the rails as soon as possible

I mean, be honest, we all knew this thread would go off track at some point. I just would have guessed it would have taken a bit longer and be done a bit more subtly than Tim taking a hammer to the tracks 5 posts in

but hey, Tim is nothing if not efficient

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Officer Pete Malloy said:
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
What if people's beliefs are childish and deserving of ridicule?
Click to expand...
The world is full of children I guess. Thank goodness the small but vocal group of atheists are here to remind us of what adult beliefs are.

 
Andy Dufresne said:
Officer Pete Malloy said:
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
What if people's beliefs are childish and deserving of ridicule?
Click to expand...
Then it's a good thing we have a bevy of self-appointed arbiters around here to champion such endeavors.
Click to expand...
And we have this neat "Start New Topic" button on the main forum page.

Back on topic, I was under the impression that inflation was pretty much settled, so I guess I don't fully understand why this is such a big deal.

 
Another article on same subject.

A team of scientists may have detected a twist in light from the early universe that could help explain how the universe began. Such a finding has been compared in significance to the detection of the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012.


What they detected is known as primordial B-mode polarization and is important for at least two reasons. It would be is the first detection of gravitational waves, which are predicted to exist under Einstein’s theory of relativity but have never before been seen. But the thing that has scientists really excited is that it could provide the first direct evidence for a theorized event called inflation that caused the universe to exponentially grow just a fraction of a fraction of a second after it was born.

“Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today,” astronomer John Kovac of Harvard, who led the team announcing the discovery today, in a press release.

Though the team’s work will still need to be confirmed by other experiments, it is already generating a huge amount of interest. It would give physicists a look at the hot and violent early universe, when temperatures were 13 orders of magnitude greater than what can be achieved at the LHC. And it could help solve some lingering problems with our models of the Big Bang and the origins of the universe.

“This is literally a window back to almost the beginning of time itself,” said physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, who was not involved with the work but who has studied inflation.


Now you might be asking yourself how primordial B-modes could be so important if you’ve never heard of them. Though not well known outside cosmologists’ meetings, primordial B-modes have been called the “first tremors of the Big Bang.”

./b_over_t.eps
The black lines seen are swirls in the polarization of CMB light that could have been produced by gravitational waves created by inflation. Image: BICEP2 Collaboration
The early universe was extremely hot and dense. But about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, it had cooled enough that light waves could travel without immediately crashing into one particle or another. These photons have been traveling ever since, appearing in our telescopes as a faint radio signal called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). B-modes are sort of like a ripple that has been imprinted on these CMB photons.

Light, being a wave, oscillates in a particular direction, known as its polarization. This polarization is given to each photon at the time it was created. But gravity warps everything in the universe, including light. As the CMB photons traveled through the universe past galaxies and stars, they were bent by the gravitational influence of these massive objects, and this bending produced one type of B-mode polarization.

Researchers using the South Pole Telescope might have discovered this first type of B-mode polarization last year. But there is another, more subtle B-mode polarization that cosmologists have also long searched for. In this case, the CMB light was swirled by enormous gravitational waves, which are ripples in the fabric of space-time. The new findings suggest that these gravitational waves could have come from an extremely early period in the universe’s life known as inflation.

According to the Big Bang model of our origins, when the universe was born it immediately began expanding outward. All of space-time ballooned like a stretching sheet. Scientists mostly accepted this Big Bang model in the mid-20th century but it has a few problems. Mainly, it has never made sense how distant parts of the universe could have the same temperature. A point on one side of the universe could never have exchanged radiation or any other sort of information with the other side of the universe, even way back when it was a tiny speck. Yet the CMB, which comes from all around us, is uniform down to one part in ten thousand.

To solve this conundrum, theorists in the 1980s speculated that the very early universe must have been even smaller than we presume. Approximately 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang, it suddenly went through an accelerated expansion that drove it to become one thousand quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion times bigger than it previously was. Inflation brings the universe to the right size for the Big Bang model and all our other observations to make sense.

Using a telescope at the South Pole, a project known as Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) has been searching for the B-mode polarizations that would be an echo of this inflationary period. And it seems that now they finally found them. The signal they detected was surprisingly strong, even for members of the team, who have been working on their data for the last three years to rule out any errors.

On Friday, rumors began flying that the BICEP team was about to announce a major discovery. Most cosmologists correctly guessed that the announcement would revolve around B-mode polarizations, but no one was sure exactly what would be announced. Because the team has been able to keep so quiet about their findings (an almost unheard of occurrence in gossipy physics circles), some suspected the data wouldn’t be enough to give more than just a hint of the existence of gravitational waves. But today’s announcement has proved to be a historic one, with physicists already speculating about who might win a Nobel Prize based on the findings.

Even in the midst of excitedly celebrating, most scientists are urging caution until the results are confirmed by an independent team. “We should be skeptical,” said Krauss. “Alone this finding is tantalizing, but not definitive.”

In fact, BICEP’s data is somewhat at odds with other experiments, such as the Planck space telescope, which have carefully mapped the CMB but not seen primordial B-modes. But it’s also possible that these other teams simply missed what BICEP is seeing and, now that they know how to look for the primordial B-modes, can confirm the results fairly quickly using already existing datasets, perhaps within a matter of weeks. No doubt, other collaborations will begin taking new data to try and detect the primordial B-modes on their own.
Click to expand...
 
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
I wasn't trying to trample on anyone's beliefs. And unlike Officer Pete Malloy, I don't think religious beliefs are childish. But I do think exactly what I wrote: that the Big Bang is incompatible with Genesis. If you accept the Big Bang to be true, you have to regard Genesis as a legend and not as the literal truth. That statement was not meant to be insulting or to bash anyone.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
timschochet said:
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
I wasn't trying to trample on anyone's beliefs. And unlike Officer Pete Malloy, I don't think religious beliefs are childish.But I do think exactly what I wrote: that the Big Bang is incompatible with Genesis. If you accept the Big Bang to be true, you have to regard Genesis as a legend and not as the literal truth. That statement was not meant to be insulting or to bash anyone.
Click to expand...
http://31.cdn.bit2host.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/TrainWreck.jpg

 
Andy Dufresne said:
Officer Pete Malloy said:
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
What if people's beliefs are childish and deserving of ridicule?
Click to expand...
Then it's a good thing we have a bevy of self-appointed arbiters around here to champion such endeavors.
Click to expand...
:shrug:

 
shader said:
Officer Pete Malloy said:
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
What if people's beliefs are childish and deserving of ridicule?
Click to expand...
The world is full of children I guess. Thank goodness the small but vocal group of atheists are here to remind us of what adult beliefs are.
Click to expand...
You're welcome.

 
timschochet said:
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
I wasn't trying to trample on anyone's beliefs. And unlike Officer Pete Malloy, I don't think religious beliefs are childish.But I do think exactly what I wrote: that the Big Bang is incompatible with Genesis. If you accept the Big Bang to be true, you have to regard Genesis as a legend and not as the literal truth. That statement was not meant to be insulting or to bash anyone.
Click to expand...
I think Genesis would be hurt if it could be proven that there was no Big Bang and that the universe always existed. The Big Bang fits in perfectly with God "creating the heavens and the earth".

 
I've been a Christian believer and also a non-believer.

I don't think the Big Bang is inconsistent at all with the Genesis story. I always thought the Genesis concept of "days" was arbitrary. :shrug:

 
Andy Dufresne said:
I've been a Christian believer and also a non-believer.

I don't think the Big Bang is inconsistent at all with the Genesis story. I always thought the Genesis concept of "days" was arbitrary. :shrug:
Click to expand...
Everything in the bible is arbitrary. Depends on what you feel like believing that day.

 
B-Deep said:
timschochet said:
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
I wasn't trying to trample on anyone's beliefs. And unlike Officer Pete Malloy, I don't think religious beliefs are childish.But I do think exactly what I wrote: that the Big Bang is incompatible with Genesis. If you accept the Big Bang to be true, you have to regard Genesis as a legend and not as the literal truth. That statement was not meant to be insulting or to bash anyone.
Click to expand...
http://31.cdn.bit2host.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/TrainWreck.jpg
Click to expand...
Yeah it's easy to blame me for "derailing" the thread and I'm sure many people will. But any discussion of the origins of the universe is going to involve a comparison between scientific discoveries and religious belief. Otherwise such a discussion would be incomplete.
 
Andy Dufresne said:
I've been a Christian believer and also a non-believer.

I don't think the Big Bang is inconsistent at all with the Genesis story. I always thought the Genesis concept of "days" was arbitrary. :shrug:
Click to expand...
It's not so much the concept of days, but the order of creation that IMO doesn't jibe with the Big Bang.
 
Andy Dufresne said:
Link

Scientists have found the first direct evidence that the universe expanded incredibly quickly in the microseconds after the Big Bang.


They found these signatures of cosmic inflation as gravitational waves from the Big Bang from the cosmic microwave background radiation of our universe.

A press release from NASA says:

Astronomers are announcing today that they have acquired the first direct evidence that gravitational waves rippled through our infant universe during an explosive period of growth called inflation. This is the strongest confirmation yet of cosmic inflation theories, which say the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times, in less than the blink of an eye.

The major announcement came from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Here's the technical data and papers that go along with the announcement from the group at the Bicep (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) project.

"This work offers new insights into some of our most basic questions: Why do we exist? How did the universe begin?," astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who wasn't a member of the study team said in a statement about the Harvard-Smithsonian research. "These results are not only a smoking gun for inflation, they also tell us when inflation took place and how powerful the process was."

Researchers will be giving a press conference, streamed live starting at 11:55 a.m. EDT at this link and this back up link, though neither are working for us right now. From twitter, it's looking like they've started the press conference early, though we can't confirm that.

As the rumors have been saying, the discovery has to do with finding of evidence of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were produced in the early universe as it inflated explosively from a tiny dot. The imprint they left when the universe was born 13.82 billion years ago would give us an idea of what the universe was like when it just came into existence.
Click to expand...
I don't really know what it all means, but I still think it's cool.
Click to expand...
SacramentoBob said:
All of this #### freaks me the #### out.
Click to expand...
I'll tell you what this means to me:

we have always worked off of first mass, then energy as the primary building blocks of our physical existence.

But here we have gravity raising its head in the very earliest of time, mass and energy.

The nature of gravity has not been formally explained, there is a theory about a body called "gravitinos" but it is purely theoretical. There are further strong forces and weak forces, also largely undefeined.

Here is gravity before there were planetary bodies, in association with energy. Energy expands, but how? Looking back in time there are gasses but not mass per se, except to the extent that gasses, like stars, have mass. But there is no solid "mass" in the respect of land, or dirt or rock. In relation to itself, energy, there is time in the form of distance, there is light, and there is a force that expels it outward and which draws it back inward (as for instance galaxies, stars and planets, and even the things living and forming on them come into existence).

This should freak all of us out because if so we are still misunderstanding a big swath of our physical existence.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Cliff Clavin said:
Andy Dufresne said:
I've been a Christian believer and also a non-believer.

I don't think the Big Bang is inconsistent at all with the Genesis story. I always thought the Genesis concept of "days" was arbitrary. :shrug:
Click to expand...
Everything in the bible is arbitrary. Depends on what you feel like believing that day.
Click to expand...
I prefer to think of it as allegorical and open to interpretation.

Except for the story of the king that called on the bears to tear up the 42 lads. I'm pretty sure that's literal.

 
timschochet said:
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
I wasn't trying to trample on anyone's beliefs. And unlike Officer Pete Malloy, I don't think religious beliefs are childish. But I do think exactly what I wrote: that the Big Bang is incompatible with Genesis. If you accept the Big Bang to be true, you have to regard Genesis as a legend and not as the literal truth. That statement was not meant to be insulting or to bash anyone.
Click to expand...
It takes a lot less than the Big Bang to scientifically disprove the Genesis creation myth.

 
"I don't see any conflict between religion and science. Religion has to accept the science of the day and penetrate it to the mystery. The conflict is between the science of 2000 B.C. and 2000 A.D.."

-Joseph Campbell

 
I was going to guess the expansion at 80 trillion trillion, so I admit I was a little off.

 
Andy Dufresne said:
Another article on same subject.

A team of scientists may have detected a twist in light from the early universe that could help explain how the universe began. Such a finding has been compared in significance to the detection of the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012.


What they detected is known as primordial B-mode polarization and is important for at least two reasons. It would be is the first detection of gravitational waves, which are predicted to exist under Einstein’s theory of relativity but have never before been seen. But the thing that has scientists really excited is that it could provide the first direct evidence for a theorized event called inflation that caused the universe to exponentially grow just a fraction of a fraction of a second after it was born.

“Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today,” astronomer John Kovac of Harvard, who led the team announcing the discovery today, in a press release.

Though the team’s work will still need to be confirmed by other experiments, it is already generating a huge amount of interest. It would give physicists a look at the hot and violent early universe, when temperatures were 13 orders of magnitude greater than what can be achieved at the LHC. And it could help solve some lingering problems with our models of the Big Bang and the origins of the universe.

“This is literally a window back to almost the beginning of time itself,” said physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, who was not involved with the work but who has studied inflation.


Now you might be asking yourself how primordial B-modes could be so important if you’ve never heard of them. Though not well known outside cosmologists’ meetings, primordial B-modes have been called the “first tremors of the Big Bang.”

./b_over_t.eps
The black lines seen are swirls in the polarization of CMB light that could have been produced by gravitational waves created by inflation. Image: BICEP2 Collaboration
The early universe was extremely hot and dense. But about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, it had cooled enough that light waves could travel without immediately crashing into one particle or another. These photons have been traveling ever since, appearing in our telescopes as a faint radio signal called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). B-modes are sort of like a ripple that has been imprinted on these CMB photons.

Light, being a wave, oscillates in a particular direction, known as its polarization. This polarization is given to each photon at the time it was created. But gravity warps everything in the universe, including light. As the CMB photons traveled through the universe past galaxies and stars, they were bent by the gravitational influence of these massive objects, and this bending produced one type of B-mode polarization.

Researchers using the South Pole Telescope might have discovered this first type of B-mode polarization last year. But there is another, more subtle B-mode polarization that cosmologists have also long searched for. In this case, the CMB light was swirled by enormous gravitational waves, which are ripples in the fabric of space-time. The new findings suggest that these gravitational waves could have come from an extremely early period in the universe’s life known as inflation.

According to the Big Bang model of our origins, when the universe was born it immediately began expanding outward. All of space-time ballooned like a stretching sheet. Scientists mostly accepted this Big Bang model in the mid-20th century but it has a few problems. Mainly, it has never made sense how distant parts of the universe could have the same temperature. A point on one side of the universe could never have exchanged radiation or any other sort of information with the other side of the universe, even way back when it was a tiny speck. Yet the CMB, which comes from all around us, is uniform down to one part in ten thousand.

To solve this conundrum, theorists in the 1980s speculated that the very early universe must have been even smaller than we presume. Approximately 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang, it suddenly went through an accelerated expansion that drove it to become one thousand quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion times bigger than it previously was. Inflation brings the universe to the right size for the Big Bang model and all our other observations to make sense.

Using a telescope at the South Pole, a project known as Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) has been searching for the B-mode polarizations that would be an echo of this inflationary period. And it seems that now they finally found them. The signal they detected was surprisingly strong, even for members of the team, who have been working on their data for the last three years to rule out any errors.

On Friday, rumors began flying that the BICEP team was about to announce a major discovery. Most cosmologists correctly guessed that the announcement would revolve around B-mode polarizations, but no one was sure exactly what would be announced. Because the team has been able to keep so quiet about their findings (an almost unheard of occurrence in gossipy physics circles), some suspected the data wouldn’t be enough to give more than just a hint of the existence of gravitational waves. But today’s announcement has proved to be a historic one, with physicists already speculating about who might win a Nobel Prize based on the findings.

Even in the midst of excitedly celebrating, most scientists are urging caution until the results are confirmed by an independent team. “We should be skeptical,” said Krauss. “Alone this finding is tantalizing, but not definitive.”

In fact, BICEP’s data is somewhat at odds with other experiments, such as the Planck space telescope, which have carefully mapped the CMB but not seen primordial B-modes. But it’s also possible that these other teams simply missed what BICEP is seeing and, now that they know how to look for the primordial B-modes, can confirm the results fairly quickly using already existing datasets, perhaps within a matter of weeks. No doubt, other collaborations will begin taking new data to try and detect the primordial B-modes on their own.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Very interesting stuff. Shame that the usual clowns are derailing this thread.

 
SacramentoBob said:
All of this #### freaks me the #### out.
Click to expand...
I think it is the coolest thing ever. How does something (the universe in this case) just expand into empty nothing? No one knows and no one will ever know because it doesn't make any sense. Scientists can come up with some sort of theory (their own line of BS) but they have no clue. The 1st thing you have to realize is that some higher power did it. It didn't just create itself. That is pure comedy. THAT is when it really gets freaky. So what created that higher power...and so on and so on.

Don't even get me started on the universe being finite or infinite. My best guess is you leave earth heading up and somehow you magically arrive on the other side of the planet after you traverse the universe. FREAK ME OUT!

 
Last edited by a moderator:
lod01 said:
SacramentoBob said:
All of this #### freaks me the #### out.
Click to expand...
I think it is the coolest thing ever. How does something (the universe in this case) just expand into empty nothing? No one knows and no one will ever know because it doesn't make any sense. Scientists can come up with some sort of theory (their own line of BS) but they have no clue. The 1st thing you have to realize is that some higher power did it. It didn't just create itself. That is pure comedy. THAT is when it really gets freaky. So what created that higher power...and so on and so on.
Click to expand...
That might be true but you don't have to assume that it's something sentient, or what we would normally categorize as a "god" being.

 
lod01 said:
SacramentoBob said:
All of this #### freaks me the #### out.
Click to expand...
I think it is the coolest thing ever. How does something (the universe in this case) just expand into empty nothing? No one knows and no one will ever know because it doesn't make any sense. Scientists can come up with some sort of theory (their own line of BS) but they have no clue. The 1st thing you have to realize is that some higher power did it. It didn't just create itself. That is pure comedy. THAT is when it really gets freaky. So what created that higher power...and so on and so on.
Click to expand...
:unsure:

 
lod01 said:
SacramentoBob said:
All of this #### freaks me the #### out.
Click to expand...
I think it is the coolest thing ever. How does something (the universe in this case) just expand into empty nothing? No one knows and no one will ever know because it doesn't make any sense. Scientists can come up with some sort of theory (their own line of BS) but they have no clue. The 1st thing you have to realize is that some higher power did it. It didn't just create itself. That is pure comedy. THAT is when it really gets freaky. So what created that higher power...and so on and so on.
Click to expand...
Just for clarification: when you say "higher power", are you talking about God? A deliberate being? Or what?
 
Cliff Clavin said:
lod01 said:
SacramentoBob said:
All of this #### freaks me the #### out.
Click to expand...
I think it is the coolest thing ever. How does something (the universe in this case) just expand into empty nothing? No one knows and no one will ever know because it doesn't make any sense. Scientists can come up with some sort of theory (their own line of BS) but they have no clue. The 1st thing you have to realize is that some higher power did it. It didn't just create itself. That is pure comedy. THAT is when it really gets freaky. So what created that higher power...and so on and so on.
Click to expand...
:unsure:
Click to expand...
Nick Bostrom has an answer for that. But who wrote the code?

 
timschochet said:
lod01 said:
SacramentoBob said:
All of this #### freaks me the #### out.
Click to expand...
I think it is the coolest thing ever. How does something (the universe in this case) just expand into empty nothing? No one knows and no one will ever know because it doesn't make any sense. Scientists can come up with some sort of theory (their own line of BS) but they have no clue. The 1st thing you have to realize is that some higher power did it. It didn't just create itself. That is pure comedy. THAT is when it really gets freaky. So what created that higher power...and so on and so on.
Click to expand...
Just for clarification: when you say "higher power", are you talking about God? A deliberate being? Or what?
Click to expand...
A higher power. Call it what you want. I'll see it when I see it. Before that no one has a clue. You can say you do but you don't.

I plan on only sticking around for a handshake or so unless I'm getting the virgin chicks. If that proves false, I plan on flying thru the universe and checking out everything I can't from this floating marble.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
timschochet said:
B-Deep said:
timschochet said:
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
I wasn't trying to trample on anyone's beliefs. And unlike Officer Pete Malloy, I don't think religious beliefs are childish.But I do think exactly what I wrote: that the Big Bang is incompatible with Genesis. If you accept the Big Bang to be true, you have to regard Genesis as a legend and not as the literal truth. That statement was not meant to be insulting or to bash anyone.
Click to expand...
http://31.cdn.bit2host.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/TrainWreck.jpg
Click to expand...
Yeah it's easy to blame me for "derailing" the thread and I'm sure many people will. But any discussion of the origins of the universe is going to involve a comparison between scientific discoveries and religious belief. Otherwise such a discussion would be incomplete.
Click to expand...
no it would not be incomplete

if we follow this theory then:

a discussion of religious beliefs should include a discussion of the changes in those beliefs over time

it should include a discussion of autohorship of the bible

it should include a debate about the contents of the bible and how they were decided

it should include debates about translations

it should include other fiaths as well

so i guess this thread is the place to discuss the Dali Llama's feeling on Moses as the actual author of the book of genesis

this thread could chug along just fine without anyone using the bible to attack it, or using the discovery to attack the bible or religion as a whole

we all know it would not, but it could.

 
timschochet said:
B-Deep said:
timschochet said:
shader said:
timschochet said:
This news is incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Click to expand...
Can't we just discuss news instead of trying to trample on people's beliefs? I would disagree with your statement by the way.
Click to expand...
I wasn't trying to trample on anyone's beliefs. And unlike Officer Pete Malloy, I don't think religious beliefs are childish.But I do think exactly what I wrote: that the Big Bang is incompatible with Genesis. If you accept the Big Bang to be true, you have to regard Genesis as a legend and not as the literal truth. That statement was not meant to be insulting or to bash anyone.
Click to expand...
http://31.cdn.bit2host.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/TrainWreck.jpg
Click to expand...
Yeah it's easy to blame me for "derailing" the thread and I'm sure many people will. But any discussion of the origins of the universe is going to involve a comparison between scientific discoveries and religious belief. Otherwise such a discussion would be incomplete.
Click to expand...
So why not let someone come in and dispute it instead of forcing someone to come in and defend their beliefs. This could have stayed as a discussion based on the actual topic for a lot longer.

Now it's just a mess.

 
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