Pristine Big Bang Gas Found 220
New submitter cekerr sends this quote from Discovery News:
"U.S. scientists have found two interstellar clouds of original gas, which contain only original elements created moments after the universe's birth (abstract). Unlike everything else in the universe, the gas clouds have never mingled with elements forged later in stars. The existence of pristine gas that formed minutes after the Big Bang explosion, some 13.7 billion years ago, had been predicted, but never before observed."
The whole universe was in a hot, dense state... (Score:4, Funny)
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, wait...
Re:The whole universe was in a hot, dense state... (Score:4, Funny)
The whole universe was in a hot, dense state
Florida? Alabama?
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C'mon, join in!
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery,
That all started with a big bang! Bang!"
There is a second verse. My daughter knows the words and sings it after the first verse at the beginning of every show. (I have a very small part -- I shout "they froze their asses off" at the right time.)
Only show with physics problems in the vanity card.
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I'm sure I wasn't the only one who found themself shouting out answers to the problems in the Physics Bowl episode and getting weird looks from housemates ;)
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Oh man, me too. Wife and daughter find this really irritating. I have a habit during the show of shouting out "that's actually true!" and "CERN reported that just last week!"
I especially like Howard's bits because his mishaps and adventures are so often connected to real life -- like the ISS toilet episode, and the time he got Spirit stuck in the sand.
You can bet Chuck Lorre will put something about this finding in a future episode. Hopefully it won't be a chili bean joke.
Re:The whole universe was in a hot, dense state... (Score:4, Informative)
Three verses. One of the few MP3s I've purchased from Amazon.
Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unravelling the mystery,
That all started with the big bang! BANG!
Since the dawn of man is really not that long,
As every galaxy was formed in less time
than it takes to sing this song.
A fraction of a second and the elements were made.
The bipeds stood up straight,
The dinosaurs all met their fate,
They tried to leap but they were late
And they all died (they froze their asses off)
The oceans and Pangaea
See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya!
Set in motion by the same big bang!
It all started with a big BANG!
It's expanding ever outward but one day
It will pause, then start to go the other way,
Collapsing ever inward,
we won't be here, it wont be heard
Our best and brightest figure that
it'll make an even bigger bang!
Australopithecus would really have been sick of us
Debating how we're here,
they're catching deer (we're catching viruses)
Religion or astronomy, Encarta, Deuteronomy
It all started with a big bang!
Music and mythology, Einstein and astrology
It all started with a big bang!
It all started with a big BANG!
Big Whoop (Score:4, Funny)
Every day I have a bowl of beans at lunch and make some "Pristine Big Bang Gas".
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Huh? They're talking about hydrogen that's over 13 billion years old.
Actually, most of the universe's hydrogen is that old. And in any case, it's all fungible.
frist! (Score:4, Funny)
It seems that these gas clouds have the ultimate claims to First Post.
Pristine Big Bang Gas Found? (Score:5, Funny)
Was it in the vicinity of Uranus?
[okay, okay, someone had to say it]
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This proves one thing. (Score:4, Funny)
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But what did it sound like? (Score:2)
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No, it's hydrogen and hydrogen. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen, not helium.
Isotopes != elements (Score:4, Insightful)
So, the cloud contains only hydrogen and hydrogen but they refer to hydrogen as multiple elements? ;)
I'm assuming they meant to say "The cloud contains nothing but two isotopes (hydrogen-1 and deuterium) of a single element, hydrogen.
More seriously though, how can they conclusively state this is from the big bang? It's a big universe and there was bound to be a cloud containing only hydrogen somewhere. There is probably a cloud containing nothing but radon (the heaviest elemental gas) somewhere in the universe as well, right? If that exists would it disprove the big bang, or would it simply have been there by chance for billions of years, just like this one could have been?
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So, the cloud contains only hydrogen and hydrogen but they refer to hydrogen as multiple elements? ;)
I'm assuming they meant to say "The cloud contains nothing but two isotopes (hydrogen-1 and deuterium) of a single element, hydrogen.
You know, there's a reason the word "assume" starts with "ass". If you actually read TFA instead of assuming, you'd have found out that those multiple elements are hydrogen, helium and lithium.
Re:Isotopes != elements (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen and helium isotopes (and a little bit of lithium and beryllium) are made in the Big Bang. Everything heavier is made in stars. So these pure clouds can exist only as long as there are no stars nearby to pollute them with heavier elements. Stars are common in the modern universe, which is why it has been so hard to find such clouds.
Radon in particular is made in supernova explosions (and by the decay of radioactives which were made in supernova explosions) and there is no natural mechanism to separate it back out from mixtures of supernova debris. So in a sense, yes, if a massive, primordial, pure radon cloud was out there, it would disprove the Big Bang theory's prediction of nucleosynthesis, which can only make light elements.
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Actually, finding a cloud containing only Radon gas would basically indicate alien intelligence or some completely new nuclear process since there isn't a process that would purify to only Radon... Even isotopes that decay into radon would need to be purified....
Finding a giant isolated stellar gas cloud that contains no other elements again either implies that they were purified by some process, or that it has been there alone since before there were other gases (eg Oxygen, Nitrogen) to mix with. It would
And the /. community greets this news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And the /. community greets this news (Score:5, Insightful)
A question. (Score:2)
If the big bang was more energetic than as supernova why did it only create Hydrogen and Helium? Why not at least some Lithium?
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Because it was mostly isotropic and in equilibrium so there was't any pressure to fuse nuclei? Just a hunch.
Re:A question. (Score:5, Informative)
If the big bang was more energetic than as supernova why did it only create Hydrogen and Helium? Why not at least some Lithium?
Lithium was produced in the Big Bang, but in very tiny amounts, less than a part per billion. No heavier elements were produced because of a "bottleneck" caused by the fact that there are no stable nuclei with atomic mass 5 or 8. Massive stars get around this bottleneck by the triple-alpha [wikipedia.org] process, i.e. by three-body collisions of helium, which requires higher temperatures and longer time scales than were available in Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which lasted only a few minutes.
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Thanks that make sense to me.
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Actually Lithium was a bad choice. Lithium in that kind of an environment would probably under go fission into Tritium and Helium like what happens in Hydrogen bombs. Maybe Boron would have been a better choice.
Are we alone? (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's a false dichotomy. Either there are no aliens, or there are aliens parking starships everywhere. The universe is a huge thing. It's also an empty thing. Expecting alien space parking garages everywhere is beyond science fiction and is quite ludicrous.
It's one thing for aliens to exist. It's another for them to be common. It's optimistic to then expect that they are more advanced than us. It's amazing if they are all into space travel. It would be quite startling if they are into interstellar travel.
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That's a false dichotomy. Either there are no aliens, or there are aliens parking starships everywhere.
I was just musing not expecting to really be taken seriously. Let me put a finer point on it though. Considering we are at least a third generation star system, if you believe advanced life isn't so ridiculously far-fetched that it rarely happens, it stands to reason that there have been many advanced civilizations that have come and gone long before us. For a species to have made it through the eons of evolution, individuals of that species would have to have a strong sense of self-preservation. One co
Re:Are we alone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's assume for a second that an alien race existed that got advanced enough to build something big. First of all, how big would it need to be to be detected by us? Currently, we are on the verge of detecting Earth-sized planets. Even when we detect these, it isn't some telescope taking ultra-HD photos of the planet. It's a detection of gravitational effects or seeing the star's light dim as the planet passes between us and the star. So I'd wager we'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between an alien built Ultra-Planet-Sized-Death-Orb and Naturally Occurring Planet #52. Anything smaller than star-sized would either be mistaken as a naturally occurring object or would go completely unnoticed.
So now our alien race has advanced to the point that they can build space-constructs the size of a star. Now, we'd need to actually detect it. For that, we need to ask where are they? Are they in the Milky Way? If not, chances are we see their galaxy and not them. Even if they are in the Milky Way, if they are on the far side we might not notice their object because it is blocked by the rest of the galaxy.
Then there's the problem of distance. Remember, looking into the sky is like looking into the past. Suppose this alien civilization is 100,000 years ahead of us. If they are 10 light years away, no problem. We'll just see things the way they were 10 years ago. If they are 100,000 light years away, though, we'll see things the way they were when they were at our technological level. A million light years away and we'll be seeing them when they were cave-aliens. (And I use the term "seeing them" loosely. See the first point.)
So even if an alien built a giant object in space, they would need to position it just right and have it be positioned at the right time for us to spot it. At this point, the fact that we haven't seen any aliens has more to do with the size of the universe and our detection abilities than whether or not aliens exist. This doesn't mean that they do exist. Just that lack of proof of existence doesn't equal proof of non-existence.
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star. So I'd wager we'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between an alien built Ultra-Planet-Sized-Death-Orb and Naturally Occurring Planet #52. Anything smaller than star-sized would either be mistaken as a naturally occurring object or would go completely unnoticed.
I was actually thinking much bigger than that. A hypothetical hyper advanced galactic civilization can do better than a giant death star. Why not build a giant Dyson's sphere around the galactic core? Why not reengineer the entire quadrant of space for computation. A sufficiently advanced civilization could conceivably reengineer everything to the sub atomic level and reconstitute reality into things we couldn't even begin to imagine. Eventually just through time and various projects, something would be no
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You're assuming other civilizations have overcome the leash holding them to their flying rock. For all we know there's another world just as screwed up as ours with another civilization just as stuck as we are.
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This is just a short blip fueled by cheap energy. Once it's over there will be time to build a sustainable civilization. It won't be very tech intensive though and there won't be very many people.
That's the solution to Fermi's paradox.
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It won't be very tech intensive though and there won't be very many people.
Technology doesn't require a lot of energy to run. People don't need a lot of energy to live either. And there's a huge amount of free energy raining down everywhere from the Sun. Looks to me like you haven't given this even the most basic of thoughts.
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But making stuff and food takes a lot of energy and fertilizer, both of which come from fossil fuels today and the time for large scale change has passed. We are following the worst case trajectories from Limits To Growth and the IPCC.
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But making stuff and food takes a lot of energy and fertilizer
More than half of fertilizer comes from legumes or other recycled biomass not fossil fuels (natural gas in other words). As to manufacture, there are two things to note. We can make most industrial processes less energy intensive - should we need to. And we have cheap energy sources coming as well (namely, solar and wind power). Manufacture can choose to operate when the power is cheap. So it doesn't matter so much that the cheap sources coming online are intermittent.
We are following the worst case trajectories from Limits To Growth and the IPCC.
Given that we aren't, what was the poin
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... for all we know that IS an alien parking garage.
Highway, not garage was Re:Are we alone? (Score:2)
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i can see it now (Score:2)
this will be the big push we need to get back into human space exploration.... when porn companies fight to get to the virgin "hot" gas and make it all dirty.
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Why are you arguing against yourself? Or do you belong to that religion called Atheism that feels superior and must interject all of their thoughts into conversation as if they are priceless artifacts?
Point being, bringing it up is like drawing attention to non-existent racism. Crying pre-emptive foul only detracts from the purpose of the article.
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"I learned it from watching YOU!"
Parents who are holier than thou have children who are holier than thou.
This message brought you by the Partnership for a Arrogance Free America.
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False. Many religions are not organized, and many organizations based around ideologies are not religions.
False. There is no organization that represents even a significant minority of atheists, let alone all of them. There is no atheist equivalent of the Catholic Church.
False. Lack of belief in a god is not an ideology.
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There is no $deity
See, that sounds like a belief in a lack of gods, not a lack of belief in gods to me. This whole "lack of belief in a god is not an ideology" would hold up if that was actually the reality of the situation for a person. However, it does not apply to the people like the OP who go on and on about how there is no God definitively, and snidely.
Re:They found the farts of God! (Score:4, Insightful)
See, that sounds like a belief in a lack of gods, not a lack of belief in gods to me.
There are a nearly infinite number of things that people don't believe (like an invisible unicorn that lives under my fingernail)
Does that mean most people have a "positive belief" in a lack of fingernail-dwelling invisible unicorns...or maybe it's just the default, common-sense, extraordinary-claims-require-extraordinary-evidence-come-back-when-you-have-some position?
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There's an infinite number of things people fail to believe -- fingernail unicorns, pizza trolls, earbud elephants, bacterial senates, quagga cell phones, nuclear power plant elves, and on and on. To treat every belief of "Absurd-Thing-#81231237 does not exist" as though it's equivalent to a religion is to render the statement "does not exist" meaningless. There's *always* a possibility that any statement is false, even something like 1+1=2 -- but there's an implicit "beyond any reasonable doubt" in there
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A cult, maybe.
People repeating doctrine given to them by charismatic leaders? check
Arguing for their side without considering facts? check
Belief that it's wrong to believe otherwise? check
Suppose democrats are one too.
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There are other terms you could use to define an organization based around an ideology, religion has a more specific meaning necessitating the God.
https://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&ix=c1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=define%3A+religion [google.com]
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You, sir, are a dumbass and in dire need of a dictionary.
atheism [ey-thee-iz-uhm] noun
1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God.
2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings
Atheism is an affirmative statement of belief in a position that has precisely as much empirical evidence supporting it as do the beliefs in the christian god, the islamic god, kali, or the flying spaghetti monster.
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Your dictionary entry says exactly what the guy you are disagreeing with says. I'm not sure what you hoped to say there.
There is lots of evidence there are no gods. There is lots of evidence that many of the things holy books say happened very likely did not. Lets take the christian god who is supposed to be: omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent. If such a being existed why is there so much evil in the world that such a being would easily be able to prevent? Every time a child dies of cancer it is evid
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Re:They found the farts of God! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They found the farts of God! (Score:4, Insightful)
... I hope you'll at least agree that atheism *is* based on beliefs much in the same way that religion is based on beliefs.
Yeah, it's based on the belief that, as Bertrand Russell put it, one shouldn't believe anything for which there isn't any evidence.
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Yet, you don't have any evidence they are false either. Are you beliving that religions are false despite the lack of evidence?
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Are you beliving that religions are false despite the lack of evidence?
Again, you're confusing refusal to believe that something is true with believing that it's false. You're implying that skepticism is impossible; for any statement X, one must believe either that X is true or that it's false.
Russell's comment amounts to saying "Show me the evidence (for or against); I won't make up my mind until I have a reason to believe one or the other."
Actually, since Russell's time, there has been quite a lot of mathematical work on multi-valued logics. This has even made small i
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No disagreement here! I think it'd be foolish to believe in something for very long without some sort of evidence. Having said that, I'll read between the lines a little here: you're implying that all religious people in the history of the world have had no evidence, correct? If so, are you certain that that is true? If so, how have you reached that certainty?
Well, actually, I sorta like to argue that there may have been a god or gods around some time in the past. But they disappeared for some reason around the time we developed scientific methods, and carefully hid all evidence that they had ever existed.
It's closely related to the argument that God seems to have created a world full of geological and paleontological evidence of a world more than 4 billion years old, with a long history of biological evolution behind all the living species and the zillions
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Theist : believes in one or more gods, often thinks *his god* is real while yours is nothing but empty idolatry
atheist : believes there are no gods at all, and thinks that makes him superior to the theist
militant atheist : believes there are no gods, and the fact that you choose
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*YOU* know this is the Internet, where accusations of dishonest arguments and lack of acknowledgment of subtlety, often on purpose, is *par for the course*.
Re:They found the farts of God! (Score:4, Insightful)
... since any god worth mentioning is not a testable theory, your statement is logically equivalent to "atheism is the belief that no god exists."
Oh, I dunno; standard scientific methods can and often do distinguish between skepticism and active disbelief. Thus, if a species is known to live in a very narrow niche, and hasn't been seen for a while, people might suggest that the species may be extinct. This is the "skepticism" phase. If enough field workers look around in places where the species should be able to live, and none of them report finding it, eventually the species goes to "likely extinct", and eventually to "believed extinct".
Any statistician should be able to give you the numbers on such testing. As your observation set grows to a larger part of the specie's possible range, the probability that it still exists in unexamined areas decreases in a predictable way.
Actually, the statistical equations for this have a consequence that most people find counter-intuitive. Example: A few decades ago, it was calculated that there was about a 50% probability that a large mammal species "undiscovered by science" (i.e., not published in any taxonomies) still existed on Earth. The term "large" was intentionally vague, but meant something roughly human-size or larger. Then, a few years ago, a "new" species of deer was discovered in Asia. Statisticians had fun pointing out that this meant that the probability that more large mammal species exist had increased. This puzzled a lot of people. If we'd discovered one of a tiny remaining set, shouldn't there be one fewer species in that set now?
Of course, one way of making this sensible is to note that, strictly speaking, what had been shown was that scientific field work had been less effective than previously thought. In particular, this "new" species was known to the humans who lived in the area; they just hadn't been in contact with any biologists who kept lists of species. There are presumably other similar cases scattered around the world, and the discovery of one meant that we hadn't looked closely enough. Or maybe not; maybe that was the last undocumented large mammal.
Applying all this to the existence of a god or gods is straightforward. Thus, many religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, claim a god who (according to their sacred texts) has in the past often actively intervened in human affairs. He even once devastated the world and exterminated many innocent species to punish wayward humans for their sins. You'd think that it would be easy to get such a god to reveal His presence in the current world, which has even more humans in dire need of punishment for their sins.
But over the past few centuries, we have collected lots of data about the recent disasters in our world, and the data shows fairly clearly that the disasters' effects are essentially uncorrelated with the local human activity. If any god was directing our recent disasters, that god is apparently rather incompetent at punishing the right sinners. Thus, when religious people claimed that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for the sins of the residents of New Orleans (a Sin City if there ever was one), people quickly pointed out that the French Quarter (the center of the local sinning) wasn't damaged. Scientists and engineers would point out that the French Quarter is one of the few parts of the city that's above sea level, so whatever god may have been involved must be too feeble to even push the water level up by a few meters.
But the most reasonable conclusion, supported by basic textbook scientific methodology, is that our planet has no god that has the interest and ability to intervene the way our religious texts claim that God has intervened in the past. Yes, this isn't proof that there's no god around. But, as is often pointed out, absolute proof of a negative is difficult, and scientific methods rarely if ever actually "prove" anything. Sci
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Holy Cow, ScentCone, I thought you'd be the first to be Bible-thumping/slamming atheists on this topic.
Kudos for not doing so!
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A wise man once explained this to me: Atheism is a religious preference, not a religion. He was big on getting hospital beaurocracies to change the wording on their forms (he was a chaplin).
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But... you don't seem to understand. You see, the sky daddy has a son, a cosmic Jewish zombie who can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
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You forgot the part where the son turns out to be sky daddy himself, possibly due some kind of a time paradox.
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A wise man undrstands and admits that statements whose truth proveably can not be determined are there only for our amusement and are generally useless for our understanding of the world, while the question why those statements can not be decided might be of some interest though ;)
Re:They found the farts of God! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They found the farts of God! (Score:5, Insightful)
So what?
The greatest feature of science is that the person doesn't matter. It makes no difference if Darwin was a god hating rascist trying to justify his hate. It makes no difference if Newton liked to try to turn lead into gold. It makes no difference if Lemaitre was attempting to reconcile his faith and science. It makes no difference if scientist X was a pedophile and serial killer.
As long as the ideas match observation and make some testable prediction science as a whole can take them and benefit from them. Even if major shifts will be met with resistance because scientists are egotistical humans, over time the theories which best match observation will win out.
Whereas in religion it makes a difference. An unrepetentant rascist serial killer's explanations of the sacrifice of Jesus can be dismissed just because of the person making them. Following his moral guidelines would be a bad idea. Testing his scientific theories and keeping those that provide a better explanation that better matches reality is perfectly fine.
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Also, if an unrepentant racist serial killer gave a decent explanation of the purpose of the sacrifice of Jesus, I fail to see why he should be dismissed, as long as he remains philosop
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I thought Christianity had a concept of a bad tree being unable to bear good fruit. Though it wouldn't be the first time I've misunderstood something.
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"Not sure about that one, but I don't think so. I grew up Catholic (though I'm not really anymore)."
You are. Unless you had yourself removed from the baptism registry, which more or less is where the members are stored.
I had to use a local atheism website (http://www.fraiheet.lu) in German and Luxembourgish to be able to leave the church where I was made a member at birth without my consent. The local church administrators chose to ignore all personal requests until that.
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No, really they didn't. There is no $deity, the universe was not formed from the flatus of a magic sky fairy with wind. Sorry to disappoint but the science is way more exciting and interesting than the alternative.
That's exactly 3 minutes between first post and an off topic anti-religion post (par for the course on slashdot).
People like you need religion more than anybody else. Since your mother didn't teach you to not be an asshole, maybe fear of $deity could make you behave like a decent person.
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Do you apply the scientific method to everything? That seems to be your whole argument, that everything you think and do rests on the scientific method. When your mother told you she loved you did you say she couldn't prove that so she shouldn't assert it? Tell me, do the ladies just love that about you?
I did not, and never did, say anything remotely like that. In the vernacular, we call that an "epic fail". I merely said that the method is incompatible with faith. How in the hell you arrived with that mess of idiotic gibberish, I do not wish to know.
Do you ever think about things like morality or justice, things that aren't science based?
That, of course, is completely unrelated to the point.
There are some things the scientific method do not apply to (like religion) and in your mind that means they shouldn't matter and should be discarded.
In my mind? Not only did I say that they didn't matter, and that I definitely didn't say they should be discarded, but that's also not what I think. Which makes your characterization either dishonest or stu
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Neither the scientific method nor the concept thereof are incompatible with faith.
The concept is that you do not accept unproven concepts, you only show that a hypothesis to an observation is wrong. You do not say an unproven concept is wrong, you just don't accept them. That is a complete contradiction with taking faith, which is accepting an unproven concept as true. In fact, in science, there are no absolute truths, just accepted observations and explanations. "Accepted" meaning that the hypothesis has yet to be shown wrong with respect to given data and agreed upon error.
That's such a ridiculous assertion that only a slashdotter could have made it.
How is that
Re:They found the farts of God! (Score:4, Insightful)
Science is all about unproven concepts, and rest firmly upon a bunch of them - even setting aside that we don't prove anything in science, proof is for mathematics, which also rests on nothing but unproven concepts.
Often these unproven concepts are called "axioms" (which, by definition,canot be proven), but there are a few things simply taken on faith, especially the "Copernican" assertion: here is not special, now is not special. There are several related articles of faith that ground all empiricism (e.g., we are not in the Matrix, there is not a God who changes the laws of nature on a whim). There's a whole stack of assumptions, mostly ignored because there's no way to do science if they're false, so you go on assuming that the universe isn't actively tricking you because otherwise, what's the point?
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Axiom: An intelligent being which created and runs the universe exists.
Which is the appropriate scientific response to this?
A) Accept this on faith
B) Begin trying to explain why said being exists, how said being works, and creating experiments to probe for said being
I think you know the answer to that.
Re:Space Stem Cells (Score:5, Insightful)
Because when a theory predicts that 'X ought to exist', and then later on you find solid empirical evidence of X, that makes the theory a lot more solid and provides a starting point for further avenues of research.
Remember, the first step in figuring out how to get nature to work for you is figuring out how nature works.
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If you read the scientific paper you will find that kind of discussion. If you read the news stories about science, you will find a lot more of the sensationalism. Scientific papers are about developing objective truth, scientific journalism is about getting people to click that link and getting the ad impressions.
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There is no such thing as proof in science, only in math.
All there is is hypotheses and theories and data/evidence to support them.
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Researcher: "We observed some really anomalous gas purities. This is cool. We want to study it some more. It fits with some of the postulates of the Big Bang Model. It also fits with the fact that it's a big universe and we're not, and strange stuff happens in it."
Science Journal: "Pristine Big Bang Gas Found". Slashdotter: "The gas proves the Big Bang".
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Some scientists found some high quality hydrogen clouds. Their purity is a bit of an anomaly.
It's not an anomaly, it was expected according to the theory: A large volume of space where the hydrogen density wasn't high enough to induce gravitational collapse into stars. No stars, no fusion. No fusion, no elements heavier than hydrogen. They tested the expectation by looking for hydrogen gas that didn't contain any heavier elements, and they found it. It's the scientific method at its most basic.
But I don't see how this proves or disproves the Big Bang theory really.
Where is anyone claiming a proof about this? /strawman
Re:Seems like not that long... (Score:5, Informative)
Large bright stars don't last nearly as long as smaller dimmer ones like the Sun, and it's the big ones that actually explode at the end of their lives and spray heavy elements into the interstellar medium, so, especially in the early life of a galaxy, gas may get processed through many generations of big stars.
Re:Seems like not that long... (Score:4, Informative)
The average star age is 1-10 billion years
Very massive stars don't last nearly as long.
From source http://www.universetoday.com/25160/how-long-do-stars-last/ [universetoday.com]
"The mass of a star defines its lifespan. The least massive stars will live the longest, while the most massive stars in the Universe will use their fuel up in a few million years and end in a spectacular supernova explosion. So, how long do stars last?" ...
"How long do stars last? The biggest stars last only millions, the medium-sized stars last billions, and the smallest stars can last trillions of years."
Re: (Score:2)
honestly I was surprised that the religion flamefest preceded the Uranus posts...
Re: (Score:2)
That sounds about right. Just because the universe is quite old doesn't make 2 billion years any less time. In reality, 1.7byr is actually a fair mount of time! Mind that the theorized first population of star (III) are theorized to have been super massive and very short lived (~10Myr), so they would mostly be dead and gone (kind of frustrating for trying to study them!) quite early in. So a 'modern' galaxy could easily form very early in the universe's life. And as Quasars are thought to be very young
Re: (Score:2)
We look everywhere else in the universe and observe mixtures of heavy and light elements. Thus how do we explain this observation of clouds (already from the early universe) where there is an unexpected lack of heavy elements (unlike the rest of the observations)? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to hypothesize that since these clouds had avoided being mixed with heavy elements from supernovae and thus they have avoided the usual stellar evolution cycle that is prevalent.
Re: (Score:2)
My only point is that, while not impossible, such a theory is just as likely as having gravity from a dense object pull away the heavier elements from such a cloud.
Making claims like this is interesting discussion and all, but I think it falls short of objective interpretation.
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Easy! Just check the ctime on the atoms.
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It may surprise you to learn that this hasn't been the sole discovery in the history of astrophysics. It's the latest in a long list of discoveries, putting everything we've seen together gives us a good picture of how the universe works.