The Astrophysical Hotseat

[Jack_Ian]

What about logical inconsistencies?
If your preferred religious text contains statements that are logically inconsistent, then could it still be true?

Certainly we know that there is something wrong with the Scientific view of things, because Quantum Theory, which explains things in the small scale, disagrees with Relativity, which explains things on a large scale. The trouble is that we have not been able to figure out yet which, if any, is universally true.

Should logic not apply where God is concerned?
If logic does not apply and God does not follow rules, then what's the point in studying him?

[Chaz]

Morality, of course.

As for the religious text containing logical inconsistency... it's a collection of stories about God. Logical inconsistency always follows where opinions are based on other opinions. That doesn't disprove the existence of God, but only the lack of a definitive path God expects us to follow.

Certainly there are disagreements in the scientific community. As much as the scientific community prides itself on only basing things on facts, the fact remains that a lot of science is based on theories which can neither be proven nor dis-proven (the Haldron Collider might even unprove a lot of "facts" in one fell swoop.) Not to mention, all of science is based on observations of these facts, and observations can certainly be wrong.

I just think it's silly to use either in attempt to either disprove the other, or to prove the self. They're both based on observations and records which may or may not be accurate, and are repeatable with varying degrees of mixed results. They both assume they're correct because they both assume they're correct.

If you take most, if not any, criticism that either side has against the other side, the criticism can certainly be applied directly to the other side with very minor tweaking. Both sides are adamant that their side is right, and both sides attempt to prove this with documents which assumed that they were right in the first place.

[extro...*]

[Chaz]

Good catch extro!

They basically said that the law of gravity exists because the law of gravity exists assuming that the law of gravity exists.

Duh.

[extro...*]

What is the "mechanism" by which the laws of physics are actually effective, in the universe, and prior to its existence?

[mole]

What happens to all the universes where the laws of physics are insufficient to cause the Big Bang?

[Jack_Ian]

Did time exist before the big bang/bounce?
If not what does prior mean in this case?

[Chuck]

What caused the God that actually exists to be the exact God who would create this exact universe? Isn't that as improbable as the universe itself?

Eventually, something must just happened to have been there. Why does that thing have to be God and not something else? If a vast intelligence with incredible design ability can just happen to exists, why can't just about anything else just happen to exist?

Do we even understand time and space well enough to understand the answers?

[Zag]

[Chaz]

I guess it depends on what is being said....

If Hawking (or The Times, or, more immediately Jack Ian) is arguing this as proof that God * didn't * create the universe... then the argument is false.
If the argument is that it wasn't necessarily God, then the argument is unprovable.

Either way... it's not "official."

[extro...*]

[extro...*]

[Nsof]

this is all clearly a bug in his click to speak software or a twitch in his finger.
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[Nsof]

[Zag]

How big is Earth?

[Chaz]

[BraveHat]

That was a cool video. Kind of killed at the end, though, by an imposed non sequitur (as Dr. David Berlinski points out, size is not an argument against placement.).

[Chaz]

[Chuck]

[Chuck]

On Easter Sunday, April 8, it will be exactly 30,000 days since Pluto was discovered on February 18, 1930.

[Chuck]

[Jedo the Jedi]

Could somebody just briefly outline the Big Bang Theory for me? I read through this thread, but it only answered some of my questions. I would like a baseline explanation from which to ask further questions. You can even just post the Wikipedia article if you think it is accurate enough.
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[extropalopakettle]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang

[extropalopakettle]

http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm

[Jack_Ian]

Simply put, the Big Bang is the name given to the theory that everything existed in a single location in the distant past and then began expanding outwards.
The reason that scientists believe this is that currently everything is generally moving away from everything else. That means we were all closer before.
Scientists make assumptions about how it all began and then use these assumptions, along with computer models, to predict what the universe would look like no (if they were correct). If the result matches, then they have some confidence about their initial assumptions. If not, then they give it some more thought.
The thing which provides much of the information of the early universe is something called the Microwave Background Radiation. It's very old and provides a footprint of the very early universe.
It is a common misconception that the Big Bang was like an explosion blasting things out into space. This is very wrong. Space itself expanded and brought everything along with it.

[jadesmar]

[Scurra]

[Jack_Ian]

I hadn't heard that one before.
The moon and the Earth were actually touching in the past though. The moon was formed from the Earth's crust after a massive collision with Theia.
^{(Though there is some controversy about this)}

[Jedo the Jedi]

Thank you, extro. Questions will be forthcoming.

As I read through these articles (it's taking some time to wrap my mind around the unfamiliar terms), I see some discrepancies which may have to do with competing understandings. Expect that some of my questions will concern those, and you people can set me right regarding the prevailing understanding.
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[Zag]

Jedo's questions got me thinking about the whole expansion thing, and I have a question for Lepton or someone else who knows more about it than I.

Is the space that contains matter immune from the expansion? We've observed that distant objects are moving away from us, proportional to how far away from us they are. And we've theorized that it is NOT that all stuff is moving away from a central point (as the naive interpretation of "Big Bang" would suggest). Instead, it is that the substrate of the universe is expanding, as if every object is suspended in Jello, and the Jello is slowly expanding while the things are moving through it.

Ok. So the far side of the Earth is not that far away from me, in astrological terms, but it is a distance. If the substrate of the universe is expanding, then the far side of the Earth should be moving away from me at that rate. Of course, the distance that I measure would still come out the same, because the ruler I'm using to measure would be expanding at the same rate, too. Right? So why do we perceive things moving away from us, due to the substrate expanding. Wouldn't the ruler by which we measure these things be expanding at the same rate, so those things are really the same "distance" that they were yesterday?

[Jack_Ian]

If the whole universe expanded to twice its size and everything in it became twice as large then we would notice nothing. It would look the same.
Expansion is a very weak force, so it has very little effect on items that are bound strongly together.
Things pretty much like to stay the way they are unless something disturbs them. From very small scales to much larger scales, things "wobble" and finally settle down to a stable state. To create some change, you need to create a "wobble" large enough to force it to settle down to a different state once the wobble completes. Imagine it like a spider's web. Blow on it and it eventually returns to the initial state, break a strand and it will wobble then settle into a new state.
The expansion does not provide enough of a wobble to effect tightly bound objects. Even the Moon's orbit is probably too stable to be effected.
I wonder if even galaxies expand. It must be possible to check if stars within galaxies are receding from us at different rates.

[Jedo the Jedi]

Would the example that we don't really feel the earth's rotation be a good analogy for why we don't really feel the expansion? We're moving/expanding at the same rate. (Trying to get my own baseline example.)
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[Jack_Ian]

[extro...*]

random bit of perspective, if I did my math right:

If the Earth were expanding at the same rate as the current rate of expansion of the universe, it would grow an inch in diameter in about 26 years

(based on rate of expansion of 74.2 kilometers/second/megaparsec)

(Earth small, megaparsec big)

[extro...*]

[L'lanmal]

Why is megaparsec a unit? Wouldn't pardegs (parallax degrees) make more sense at that magnitude?

Parsecs are also a good example of a unit that would expand at the same rate as the earth's orbit, unless someone has gone and redefined them as a certain distance that light travels, like they did with the meter.

[Chuck]

They could have just stayed in the metric system. 1 yottameter is about 105.7 million light years.

[L'lanmal]

Come to think of it, a pardeg would be smaller than a parsec, not larger. Still, a megaparsec seems a strange mix of lateral and linear distance, which obviously confuses me.

[Jack_Ian]

[extropalopakettle]