Would God Create a Gigantic Universe?
The Why Files | 1. Astronomy: Galileo’s great legacy!!!
The expression “elephant in the room”
Is a metaphorical idiom in English for an important or enormous topic, question, or controversial issue that is obvious or everyone knows about
but no one mentions or wants to discuss because it makes at least some of them uncomfortable and is personally, socially, or politically embarrassing, controversial, inflammatory, or dangerous. It is based on the idea/thought
that something as conspicuous as an elephant can appear to be overlooked in codified social interactions and that the sociology/psychology of repression also operates on the macro scale.
HUMANITY needs to prioritize our concerns and address them until remedied. Truth is supported by facts, let’s find the facts.
Something DemocRats don’t know!!!
How 0ld is the Universe?
Our answer keeps getting better.
“Perennial Philosophy” (and Prothero’s critique of)
The idea that all religions are just different paths up the same mountain
They all share a single truth. All religions are one:
Prothero says: Dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue
Neither accurate nor ethically responsible
The world’s religious rivals converge when it comes to ethics, but they diverge sharply on doctrine, ritual, mythology, experience, and law
Different problems, different goals
What the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point
Mountain range, not just one mountain.
Understand religious thought and behavior from the point of view of religious persons. Leave behind our beliefs and step into their mindset
Bracket our convictions so we can understand
The point of the phenomenological approach is not so much evaluation of understandingLatin: religere/religare: “to bind together, to tie back” relegere: “to recollect”Different Problems, Different Goals. A problem, A solution (or the religious goal)
A technique ( or techniques/ a path- for moving from this problem to this solution)
An exemplar (or exemplars) who chart this path from problem to solution
Prothero admits that this four step approach is admittedly simplistic, so this model is simply a starting point that must be nuanced along the way
This model helps to make plain the differences across and inside religious traditions ( compare differences across religions- “he who knows one, knows none”)
“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
~ Abraham Lincoln. Agree?
RELIGION CAN CONTRADICT SCIENCE
End time signs in the bible – Bing
The Beginning and the End: the Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective
In milliseconds, Google can serve up a fact that long eluded many of humanity’s deepest thinkers: The universe is nearly 14 billion years old—13.8 billion years old to be exact. And many cosmologists continue to grow more confident in that number. In late December of 2020, a collaboration of researchers working on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile published their newest estimate, 13.77 billion years, plus or minus a few tens of millions of years. Their answer matches that of the Planck mission, a European satellite that made similar observations between 2009 and 2013.
Frontiers of Astrophysics: How Discoveries Can Change Our Lives
Spacetime Simulations and the Discovery of Gravitational Waves (nasa.gov)
Joan Centrella (Goddard Space Flight Center)
The frontiers of astrophysics are driven forward by the power of ideas and discoveries. We will focus on three exciting areas: the search for exoplanets and life in the universe; revealing the dark side of the universe with gravitational waves; and probing farther back in time with new telescopes.
In addition to the scientific achievements, we will also consider how knowledge from these areas of astrophysics can impact how we think and live.
The final merger of two black holes releases a tremendous amount of energy,
more than the combined light from all the stars in the visible universe.
This energy is emitted in the form of gravitational waves, and observing these sources with gravitational wave detectors such as LISA requires that we know the pattern or fingerprint of the radiation emitted.
Since black hole mergers take place in regions of extreme gravitational fields, We need to solve Einstein’s equations of general relativity on a computer in order to calculate these wave patterns.
Solving the mysteries of the universe | Scientific Computing World
These mergers are by far the most powerful events occurring in the universe, with each one generating more energy than all of the stars in the universe combined. Now we have realistic simulations to guide gravitational wave detectors coming online. Joan Centrella
For more than 30 years, scientists have tried to compute these wave patterns. However, their computer codes have been plagued by problems that caused them to crash. This situation has changed dramatically in the past 2 years,
with a series of amazing breakthroughs.
This talk will take you on this quest for these gravitational wave patterns, showing how spacetime is constructed on a computer to build a simulation laboratory for binary black hole mergers. We will focus on the recent advances that are revealing these waveforms, and also the dramatic new potential for discoveries that arises when these sources will be observed by the space based gravitational wave detector LISA.
Joan Centrella – Experimenting with black holes – YouTube
Three-dimensional numerical simulations of the nonlinear growth of adiabatic perturbations in collision less matter demonstrate that a cellular structure develops in the Universe. This dark matter collapses into interconnecting dense regions surrounding large voids, or low density regions. The models presented here were done with a cloud-in-cell (CIC) code using a very large number, nearly 9 × 105, of clouds. Such a large number of clouds provides adequate coverage of the voids, eliminates spurious clumping in both the high- and low-density regions, and is a significant improvement over earlier three-dimensional simulations of the cellular structure.
We consider here both high (Ω0 = 1.07) and low (Ω0 = 0.1) density models. Our simulations clearly show that the interconnecting dense regions contain both filamentary and flat, pancake-shaped structures. Furthermore, the interactions among neighboring structures are important and produce matter flows towards the dense intersections. The low-density voids which develop are approximately spherically symmetric in shape. As the voids expand, they collide and intersect. The covariance function ξ(R) has a power law form at small radii, with anticorrelation found just beyond the break and no sizeable features at larger radii.
Planck Mission Brings Universe Into Sharp Focus
This map shows the oldest light in our universe, as detected with the greatest precision yet by the Planck mission. Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration
› Full image and caption
› Video: Ancient Light
› Video: Journey of Light
› Latest images
› Planck’s supercomputer feature
› Planck science papers
This full-sky map from the Planck mission shows matter between Earth and the edge of the observable universe. Regions with more mass show up as lighter areas while regions with less mass are darker. Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption
The Planck mission has imaged the oldest light in our universe, called the cosmic microwave background, with unprecedented precision. Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech › Full image and caption
This tone represents sound waves that traveled through the early universe, and were later “heard” by the Planck space telescope. › Listen now
PASADENA, Calif. – The Planck space mission has released the most accurate and detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the universe, revealing new information about its age, contents and origins.
Planck is a European Space Agency mission. NASA contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck’s science instruments, and U.S., European and Canadian scientists work together to analyze the Planck data.
ESA Euro news: Planck maps the dawn of time.
The map results suggest the universe is expanding more slowly than scientists thought, and is 13.8 billion years old, 100 million years older than previous estimates. The data also show there is less dark energy and more matter, both normal and dark matter, in the universe than previously known. Dark matter is an invisible substance that can only be seen through the effects of its gravity, while dark energy is pushing our universe apart.
The nature of both remains mysterious.
“Astronomers worldwide have been on the edge of their seats waiting for this map,” said Joan Centrella, Planck program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These measurements are profoundly important to many areas of science, as well as future space missions. We are so pleased to have worked with the European Space Agency on such a historic endeavor.”
The map, based on the mission’s first 15.5 months of all-sky observations, reveals tiny temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, ancient light that has traveled for billions of years from the very early universe to reach us. The patterns of light represent the seeds of galaxies and clusters of galaxies we see around us today.
“As that ancient light travels to us, matter acts like an obstacle course getting in its way and changing the patterns slightly,” said Charles Lawrence, the U.S. project scientist for Planck at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.“the age, contents and other fundamental traits of our universe are described in a simple model developed by scientists,” called the standard model of cosmology.
These new data have allowed scientists to test and improve the accuracy of this model with the greatest precision yet. At the same time, some curious features are observed that don’t quite fit with the simple picture. For example, the model assumes the sky is the same everywhere, but the light patterns are asymmetrical on two halves of the sky, and there is a spot extending over a patch of sky that is larger than expected.
“On one hand, we have a simple model that fits our observations extremely well, but on the other hand, we see some strange features which force us to rethink some of our basic assumptions,” said Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency’s Planck project scientist based in the Netherlands. “This is the beginning of a new journey, and we expect our continued analysis of Planck data will help shed light on this conundrum.”
The findings also test theories describing inflation, a dramatic expansion of the universe that occurred immediately after its birth. In far less time than it takes to blink an eye, the universe blew up by 100 trillion trillion times in size. The new map, by showing matter seems to be distributed randomly, suggests that random processes were at play in the very early universe on minute “quantum” scales. This allows scientists to rule out many complex inflation theories in favor of simple ones.
“Patterns over huge patches of sky tell us about what was happening on the tiniest of scales in the moments just after our universe was born,” Lawrence said.
Planck launched in 2009 and has been scanning the skies ever since, mapping the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the theorized big bang that created our universe. This relic radiation provides scientists with a snapshot of the universe 370,000 years after the big bang. Light existed before this time, but it was locked in a hot plasma similar to a candle flame, which later cooled and set the light free.
Status of cosmological parameters from the cosmic microwave background.
The cosmic microwave background is remarkably uniform over the entire sky, but tiny variations reveal the imprints of sound waves triggered by quantum fluctuations in the universe just moments after it was born. These imprints, appearing as splotches in the Planck map, are the seeds from which matter grew, forming stars and galaxies. Prior balloon-based and space missions learned a great deal by studying these patterns, including NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), which earned the COBE Team the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Planck is the successor to these satellites, covering a wider range of light frequencies with improved sensitivity and resolution. Its measurements reveal light patterns as small as one-twelfth of a degree on the sky.
“Planck is like the Ferrari of cosmic microwave background missions,” said Krzysztof Gorski, a U.S Planck scientist at JPL. “You fine tune the technology to get more precise results. For a car, that can mean an increase in speed and winning races. For Planck, it results in giving astronomers a treasure trove of spectacular data, and bringing forth a deeper understanding of the properties and history of the universe.”
The newly estimated expansion rate of the universe, known as Hubble’s constant, is 67.15 plus or minus 1.2 kilometers/second/megaparsec. A megaparsec is roughly 3 million light-years. This is less than prior estimates derived from space telescopes, such as NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble, using a different technique. The new estimate of dark matter content in the universe is 26.8 percent, up from 24 percent, while dark energy falls to 68.3 percent, down from 71.4 percent. Normal matter now is 4.9 percent, up from 4.6 percent.
Complete results from Planck, which still is scanning the skies, will be released in 2014. NASA’s Planck Project Office is based at JPL. More information is online http://www.nasa.gov/planck, http://planck.caltech.edu and
http://www.esa.int/planck .
The precise observations of ACT and Planck come after more than a millennium of humans watching the sky and pondering where it all could have come from. Somehow, primates with lifespans of less than a century got a handle on events that took place eons before their planet—and even the atoms that would form their planet—existed.
Here’s a brief account of how humanity came around
to figure out how old the universe is.
Every culture has a creation myth: Does Heaven Exist!!
The Babylonians, for instance, believed the heavens and the Earth to be hewn from the carcass of a slain god. But few belief systems specified when existence started existing (one exception is Hinduism, which teaches that the universe reforms every 4.3 billion years, not so far off from the actual age of the Earth). Does GOD exist…
Does Heaven Co-exists is the heavenly world different from earth.
The idea that stuck, at least in the west, came from the Greek philosophers, and it was actually something of a scientific step back. In the fourth and third centuries BCE, Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers went all in on the notion that the planets and stars were embedded in eternally rotating celestial spheres. For the next millennium or so, few expected the universe to have an age at all.
Astronomer Johannes Kepler realized in 1610.
That one major crack in the popular Greek-inspired cosmology had been staring star gazers in the face all along. If an eternal universe hosted an infinite number of stars, as many had come to believe, why didn’t all those stars fill the universe with a blinding light? A dark night sky, he reasoned, suggested a finite cosmos where the stars eventually peter out.
The clash between the night sky and the infinite universe.
Became known as Olbers paradox, named after Heinrich Olber, an astronomer who popularized it in 1826. An early version of the modern solution came, of all people, from the poet Edgar Allan Poe. We experience night, he speculated in his prose poem Eureka in 1848, because the universe is not eternal. There was a beginning, and not enough time has elapsed since then for the stars to fully light up the sky.
But the resolution to Olbers paradox took time to sink in. When Einstein’s own theory of gravity told him that the universe likely would grow or shrink over time in 1917, he added a fudge factor into his equations—the cosmological constant—to get the universe to hold still (allowing it to endure forever)
February 28th: Edgar Allan Poe and the Riddle of Darkness at Night
365 Days of Astronomy (cosmoquest.org)
Eureka: A Prose Poem by Edgar Allan Poe (Analysis)
Eureka (1848) is a lengthy non-fiction work by American author Edgar Allan Poe(1809-1849) which he subtitled “A Prose Poem”, though it has also been subtitled as “An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe”. Adapted from a lecture he had presented, Eureka describes Poe’s intuitive conception of the nature of the universe with no antecedent scientific work done to reach his conclusions.
He also discusses man’s relationship with God, whom he compares to an author.
It is dedicated to the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859).Though it is generally considered a literary work, some of Poe’s ideas anticipate 20th century scientific discoveries and theories. Indeed a critical analysis of the scientific content of Eureka reveals a non-causal correspondence with modern cosmology due to the assumption of an evolving Universe.
But excludes the anachronistic anticipation of relativistic concepts such as black holes. Eureka was received poorly in Poe’s day and generally described as absurd, even by friends. Modern critics continue to debate the significance of Eureka and some doubt its seriousness, in part because of Poe’s many incorrect assumptions and his comedic descriptions of well-known historical minds.
THINK TANK; What Did Poe Know About Cosmology?
Nothing. But He Was Right. – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[Related: One of Einstein’s predictions on black holes has finally been confirmed]
Max Planck and quanta Building atop the work of Marie and Pierre Curie,
his quantum theory proposed that rather than heated body radiating energy in a steady stream that it is discontinuous, in packets called quanta.
Albert Einstein’s E = MC². Darwin’s observations of finches was a study of their distribution, making it one example of the _______ evidence he collected as he developed theories on evolution. t/f
Upon observing the 12 types of finches he encountered on the Galápagos Islands,1. Since more offspring are produced than an environment can support, organisms within a population must compete for resources to survive. 2. Due to variations within the population, some competitors will be better equipped for survival than others. 3. The best-equipped organisms will survive and will produce well-equipped offspring. 4. variations that with survival will be passed onto future generations and will rapidly change the whole population.
Which point is flawed as written above?
point 1. point 2. point 3. point 4.
Answer: Point 4
Variations that help with survival will be passed onto future generations and will rapidly change the whole population.
Explanation: Charles Darwin formulated the principal
basis of evolution is natural selection.
Natural selection is a mechanism which signifies the relation between adaptation of the species to their environment and their survival. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution’s four main points are: members of a species are not identical, more offspring are born than they can survive, traits are transferred from one generation to another, and only the winners of the resource rivalry are reproducing. But rapid change of the population was not suggested by him.
Sunday free will: “pseudo-dualism” – Why Evolution Is True
The Cosmological Argument (1 of 2) | by Mr. McMillan Revis – Bing video
Cosmological dualism is a long standing tension in the realm of philosophies and religions. Mankind has been inspired and marveled at the wonder and majesty of existent reality while at the same time being perplexed that, from a subjective human perspective, a lifetime of existence in this reality is frequently unpleasant and at times extremely so (much of human history attest to that estimation). The order and meticulousness of apparent existent reality for many tends to affirm an extraordinary consciousness as its ultimate source
(arch materialist should first check in here before proceeding further).
Lecture Collection | Cosmology Yet the human mind has been unable to satisfactorily reconcile the grand artifact of apparent existent reality with the actual experience of it. Cosmological dualisms generally in some fashion seek to address, as explanation, this fundamental dichotomy of the pervasive human condition.
To date, physicists have investigated the behavior of matter and energy at temperatures as high as those that existed in the universe as far back as _______ after the Big Bang. The way I’ve looked at this is even after a respite and the clouds are looming, it will not always be so and the sun will shine all the brighter until there is darkness no more.
From Cave Painting to Satellite-From Long Term to Instant Telecommunication:
Viewing The Intergalactic Superstructures,
Though there are many parts of Dua Lipa’s life that I cannot even remotely relate to (like being an international pop star, dating one of the Hadid siblings, and looking like an angel designed specially by God himself, for example), there is one single thing that I absolutely understand: wearing a hot dog T-shirt to the beach.
Science fiction crime thriller from Louis Morneau, genre director and graduate of the Roger Corman school of filmmaking. Kylie Travis stars as Karen, a psychiatrist and former hostage negotiator with the Chicago Police Department. After a negotiation gone lethally wrong, Karen has quit and returned home to Texas, where her car breaks down on the side of the highway. Picked up by Frank (James Belushi) and his ex-wife Rayanne (Shannon Whirry). I
t becomes quickly evident that Frank, a psychotically violent and jealous man, is involved in some sort of illegal activity involving a stolen computer disk. During a break at a truck stop, Frank murders Rayanne. Karen escapes to a nearby government installation, where Brian (Frank Whaley), a scientist, is working on a time travel device. Karen uses the machine to turn back the clock a few hours and try to prevent Frank’s murderous rampage, but her interference only makes things worse. Returning again and again to the past, Karen only succeeds in adding fuel to Frank’s fire.
RETROACTIVE // Full Movie // Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Crime