Science is Cool: Big Bang Gets a Boost!

I'm not going to pretend I truly "get" all of this. I'm a science fan, not a scientist after all. But it sounds really cool. Sure to tick of a few of the usual suspects though, don't you think?

[Excerpt]

Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun
 
One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics. He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant. . .

Read more at: New York Times

What's Wrong With Tennessee? Creationism In Schools Allowed

Pssst. . .creationists: Darwin didn't claim to know the origin of
the universe! Image from source.

Insanity. I don't care how fervently you believe that God created the universe, the idea doesn't belong in science class. As hard as they've tried to separate "creationism" from "intelligent design," there is no difference, other than taking the "Christianity" brand off of it. It's still taking the idea of an all-powerful magical being, and inserting it into science class. There isn't a scintilla of science in that. Not to mention that evolution makes no claim to the origins of the universe.

I know that I'll never convince a true believer that there is no God. But there is no denying that positing a "creator" into evolution or the big bang just makes the whole thing more complicated, not less. If you disbelieve the idea of the universe having always existed in one form or another, how is it so easy to believe that an omnipotent, invisible, intangible, omnipresent, omniscient, all-loving, vengeful, jealous God has always existed? You've just inserted a doozy of a claim into the story! And we won't even get into how this mega-creature, creator of the vastness of all that is, cares what we individual humans on this little speck called Earth, do with our private parts.

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TN science bill protects teachers who allow debate over evolution

Senators voted 24-8 to pass a bill that says schoolteachers cannot be punished for "helping students to understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories" taught in public schools. . .


Read more at: WBIR.com

Science is Cool: Hundreds of "Earth Like" Planets Found

I've found it very difficult to get back into the blogging swing after a lazy weekend. Politics just isn't doing it for me today.  So, how about a little sciencey stuff to get our week going? It's not polarizing, it's not controversial. . .unless you start to wonder about any religious implications should one of those planets have life on it.  Don't worry though, I'm sure our current religions would adapt to it, or a whole new one would spring up, right?

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Hundreds of Possible Alien Planets Discovered By NASA Spacecraft

NASA's Kepler spacecraft hunting for Earth-like planets around other stars has found 706 candidates for potential alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of the sky.



If all 706 of these objects pass the stringent follow-up tests to determine if they are actually planets, and not false alarms, they could nearly triple the current number of known extrasolar planets. They were announced as part of a huge release of data from the mission's first 43 days by NASA's Kepler science team this week. . .

Read more at: Yahoo News

Science is Cool: What Was Before the Big Bang?

Image from source, Psyorg

This is extra cool to me, because I've always held this theory as my own, and I didn't even know that science had the same idea! As an agnostic, I've often been told that the universe couldn't just have invented itself. "If you find a watch," I'm told, "you wouldn't think it just happened, you'd know there was a maker. So," they continue, "since the universe is so much more complex, it too must have had a creator."

This argument never worked for me. First, even if it held true, it wouldn't point to the existence of the Christian God. Second, it creates an even more complicated step since God, being infinitely more complicated than the universe doesn't have a creator either. If it's so easy to believe that God always existed, why not that the universe always has--in one form or another?

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Before the Big Bang: A Twin Universe?

Until very recently, asking what happened at or before the Big Bang was considered by physicists to be a religious question. General relativity theory just doesn’t go there – at T=0, it spews out zeros, infinities, and errors – and so the question didn’t make sense from a scientific view. . .

Read more at: Physorg.com

Science Is Cool: We Are Insignificant

Don't believe me? Check this out:



Found at: Voenix Rising, who says:

"And you expect me to believe that some old guy with a long white beard sitting on a golden throne somewhere really gives a rat’s ass about what I—or for that matter, anyone else—do with our genitals?"

Man Shortening the Life Expectancy of the Universe?

Image from source, Telegraph.co.uk

If you thought my last post was hard to fit into your head, try figuring this one out: Man may be shortening the lifespan of the universe, merely by observing it. Hurts your brain, don't it?

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Mankind 'shortening the universe's life'

Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our activities may be shortening the life of the universe too.

The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang. . .

Read on at: Telegraph.co.uk