For those people who believe in "Big bang" theory
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LordRaikage
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wtf....
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maybe the atheist stereotypes are true..
NaNaNaaaaa
Active member
Why would this deny God's existence, if anything for me personally it only proves it more, the electrons came from out of X (unknown place), just because we work out how something is done and we call it science does not mean it is not God's way of doing things, we are his children after all, honestly, the more wonders science uncovers, the more it makes me believe
I'm sorry but I had to say this, spelling and grammar has nothing to do with intelligence, just because someone has bad grammar or spelling does not make them an idiot. Not everyone's first language is English, nor is the internet only for English speakers. There is also the possibility that someone has a learning difficulty like Dyslexia and is trying hard to struggle through it why others put them down.
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It's hard for me to understand but I assume that guy insulted me. Sorry English is my second language I probably did spell something wrong. But I can talk better in Serbian so take the time to learn and we speak ok?
Science isn't supposed to explain how things existed. It explains and describe how their mechanics. The Big Bang theory is a good work with sufficient evidence, no doubt; but it needs to prove how this ''singularity point'' came to the first place.
Kishi Uzumaki
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I think, this will make you understand more about the big bang theory
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and you can't say it's a assumption because it's a proven theory with observations and facts and can you say the same with god's existence ? because you haven't observed gods and given undeniable facts to prove god exists but yeah ! it's your own freedom to believe in that god exists or non-existent or what's correct for you is belief of gods or believing in science .
Your argument to invalidate the Big Bang theory is that's it's a poor quality assumption...and then follow up by the question how it is possible people who believe in it deny the existence of a god? What? In the very best of cases the existence of a god is as much a poor quality assumption as you claim the BB theory to be and still you seemingly pull the card of god over the BB theory. This alone completely invalidates anything you say as you have zero credibility.
And that was the very best of cases, in reality of the two, the BB theory has the most going for it. I always imagined the two as two people who are have a running contest. The finish is still a long way off, but the BB is definitely in the lead as you have on one hand knowledge that has been accumulated for thousand of years as a result of an infinite amount of observations, theories and experiments that have been woven into a highly complex system of entities that are continuously interacting with each other: biology, physics, astronomy, geology...those are all different fields, but they are always somehow connected with each other. Denying something that's part of one thing, indirectly means you are denying everything that's, directly or indirectly, related to it and this can create the snowball effect that has huge consequences. Even the most hardcore hater of the BB theory unconsciously assumes many things science says and uses many things that got created by science.
On the other hand you have a non-defined existence that created everything in an instant by snapping his fingers. On top of that then you have the issue where does that existence come from? It's not that I deny the possibility of such an existence, but then you are just shifting the problem. Saying that God created everything did not solve anything as who created him? That's the difference and the reason why the BB theory is in the lead as it has the purpose to undeniably prove in practice that it's possible for something to come out of nothing. God creating everything does not provide a solution to the problem, it only shifted it.
You probably don't even understand what the BB theory is, at best you just skimmed through wikipedia or you quoted someone who is against it and assume everything that person said is true. The BB theory is an extremely highly complex matter, it's not something that can be denied by you posting two sentences about it =/
This is false and is a conception that belongs in to the trash. It has been outdated for decades.
Religion and science are not opposites. Many of the most important scientific discoveries were made by religious people who did it in the name of God and supported by money they received from the Church. Religion was for ages one of the strongest driving forces behind science. Many scientists did not preform scientific research to deny God or religion, it was the exact opposite they did it to become closer to it. During the Middle Ages Muslim scientists believed that science was a gift from God himself, he gave people the ability to discover how the world works and by doing so they would come closer to God. As a result they achieved some amazing results.
Yes there have been situations that when the results of a research conflicted strongly with a religious doctrine, the research was banned, which might have caused in some situations a temporary stagnation in the particular field of that research. However this attitude is by no means unique for nor created by the Catholic Church or any other kind of religious institution. The amount of people that stigmatized and persecuted ideas or concepts, for reasons void of a religious annotation, that could be very beneficial is ridiculously high. If you go to North-Korea and you propose a political system that would benefit the country as a whole, but would mean that the current people in power would have to step down, what do you think is going to happen?
Such an attitude is by no means tied to religion specifically as it's as much present in worldly affairs as it is in religious ones.
Also, contrary to popular believe, there has never been a moment in history that the Catholic Church had absolute power. Its sphere of influence varied extremely from place to place, there are even instances that some people said 'screw you' when the Church tried to do something they didn't like. So even branding something as being heretical does not mean it will die.
A Belgian priest I might add (yes I'm Belgian) and this is a good example of how the relationship between religion and science has functioned for centuries.
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If you think that the theory of the big bang is "poor" maybe you don't know enough about the theory :/
Science is based either on facts, observation, calculation or deduction, it's simply there either solid fact or as a theory derived from observation as an explanation of solid fact
Religion is based on belief
I'm not saying that religion is bad, actually I think it has done far more good than bad, I sometimes even wish I could believe but honestly, which one has more credibility? i think it's pretty obvious
Science needs to make mistakes, if it didn't it would stop evolving, any conclusion it arrives at is based on observation, but it can only go as far as our scientific models, calculations and technology allow us to go
Religion on the other hand is about as credible as Harry Potter but the culture and social groups based on religions clntributed irreplacably to the advancement of culture, art as well as preservation of knowledge and even science
Science is based either on facts, observation, calculation or deduction, it's simply there either solid fact or as a theory derived from observation as an explanation of solid fact
Religion is based on belief
I'm not saying that religion is bad, actually I think it has done far more good than bad, I sometimes even wish I could believe but honestly, which one has more credibility? i think it's pretty obvious
Science needs to make mistakes, if it didn't it would stop evolving, any conclusion it arrives at is based on observation, but it can only go as far as our scientific models, calculations and technology allow us to go
Religion on the other hand is about as credible as Harry Potter but the culture and social groups based on religions clntributed irreplacably to the advancement of culture, art as well as preservation of knowledge and even science
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Retro Chaos
Member
Does this prove god's existence? Do you have ANY proof of god's existence? There are many theories based on scientific evidence on how the universe is formed, but god's existence has no proof at all, so that is the assumption with poor quality.
This.
If you were able to disprove the big bang theory so easily you would be famous Lol. People have been trying to do it for so long already.
The bible bro
Prometheus Beta
Active member
Hi there, Im a Physicist/Mathematician (well ok Ill only be earning that title when I graduate this year but let me us it for now) and honestly, the OP sounded like gibberish to me ("electrons out of "X" to 'preform' the first shape of light", honest to goodness, I have no clue what that is even supposed to mean). But let me respond to this discussion here in general.
See folks, I think the problem here is that people in general do not understand what is sometimes called "how science works" in highschool (remember those nonsensical captions describing the nature of experiments and all that in your typical highschool science texts) very well, and I don't blame you. You would be surprised at how many of my Physics friends personally seem to not understand or misunderstand very rudimentary questions about the process of science.
You would be very, very surprised (or perhaps not) at just how common it is for your average Physicist to not be able to answer (or give wrong answers to) such questions as "how do you motivate Newtons laws (how did Newton figure them out)" and "why is energy a useful concept" etc, despite having no problem with all those supposedly very complicated partial differential equations of quantum mechanics, and all that other "cool" stuff.
I blame the farce that has become the education system in much of the western world today on this state of affairs. Our friend Aim64C has addressed that issue far more eloquently than I here before so I won't rant on about that. However one of my suggestions for a remedy is a mandatory "philosophy of science", which is what the important parts of the highschool "how science works" mumbo-jumbo is really all about, course for all Math, Science and Engineering undergrads in the first year of college/university. Preferably using the text by the Physicist (at least by education) Alan Chalmer: "What Is This Thing Called Science", by far the most lucid introductory text on the subject I have so far seen (not that I am all that much read on the topic to be honest).
We will get to the simple matter of the big bang "theory" but first let me entertain you all some more with what I think might be a far more instructive case study of the scientific process than the big bang.
Id venture to guess that most people in the literate world by now has heard of that mystical magic Math-man, Albert Einstein, but my experiences have indicated that very, very people seem to understand just what exactly he did to become the famous guy that he is. So let me very briefly describe Einstein's main contribution to Physics: the theory of general relativity (you might have heard of special relativity but frankly all Einstein did with that, so to speak, was put the pieces of the puzzle that others, such as Lorentz and Poincare, before him, had already created; it was general relativity that was his truly original contribution). Not entirely irrelevant to our topic here since general relativity has some very disturbing implications for the big bang, one being that "time" itself came into existence along with the big bang and did not exist "before" it, whatever the hell that means.
Unfortunately, general relativity is a very, very mathematical beast, so mathematical that even most pure Physicists won't study it in any detail until graduate school (Im an exception and currently taking an introductory GR course this semester only because Im the equivalent of what you Americans I think call the double Math-Physics major). The mathematics that make up its main body, differential geometry and tensor calculus, is very advanced stuff that most Math majors also won't study in any detail until graduate school and frankly I don't understand the stuff very well either (my introductory GR course introduces all of this stuff in a very dumbed-down manner) so there is absolutely no point in me trying to describe any of that in any meaningful detail lest you stop reading (still reading? well done) but I will try my very best to describe the meaning of GR in a paragraph or two.
But this is supposed to be a "how science works" lesson for you all so I figure it might be even more instructive to contextualize GR in its historical context. It goes back all the way to that magnificent Englishman (this among many other reasons is why we are the real master-race but thats a story for another day), Isaac Newton, and his "theory of gravity". In the typical polemics between atheists and creationists, I often see a reply of the form "gravity is only a theory too" to the creationist sophism that evolution is supposedly "only a theory". So let me explain that argument here.
Here is how science works: see in the intellectual enterprise called science, a most basic activity is constructing definitions, so that means that we look at some process in the real world and basically name it. To do this for gravity, we make the (not so obvious actually) observation that things with "mass" (what is that anyways? But lets not go into that otherwise wed have to discuss modern particle physics and quantum field theory, and this is already too much text) seem to exert a force (for now think of this as any influence that tends to cause motion) on other things with "mass". Now we call this phenomenon (a subtle point: notice that the identification of the very existence of this phenomenon is subject to the general problem of induction, how do we know all things with mass will always exert a gravitational force on mass and vice versa?) "gravity". This is what is called an "ostensive definition".
But notice that ostensive definitions are not very useful because all you are doing is naming your observations about the world. When we try to explain, that is try to answer the question to "how" and even "why", a phenomenon so defined, we create what scientists call a "theory", well technically a set of hypothesis that then become a theory once its accepted as being "true" by a majority of scientists but again this is too much detail now.
Newton went far beyond merely naming gravity: he came up with a theory that described "how": this is what is referred to as Newtons law of universal gravitation for those who took high-school Physics. Basically Newton postulated (there is motivation behind it but that is a subtle affair and again, unnecessary detail for our purposes here) that objects with mass conform to an "inverse square" force law (a physical pattern quite common in Physics for some reason): the force they exert on each other is proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates them, quantified by a constant G.
Well this is cool and all but how do we know that Newtons universal gravitation is actually "true". Pay attention now because this is important "how science works" stuff right here: it works. And what that means is that it explains a whole lot about the physical world and is consistently consistent with experiments. For example, historically Newton used his universal gravitation to independently derive Keplers third law, basically a mathematical relationship describing planetary orbital period to the radius (well semi-major axis) of the orbit. That was amazing because Keplers third law is simply a mathematical statement about the astronomical data that the astronomers had collected: in other words Newtons theory of gravity managed to explain all the astronomical data about the orbits of the planets around our own sun, and in a bloody quantitative manner no less!
And the success of Newtonian gravity didn't stop there: once the gravitational constant G (another subtle point: why is it universal, why shouldn't the constant be dependent on anything else besides the property we call mass? Well no one knows really, or it might be tantamount to asking why does the universe behave the way it does, I guess, but the important point is that it is consistent with all experimental observations to date) was experimentally determined (by Henry Cavendish in the late 18th century in the notorious "Cavendish experiment" as its now called, an absolutely ingenious little gem that is, but again too much detail), Newtons gravitation became all sorts of fcking useful. You can use it to calculate all sorts of important detail, from a woman's body mass, to the mass of the Earth, and much more.
But there is a limitation: as I said, a theory is what explains the "how" and even "why" of real world phenomena. Here is a finally relevant subtle point: if you think about it, Newton's gravitation doesn't explain the "why" of gravity at all. Yes it quantitatively describes the force relationship between mass, but this is descriptive. The problem is that the "why" Physicists took for an answer for a long time is not a very useful answer at all: the idea of the "action at a distance" force. Yes, ok two pieces of mass exert a force on each other at a distance but why? How the hell does a piece of mass know where another piece of mass is? One answer is the idea of the physical field but that again is not a very satisfactory "why" explanation unless you invoke quantum field theory, where gravity does not fit well.
And this, ladies and gentleman, is the ridiculously difficult problem (as simple as it might sound) that our hero, Albert Einstein, solved: his theory of general relativity explains the "why" of gravity!
*Gulp* now let me briefly try to explain what general relativity basically says. Consider this cute little thought experiment (or a real experiment if you want to try it at home but its not that hard to visualize): put a heavy ball, a bowling say, at the centre of a trampoline. What happens to the trampoline sheet? It curves around the centre doesn't it? Now you can do all sorts of cute stuff with this set-up, like rolling marble balls around the bowling ball (hmm, that seems to look a lot like the planets orbiting around the sun if you can get the marbles to orbit the bowling ball). Lets do the real thought experiment now: imagine that two-dimensional beings lived on the surface of that trampoline sheet. What things would those beings experience on a flat trampoline sheet and then when you put the bowling ball at the centre? Well, in the later case, the world starts to go a bit crazy for them, doesn't it: for some odd inexplicable reason, this black spot appears at the centre of the their world and it accelerates objects toward it. Well this thought experiment is not all that accurate for the analogy for gravity I will develop since our two-dimensional friends wouldn't in fact accelerate toward the centre for no reason - but the important point here is that the curvature of the "space" you inhabit is significant.
In our example, we are discussing what Mathematicians call the "extrinsic curvature" of the trampoline sheet because we are in fact utilizing an additional "dimension", the third dimension, as a reference frame for our curvature of the world of our two-dimensional friends. But the prince of Mathematicians, the German Carl Friedrich Gauss, long ago, figured out a way to mathematically talk about "curvature" without actually referencing extra dimensions: this is what Mathematician's call "intrinsic curvature". I can't really go in any more detail regarding this without invoking Mathematical mumbo-jumbo, but I hope that makes sense.
Hmm, lets see if this helps a bit: consider the following picture of the surface of a spherical object like the Earth.
What this shows is that if we start out at the North pole and travel in a "straight line" (what is called a "geodesic", the shortest distance between any two points on a general mathematical surface) to the equator, then move east (again in a "straight line") for 1/4 of the circumference of the full circle we would make if we followed the geodesic to full, and then move back up north in another "straight" line, we would in fact arrive at the starting point, something that certainly would not happen in a flat space with no curvature. That is one way to measure the "intrinsic curvature" of a surface, and notice that we did not have to reference any additional dimensions.
So, *drum roll*, here is finally the statement of the theory of general relativity: gravity is simply the side-effect of the curvature of "space-time" (this is not nearly as mystical as it might sound, it turns out that space and time are inseparable physical notions/properties because they are inter-dependent and so it is useful to mathematically construct a structure that incorporates time into space, it has nothing to do with the sci-fi concept of time being an alternative universe or whatnot). An object with the property of mass (technically the energy-momentum but never mind we talked too much about mass here) causes the "curvature" in space-time which in turn changes geodesic paths that objects will naturally follow. That is all there is to general-relativity without all the important mathematical mumbo-jumbo.
All of this sounds very creative and all but again, how do we know its "true". Well this is perhaps my favourite example of the scientific process at work in Physics. You see, general relativity, Albert Einstein's main work, was not definitely accepted by a majority of the Physics community until the 1960s in fact. In fact, many Physicists were deeply sceptical of GR in its early days, and who can blame them? It sounds very abstract, mathematically contrived, counter-intuitive and far-fetched to be honest, and it frankly is to an extent.
But in 1919, GR made Einstein a super-celebrity among Physicists: on May 29, 1919, there was a momentous solar eclipse, one of the longest of the century. And Sir Arthur Eddington (another brilliant Englishman) went on an expedition to Africa to experimentally put GR to the test. I won't go into the details of that experiment but let me explain the significance: you see in classical Physics, gravity should only affect objects with mass, so light, being a mass-less thing, should not be affected by gravity right? But in GR, light is not exempt from the effects of the curvature of space-time. What that famous experiment showed was that not only does the sun "bend" the path of the light near it but the quantitative prediction of Einstein for this effect was remarkably consistent with the experimental results. And just like with Newton's universal gravitation, the success of GR did not stop there: it has triumphed again and again in its predictions and experimental utility, many of which are quantitative no less, from the existence of black holes (the existence of which are implied by GR) to the crucial tool of gravitational lensing in observational astronomy.
GR is also the theory behind the details of models of the expanding universe, the expanding universe being the main piece of evidence for the big bang (I now remember, we were talking about the big bang initially). I really doubt anyone has read this far but this is already a far too longarse essay for an anime forum so I will conclude soon without going into the details of the big bang but suffice it say that virtually all of modern astrophysics, with all its predictive power and experimental utility, is consistent with or implies the big bang "theory".
One of my all time favourite quotes from the great Physicist Richard Feynman is this:
One of the most experimentally successful and accurate theory in all of Physics is Quantum-Electrodynamics, one of the founding fathers of which was Richard Feynman. Why is it so accurate? There is a physical constant (like Newton's G) called Sommerfeld's constant, and QED (unlike Newton's theory of gravity for G) can predict the value of this constant. We can also do experiments (like the Cavendish experiment) to determine this constant. We then check whether the value of the experiment agrees with the prediction of the theory of QED and to what extent. The consistency has been found to be within one part in a hundred million, and let me explain what terminology basically means: if the constant is predicted by the theory to be say 1.0 (this is just a number I made up for illustrative purposes) then our experimental determination of the constant is 1.00000001 (or closer to the value 1.0) !!!!!
So Im absolutely fine with you guys denying physical theories but the point Im trying to make here is that if you want to convince me and other Physicists to join your bandwagon, you have to be able to explain away facts such as the above. Why is QED likely to be wrong after success like the above?
Here is an aphorism of my own creation, modelled after Feynmans: It doesn't matter how ugly your theory is, how much you might hate the theorist (e.g. Darwin), or even the fact that the theory contradicts all your precious ideologies. If the theory has predictive power and experimental utility and success, the theory is almost certainly likely to be correct (or at least, as John Von Neumann would say, approximates the truth rather well).
Of course you can continue to deny the "just a theory" all you want being the ideologically motivated f-cking morons that you creationists are, but the scientific community will continue to accept the theory as being true. And that will never, ever, change unless you can offer an even better empirical "theory" that can explain the given phenomena (hint: creationism cannot even be classified as a "theory" because it is intrinsically non-empirical and therefore has about as much scientific utility as any other fairy tale).
See folks, I think the problem here is that people in general do not understand what is sometimes called "how science works" in highschool (remember those nonsensical captions describing the nature of experiments and all that in your typical highschool science texts) very well, and I don't blame you. You would be surprised at how many of my Physics friends personally seem to not understand or misunderstand very rudimentary questions about the process of science.
You would be very, very surprised (or perhaps not) at just how common it is for your average Physicist to not be able to answer (or give wrong answers to) such questions as "how do you motivate Newtons laws (how did Newton figure them out)" and "why is energy a useful concept" etc, despite having no problem with all those supposedly very complicated partial differential equations of quantum mechanics, and all that other "cool" stuff.
I blame the farce that has become the education system in much of the western world today on this state of affairs. Our friend Aim64C has addressed that issue far more eloquently than I here before so I won't rant on about that. However one of my suggestions for a remedy is a mandatory "philosophy of science", which is what the important parts of the highschool "how science works" mumbo-jumbo is really all about, course for all Math, Science and Engineering undergrads in the first year of college/university. Preferably using the text by the Physicist (at least by education) Alan Chalmer: "What Is This Thing Called Science", by far the most lucid introductory text on the subject I have so far seen (not that I am all that much read on the topic to be honest).
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We will get to the simple matter of the big bang "theory" but first let me entertain you all some more with what I think might be a far more instructive case study of the scientific process than the big bang.
Id venture to guess that most people in the literate world by now has heard of that mystical magic Math-man, Albert Einstein, but my experiences have indicated that very, very people seem to understand just what exactly he did to become the famous guy that he is. So let me very briefly describe Einstein's main contribution to Physics: the theory of general relativity (you might have heard of special relativity but frankly all Einstein did with that, so to speak, was put the pieces of the puzzle that others, such as Lorentz and Poincare, before him, had already created; it was general relativity that was his truly original contribution). Not entirely irrelevant to our topic here since general relativity has some very disturbing implications for the big bang, one being that "time" itself came into existence along with the big bang and did not exist "before" it, whatever the hell that means.
Unfortunately, general relativity is a very, very mathematical beast, so mathematical that even most pure Physicists won't study it in any detail until graduate school (Im an exception and currently taking an introductory GR course this semester only because Im the equivalent of what you Americans I think call the double Math-Physics major). The mathematics that make up its main body, differential geometry and tensor calculus, is very advanced stuff that most Math majors also won't study in any detail until graduate school and frankly I don't understand the stuff very well either (my introductory GR course introduces all of this stuff in a very dumbed-down manner) so there is absolutely no point in me trying to describe any of that in any meaningful detail lest you stop reading (still reading? well done) but I will try my very best to describe the meaning of GR in a paragraph or two.
But this is supposed to be a "how science works" lesson for you all so I figure it might be even more instructive to contextualize GR in its historical context. It goes back all the way to that magnificent Englishman (this among many other reasons is why we are the real master-race but thats a story for another day), Isaac Newton, and his "theory of gravity". In the typical polemics between atheists and creationists, I often see a reply of the form "gravity is only a theory too" to the creationist sophism that evolution is supposedly "only a theory". So let me explain that argument here.
Here is how science works: see in the intellectual enterprise called science, a most basic activity is constructing definitions, so that means that we look at some process in the real world and basically name it. To do this for gravity, we make the (not so obvious actually) observation that things with "mass" (what is that anyways? But lets not go into that otherwise wed have to discuss modern particle physics and quantum field theory, and this is already too much text) seem to exert a force (for now think of this as any influence that tends to cause motion) on other things with "mass". Now we call this phenomenon (a subtle point: notice that the identification of the very existence of this phenomenon is subject to the general problem of induction, how do we know all things with mass will always exert a gravitational force on mass and vice versa?) "gravity". This is what is called an "ostensive definition".
But notice that ostensive definitions are not very useful because all you are doing is naming your observations about the world. When we try to explain, that is try to answer the question to "how" and even "why", a phenomenon so defined, we create what scientists call a "theory", well technically a set of hypothesis that then become a theory once its accepted as being "true" by a majority of scientists but again this is too much detail now.
Newton went far beyond merely naming gravity: he came up with a theory that described "how": this is what is referred to as Newtons law of universal gravitation for those who took high-school Physics. Basically Newton postulated (there is motivation behind it but that is a subtle affair and again, unnecessary detail for our purposes here) that objects with mass conform to an "inverse square" force law (a physical pattern quite common in Physics for some reason): the force they exert on each other is proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates them, quantified by a constant G.
Well this is cool and all but how do we know that Newtons universal gravitation is actually "true". Pay attention now because this is important "how science works" stuff right here: it works. And what that means is that it explains a whole lot about the physical world and is consistently consistent with experiments. For example, historically Newton used his universal gravitation to independently derive Keplers third law, basically a mathematical relationship describing planetary orbital period to the radius (well semi-major axis) of the orbit. That was amazing because Keplers third law is simply a mathematical statement about the astronomical data that the astronomers had collected: in other words Newtons theory of gravity managed to explain all the astronomical data about the orbits of the planets around our own sun, and in a bloody quantitative manner no less!
And the success of Newtonian gravity didn't stop there: once the gravitational constant G (another subtle point: why is it universal, why shouldn't the constant be dependent on anything else besides the property we call mass? Well no one knows really, or it might be tantamount to asking why does the universe behave the way it does, I guess, but the important point is that it is consistent with all experimental observations to date) was experimentally determined (by Henry Cavendish in the late 18th century in the notorious "Cavendish experiment" as its now called, an absolutely ingenious little gem that is, but again too much detail), Newtons gravitation became all sorts of fcking useful. You can use it to calculate all sorts of important detail, from a woman's body mass, to the mass of the Earth, and much more.
But there is a limitation: as I said, a theory is what explains the "how" and even "why" of real world phenomena. Here is a finally relevant subtle point: if you think about it, Newton's gravitation doesn't explain the "why" of gravity at all. Yes it quantitatively describes the force relationship between mass, but this is descriptive. The problem is that the "why" Physicists took for an answer for a long time is not a very useful answer at all: the idea of the "action at a distance" force. Yes, ok two pieces of mass exert a force on each other at a distance but why? How the hell does a piece of mass know where another piece of mass is? One answer is the idea of the physical field but that again is not a very satisfactory "why" explanation unless you invoke quantum field theory, where gravity does not fit well.
And this, ladies and gentleman, is the ridiculously difficult problem (as simple as it might sound) that our hero, Albert Einstein, solved: his theory of general relativity explains the "why" of gravity!
*Gulp* now let me briefly try to explain what general relativity basically says. Consider this cute little thought experiment (or a real experiment if you want to try it at home but its not that hard to visualize): put a heavy ball, a bowling say, at the centre of a trampoline. What happens to the trampoline sheet? It curves around the centre doesn't it? Now you can do all sorts of cute stuff with this set-up, like rolling marble balls around the bowling ball (hmm, that seems to look a lot like the planets orbiting around the sun if you can get the marbles to orbit the bowling ball). Lets do the real thought experiment now: imagine that two-dimensional beings lived on the surface of that trampoline sheet. What things would those beings experience on a flat trampoline sheet and then when you put the bowling ball at the centre? Well, in the later case, the world starts to go a bit crazy for them, doesn't it: for some odd inexplicable reason, this black spot appears at the centre of the their world and it accelerates objects toward it. Well this thought experiment is not all that accurate for the analogy for gravity I will develop since our two-dimensional friends wouldn't in fact accelerate toward the centre for no reason - but the important point here is that the curvature of the "space" you inhabit is significant.
In our example, we are discussing what Mathematicians call the "extrinsic curvature" of the trampoline sheet because we are in fact utilizing an additional "dimension", the third dimension, as a reference frame for our curvature of the world of our two-dimensional friends. But the prince of Mathematicians, the German Carl Friedrich Gauss, long ago, figured out a way to mathematically talk about "curvature" without actually referencing extra dimensions: this is what Mathematician's call "intrinsic curvature". I can't really go in any more detail regarding this without invoking Mathematical mumbo-jumbo, but I hope that makes sense.
Hmm, lets see if this helps a bit: consider the following picture of the surface of a spherical object like the Earth.
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What this shows is that if we start out at the North pole and travel in a "straight line" (what is called a "geodesic", the shortest distance between any two points on a general mathematical surface) to the equator, then move east (again in a "straight line") for 1/4 of the circumference of the full circle we would make if we followed the geodesic to full, and then move back up north in another "straight" line, we would in fact arrive at the starting point, something that certainly would not happen in a flat space with no curvature. That is one way to measure the "intrinsic curvature" of a surface, and notice that we did not have to reference any additional dimensions.
So, *drum roll*, here is finally the statement of the theory of general relativity: gravity is simply the side-effect of the curvature of "space-time" (this is not nearly as mystical as it might sound, it turns out that space and time are inseparable physical notions/properties because they are inter-dependent and so it is useful to mathematically construct a structure that incorporates time into space, it has nothing to do with the sci-fi concept of time being an alternative universe or whatnot). An object with the property of mass (technically the energy-momentum but never mind we talked too much about mass here) causes the "curvature" in space-time which in turn changes geodesic paths that objects will naturally follow. That is all there is to general-relativity without all the important mathematical mumbo-jumbo.
All of this sounds very creative and all but again, how do we know its "true". Well this is perhaps my favourite example of the scientific process at work in Physics. You see, general relativity, Albert Einstein's main work, was not definitely accepted by a majority of the Physics community until the 1960s in fact. In fact, many Physicists were deeply sceptical of GR in its early days, and who can blame them? It sounds very abstract, mathematically contrived, counter-intuitive and far-fetched to be honest, and it frankly is to an extent.
But in 1919, GR made Einstein a super-celebrity among Physicists: on May 29, 1919, there was a momentous solar eclipse, one of the longest of the century. And Sir Arthur Eddington (another brilliant Englishman) went on an expedition to Africa to experimentally put GR to the test. I won't go into the details of that experiment but let me explain the significance: you see in classical Physics, gravity should only affect objects with mass, so light, being a mass-less thing, should not be affected by gravity right? But in GR, light is not exempt from the effects of the curvature of space-time. What that famous experiment showed was that not only does the sun "bend" the path of the light near it but the quantitative prediction of Einstein for this effect was remarkably consistent with the experimental results. And just like with Newton's universal gravitation, the success of GR did not stop there: it has triumphed again and again in its predictions and experimental utility, many of which are quantitative no less, from the existence of black holes (the existence of which are implied by GR) to the crucial tool of gravitational lensing in observational astronomy.
GR is also the theory behind the details of models of the expanding universe, the expanding universe being the main piece of evidence for the big bang (I now remember, we were talking about the big bang initially). I really doubt anyone has read this far but this is already a far too longarse essay for an anime forum so I will conclude soon without going into the details of the big bang but suffice it say that virtually all of modern astrophysics, with all its predictive power and experimental utility, is consistent with or implies the big bang "theory".
One of my all time favourite quotes from the great Physicist Richard Feynman is this:
See creationists, the problem with denying scientific "theories" that are accepted by the vast majority of the scientific community (the exceptions being mostly cranks and crackpots) is that you have to explain away the predictive power and experimental utility of those "theories". You are disputing and making claims, don't expect that we will take your moronic word for it, believe you for no reason, and let you off free.
One of the most experimentally successful and accurate theory in all of Physics is Quantum-Electrodynamics, one of the founding fathers of which was Richard Feynman. Why is it so accurate? There is a physical constant (like Newton's G) called Sommerfeld's constant, and QED (unlike Newton's theory of gravity for G) can predict the value of this constant. We can also do experiments (like the Cavendish experiment) to determine this constant. We then check whether the value of the experiment agrees with the prediction of the theory of QED and to what extent. The consistency has been found to be within one part in a hundred million, and let me explain what terminology basically means: if the constant is predicted by the theory to be say 1.0 (this is just a number I made up for illustrative purposes) then our experimental determination of the constant is 1.00000001 (or closer to the value 1.0) !!!!!
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So Im absolutely fine with you guys denying physical theories but the point Im trying to make here is that if you want to convince me and other Physicists to join your bandwagon, you have to be able to explain away facts such as the above. Why is QED likely to be wrong after success like the above?
Here is an aphorism of my own creation, modelled after Feynmans: It doesn't matter how ugly your theory is, how much you might hate the theorist (e.g. Darwin), or even the fact that the theory contradicts all your precious ideologies. If the theory has predictive power and experimental utility and success, the theory is almost certainly likely to be correct (or at least, as John Von Neumann would say, approximates the truth rather well).
Of course you can continue to deny the "just a theory" all you want being the ideologically motivated f-cking morons that you creationists are, but the scientific community will continue to accept the theory as being true. And that will never, ever, change unless you can offer an even better empirical "theory" that can explain the given phenomena (hint: creationism cannot even be classified as a "theory" because it is intrinsically non-empirical and therefore has about as much scientific utility as any other fairy tale).
Science is not about answers, that's why it's still called theory. Scientists are still looking into how the Universe was made, and with each passing day, they find more and more information to support or refute their theories. On the scale of the universe that formed billion upon billions of years ago, no man can find the answer to that in such short time. Hell, I think we're going to be expanding, making colonies on distant planets before we even get close to figuring out how the universe was made.
All I know is, each and every day, science takes another step forward, whereas religion keeps taking a step backwards. Science is actually saving lives with all the discoveries, whereas extremists for each religion cannot tolerate certain views on life and take away lives that science is trying to protect. Just because you don't agree with theories or other peoples views shouldn't mean you strip them of their passion, and in some cases, their life. Your god is all loving, and just because someone dedicates their life to finding answers because we are curious doesn't mean your god will throw us down to whatever punishment he has for us.
Oh, don't forget their are religious scientists out there that still wish to figure out how the universe was made. Just because they study string theory and such doesn't mean they don't practice their faiths still.
All I know is, each and every day, science takes another step forward, whereas religion keeps taking a step backwards. Science is actually saving lives with all the discoveries, whereas extremists for each religion cannot tolerate certain views on life and take away lives that science is trying to protect. Just because you don't agree with theories or other peoples views shouldn't mean you strip them of their passion, and in some cases, their life. Your god is all loving, and just because someone dedicates their life to finding answers because we are curious doesn't mean your god will throw us down to whatever punishment he has for us.
Oh, don't forget their are religious scientists out there that still wish to figure out how the universe was made. Just because they study string theory and such doesn't mean they don't practice their faiths still.
The Bible or any other religious book isn't written out of he blue by someone who suddenly thought "OMG I will make everybody a fool with my lies". Usually the myths and legends are verbally narrated through the generations until someone decides to compile and write them. And yes, the sacred books usually have moral lessons and the religions in general define a folk's moral code.
Disturbedhalo117
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My religion says otherwise, actually. According to it, a small light,"Shakti" came out of nowhere and created the universe. Then after thousands of years, or in cosmic scale, several "Yuga", three powers arose from within that universe, Creater{Bramhma},Preserver{Vishnu} and Transformer/Destroyer{Shiva}. They are all one in the same with Universe. And so on...
So, which is true? Your religion's creation theory or mine?
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