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This thread is a continuation of the first thread "Questions For Atheists & Non-Atheists" Some points were brought up that I wish to address here. I look forward to the responses. Taken from one of my dictionaries in my personal library: "Occam's Razor. A principle devised by the English philospher William of Occam, which states that entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. In a scientific context, Occam's Razor is the choice of the simplest theory from among the theories which fit what we know. In logic, Occam's Razor is the statement of an argument in its essential...

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - The newly discovered collision of two galaxies millions of years ago, which sparked rings of fire that are still expanding, may offer new clues on the origins of the universe, astronomers said on Wednesday. New images of the Andromeda Galaxy were captured by an infrared camera aboard the Spitzer Space Telescope and are described in the science journal 'Nature'. The pictures offer fresh insight into the ever-changing nature of galaxies, said Harvard University astrophysicist Giovanni Fazio. Fazio, the mastermind behind the Spitzer, is considered one of the world's top space pioneers. "We thought it was a plain,...

Early Large Spiral Galaxy Resembles Milky Way    08/18/2006   Astronomers using adaptive optics at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal, Chile took spectra of a galaxy at red-shift 2.38 described as an “early young galaxy” that must have, according to current theory, formed very rapidly, because it looks like the Milky Way.  The observations by Genzel et al., published in Nature,1 were described by Robert C. Kennicutt (editor of Astrophysical Journal) in the same issue of Nature2 this way: On page 786 of this issue1, Genzel et al. present remarkable observations of what appears to be a...

A project aiming to create an easier way to measure cosmic distances has instead turned up surprising evidence that our large and ancient universe might be even bigger and older than previously thought. If accurate, the finding would be difficult to mesh with current thinking about how the universe evolved, one scientist said. A research team led by Alceste Bonanos at the Carnegie Institution of Washington has found that the Triangulum Galaxy, also known as M33, is about 15 percent farther away from our own Milky Way than previously calculated. The finding, which will be detailed in an upcoming issue...

A handful of researchers posit an alternative theory of origin — the universe has no beginning Many, if not most, people assume that certain aspects of nature’s workings are absolutely known. Outside of intelligent design circles, no modern biologist doubts the theory of evolution by natural selection; it is too well established by harmonious data across a multiplicity of fields. No credible doctor questions the germ theory of disease. And, one might think, no serious cosmologist disagrees with the standard cosmological model. The SCM is the official designation of what is informally called “the big bang�: that relatively recent but...

LOS ANGELES - Peace reigns at least at the Miss Universe 2006 contest, where beauties Miss Lebanon and Miss Israel are the "best of friends" despite the bloody fighting between the two countries back home, their companions said. Even as Israel has bombarded Lebanon in the wake of a missile barrage by the Hezbollah militia in the country's south, the two women -- Gabrielle Bou Rached of Lebanon and Israel's Anastacia Entin -- have struck up a friendship ahead of Sunday's tough competition to see who is named the world's most beautiful woman. "I think the perpetrators of the current...

An exotic theory, which attempts to unify the laws of physics by proposing the existence of an extra fourth spatial dimension, could be tested using a satellite to be launched in 2007. Such theories are notoriously difficult to test. But a new study suggests that such hidden dimensions could give rise to thousands of mini-black holes within our own solar system – and the theory could be tested within Pluto’s orbit in just a few years. Black holes of various masses are thought to have sprung into existence within 1 second of the big bang, as elementary particles clumped together...

Scientists use quantum gravity to describe the universe before the Big Bang.Scientists may finally have an answer to a "big" question: If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what could have caused it to happen? Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing...

Roman Catholic priest Fr. Georges Lemaître, working off Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, first proposed the “Big Bang” explanation of the universe’s origin in 1927. It took decades for the theory to win general acceptance. Einstein himself opposed it bitterly for years, in what he would later call “the biggest mistake of my life.” The theory was finally proved experimentally only in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson. For their pains, they were awarded the Nobel Prize. Fr. Lemaître, on the other hand, never received the public recognition that was his due. Nevertheless, in the 1970s several apparent problems with the...

Dear Sirs. sub: Theory of everything What we want ultimately know is that who am I and from where we came and where to go, and what is this universe, how it works, how it was before the Big Bang, and what will happen after the present expansion; who is God or Creator, how he created the creations; and what are the relations between the creator and the creations, and further more what is the evolution and how it was evoluted and by whom, and the relation between the evolutions and nature; and also the latest topics of intelligent design...

Astronomers have detected the most distant -- and therefore oldest -- gamma-ray burst ever. The burst, called GRB 050904, was observed last September and is thought to have come from an explosion that happened around 12.8 billion years ago, when the universe was just 7% of its current age. The explosion released an intense flash of gamma rays that has been measured by three independent teams of astronomers from the US, Italy and Japan. The results -- reported in three papers in this week's Nature -- could help shed more light on the dynamics of the early universe. Gamma-ray bursts...

By the faint cosmic glow of the oldest known light, physicists say they have found evidence that the universe grew to astounding proportions in less than the blink of an eye. In that trillionth of a second after the big bang, the universe expanded from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space through a process they call inflation. At the same time, the seeds were planted for the formation of stars, galaxies, planets and every other object in the universe. “It's giving us our first clues about how inflation took place,” said Michael...

Grey Hautaluoma Headquarters, Washington (202) 358-0668 Susan Hendrix Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. (301) 286-7745 March 16, 2006 RELEASE: 06-097 NASA Satellite Glimpses Universe's First Trillionth of a Second Scientists peering back to the oldest light in the universe have new evidence to support the concept of inflation. The concept poses the universe expanded many trillion times its size in less than a trillionth of a second at the outset of the big bang. This finding, made with NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), is based on three years of continuous observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the...

Scientists announced today new evidence supporting the theory that the infant universe expanded from subatomic to astronomical size in a fraction of a second after its birth. The finding is based on new results from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, launched in 2001 to measure the temperature of radiant heat left over from the Big Bang, which is the theoretical beginning to the universe. This radiation is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and it is the oldest light in the universe. Using WMAP data, researchers announced in 2003 that they had pieced together a very detailed...

The stars run in their courses, in billions of galaxies, orbited by planets which are orbited by moons, and if they did not do so in ways which are predictable -- that is with many recurring similarities -- science would not exist. Predictability to some degree or other is the foundation of science. Those italics emphasize an extension of previous demands by science, which insisted on absolutes. Quantum physics took that down, and in the process angered Albert Einstein. But, still and all, even in the subatomic world one can safely play the odds. You cannot predict what any given...

Vatican's Evolutionists By Rafael Brom Catholics should wonder why Vatican constanly issuing a stout defence of Charles Darwin's Fraudulent Communist Religion "Theory of Evolution". Now we have Vatican's high ranked Cardinal claiming that the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly. Looks like that 150 million martyrs who were tortured and killed by communists since 1917 in the name of "Theory of Evolution" did not read their Bible correctly. I am sure that Vatican's Evolutionists will one day declare St. Peter as the First Communist...

I just heard on the Bakersfield News channel that the folks pushing for "intelligent design" folded like a house of cards and the group wanting to promote the Religious teachings of creationism prevailed. .......breaking news....more to come.

I am not a trekkie, but I do remember a Star Trek episode in which several members of the crew of the starship Enterprise entered an alternative universe. That universe was the mirror image of the “normal” universe, that is, it was exactly like the normal universe, but everyone in it had the exact opposite character of the people in the normal universe We have entered that alternative universe in California. I know that term limits and the recall have substantially diminished the experience in Sacramento, but anyone paying even the smallest attention to history can tell that Gray Davis...

View From a Parallel Universe . . . ''So It Goes With Empires'' Terror - Islam Friday, November 25, 2005 Jack Kinsella - Omega Letter Editor I remember a television program from a few years ago whose plot centered around a group of people who would make a weekly jump from parallel universe to parallel universe. Each jump would put them in a new universe where everybody's destiny was different than that of last week's universe. Because everybody had a different individual destiny, each parallel world was different; sometimes America was a totalitarian dictatorship, sometimes a benevolent democracy, sometimes a...

Cursed 'Einstein Gap' turns son against father BY DAVE BARRY (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Jan. 9, 2000) Recently, I received a phone call from my son, Rob. It was a phone call that every parent dreads. That's right: My son told me that the universe does not exist. Or at least it does not in any way resemble my concept of it. According to Rob, I understand the universe about as well as a barnacle understands a nuclear aircraft carrier. I blame college. That's where Rob is getting these ideas, which have to do with...

Quantum fluctuation. Inflation. Expansion. Strong nuclear interaction. Particle-antiparticle annihilation. Deuterium and helium production. Density perturbations. Recombination. Blackbody radiation. Local contraction. Cluster formation. Reionization? Violent relaxation. Virialization. Biased galaxy formation? Turbulent fragmentation. Contraction. Ionization. Compression. Opaque hydrogen. Massive star formation. Deuterium ignition. Hydrogen fusion. Hydrogen depletion. Core contraction. Envelope expansion. Helium fusion. Carbon, oxygen, and silicon fusion. Iron production. Implosion. Supernova explosion. Metals injection. Star formation. Supernova explosions. Star formation. Condensation. Planetesimal accretion. Planetary differentiation. Crust solidification. Volatile gas expulsion. Water condensation. Water dissociation. Ozone production. Ultraviolet absorption. Photosynthetic unicellular organisms. Oxidation. Mutation. Natural selection and evolution. Respiration. Cell differentiation. Sexual...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Galaxy-gazing scientists surely wonder about what kind of impact finding life or intelligent beings on another planet would have on the world. But what sort of effect would it have on Catholic beliefs? Would Christian theology be rocked to the core if science someday found a distant orb teeming with little green men, women or other intelligent forms of alien life? Would the church send missionaries to spread the Gospel to aliens? Could aliens even be baptized? Or would they have had their own version of Jesus and have already experienced his universal or galactic plan...

LOS ANGELES - Astronomers say the mysterious, massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way helped give birth to new stars, challenging earlier theories that black holes are solely destructive forces [end] Scientists peering through NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory found that disks of gas near the black hole actually helped spawn a new generation of stars. Their observations, announced Thursday, will be published in a future issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "Massive black holes are usually known for violence and destruction," said Sergei Nayakshin of the University of Leicester in England, who made...

My "Swirl Theory"We hear of string theory, the Big Bang and many other ideas.I have come up with this idea over the past several days. Katrina and Rita has turned my attention towards this as I have discovered a new theory as of late that black holes may be present at the center of each galaxy.Using the theory that a black hole could have possibly been created in space by gases which collapsed into itself churning and sucking gasses and space debris around it into a swirling vortex. This swirling vortex of gas eventually condensed into planets and solar systems.Here...

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - A NASA telescope has spotted galaxies that hold the ingredients for life dating back to when the universe was very young. Using the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists at the California Institute of Technology detected organic molecules in galaxies when the universe was a quarter of its current age of 14 billion years old, NASA said Thursday. These complex molecules, composed of carbon and hydrogen, are commonly found on Earth and are thought to be responsible for planet and star formation. Spitzer scientists found the organic building blocks in galaxies where intense star formation took place...

The article follows... Hi everybody. Have been following the Commercial art=Bad art thread for a couple of days and wanted to throw in my two cents. On the topic of 'commercial illustration=bad art' and Rockwell, Parrish, and N. C. Wyeth, et al. be damned: I can't say I agree. If one has to say that the damning detail of the art was the fact that Rockwell had to accept guidelines as to what he was to paint (i.e. paint Santa having milk and cookies for our December issue of The Saturday Evening Post) so then his art isn't art, but...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Hollywood actor Tom Cruise not only battles creatures from outer space in his latest film "War of the Worlds," he also believes aliens exist, he told a German newspaper on Wednesday. Asked in an interview with the tabloid daily Bild if he believed in aliens, Cruise said: "Yes, of course. Are you really so arrogant as to believe we are alone in this universe? "Millions of stars, and we're supposed to be the only living creatures? No, there are many things out there, we just don't know," Cruise, 42, said in the interview published in German. Cruise...

Am I the only one who marvels at the futility of Man as he tries to explain the origin of the universe? The time and effort expended upon this pursuit could be far better spent upon issues that actually lack an answer. Trying to find a new explanation for the cosmos via science is like trying to reinvent the wheel. For the sake of argument let’s assume that the universe happened by accident just as many so-called scientists claim. With this as a starting point we can make the assumption that there was a source of crude matter from which...

A good description of the state of Dark Matter - perfect daytime TV.

Note: Skeptics abound. Readed the authentication section and the issues. This is the cumulation of over a decade of research and verification and validation of the Majestic Documents set. Majestic Documents.com is a groundbreaking look at the United States UFO program called Majestic and the top secret government documents that tell the story of presidential and military action, authorization, and cover-up regarding UFOs and their alien occupants. A remarkable work of investigative journalism, this website is the first to authenticate top secret UFO documents that tell a detailed story of the crashed discs, alien bodies, presidential briefings, and superb secrecy....

Was our universe created? That is, was it brought into being by an entity with a mind? This is a question I began pondering after my recent inquiry into the end of the universe. (For some reason, cosmic mysteries are best contemplated in pairs.) It is the fundamental issue that separates religious believers, ranging from Deists to Gnostics to Southern Baptists, from nonbelievers. To many atheists, the very idea that our world could have been created by a conscious being seems downright nutty. How could anyone, even a god, "make" a universe? To get a better understanding of this matter,...

Astronomers expect to be 'Dazled' By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter, in Birmingham The VLT facility sits on top of the Paranal Mountain in Chile UK and Australian astronomers are about to use a new instrument to detect the most distant galaxies yet observed. Dazle is tuned to search for specific infrared wavelengths of light that should be associated with some of the first stars to shine in the Universe. The instrument will be fitted to the 8m Melipal Very Large Telescope at Paranal in Chile. University of Cambridge researchers gave details of their work at the UK...

ROME (Reuters) - A small group of physicists are battling what they see as the cosmological equivalent to the bogeyman: an enormous dark force, that nobody has ever seen, driving galaxies apart. Conventional wisdom holds that the mysterious force, called "dark energy," may make up 70 percent of the universe, and could be the determining factor in whether it is eventually destroyed billions of years from now. But Italian and American cosmologists are offering a controversial alternative to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. They say it's not dark energy, but an overlooked after-effect of the "Big Bang" --...

This Page is http://www.lhs.berkeley.edu/SII/URLs/URLs-Astronomy.htmlVisit this site yourself... http://www.lawrencehallofscience.org/sii/SIImorelinks.html ASTRONOMY URLs: If you find any of these links no longer operating (after repeated tries--not just first try), please notify Alan Gould <agould--@--uclink.berkeley.edu> [delete dashes] Please include name of non-operative link as well as the name of this page: URLs-Astronomy ASTRONOMY CLUBS -- ASTRONOMY COMPANIESASTRONOMY EDUCATIONASTRONOMY WEBSITES FOR KIDSCONSTELLATIONS -- ECLIPSES -- GALAXIESHISTORY OF ASTRONOMY -- IMAGES -- NASA SitesOBSERVATION AIDS -- OBSERVATORIES -- ORGANIZATIONSSOFTWARESOLAR SYSTEM/PLANETS (Asteroids, Comets, Meteors, Mars, Moon, Pluto, Saturn, Venus, Sun) SATELLITES An Astronomy Web Index (Astro Web) http://www.cv.nrao.edu/fits/www/astroweb.htmlYahoo's Index of Astronomy ResourcesAstronomy Picture of the Day http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/...

Combining observations with ESO's Very Large Telescope and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, astronomers have discovered the most distant, very massive structure in the Universe known so far. It is a remote cluster of galaxies that is found to weigh as much as several thousand galaxies like our own Milky Way and is located no less than 9,000 million light-years away. The VLT images reveal that it contains reddish and elliptical, i.e. old, galaxies. Interestingly, the cluster itself appears to be in a very advanced state of development. It must therefore have formed when the Universe was less than one third...

Baffled by the expansion of the universe? You're not alone. Even astronomers frequently get it wrong. The expansion of the universe may be the most important fact we have ever discovered about our origins. You would not be reading this article if the universe had not expanded. Human beings would not exist. Cold molecular things such as life-forms and terrestrial planets could not have come into existence unless the universe, starting from a hot big bang, had expanded and cooled. The formation of all the structures in the universe, from galaxies and stars to planets and Scientific American articles, has...

Found: 7 percent of the mass of the universe. Missing since: 10 billion years ago. Consider one more astronomical mystery solved. Scientists have located a sizeable chunk of the universe that seemed to be missing since back when the stars first formed. It’s floating in super-hot rivers of gas, invisible to the naked eye, surrounding galaxies like our own. And a completely different kind of mystery matter -- dark matter -- may have put it there. The results appear in the current issue of the journal Nature. To make this latest discovery, astronomers at Ohio State University and their colleagues...

A new analysis of the "echo" of the Big Bang has left cosmologists scratching their heads and could throw a monkey wrench into efforts to understand how the universe began. U.S. and European scientists analyzed the distribution of "hot" and "cold" regions -- areas that are putting out greater or less amounts of energy than the average -- of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the so-called echo). What they found was unexpected: an apparent correlation between those hot and cold spots and the orientation and motion of our solar system.

SAN DIEGO -- Astronomers are highly confident that they've taken the first photograph of a planet outside our solar system. Make that two photographs. A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope confirms with a high degree of confidence a picture made previously by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and reported by SPACE.com in September. The planet -- still just a candidate, actually -- is an odd duck in many respects. It does not orbit a normal star, and it is much more massive than the largest planets in our solar system. Still, if confirmed, it represents a...

Astronomers have recorded the most powerful eruption of energy yet observed in the universe. It comes from a gigantic black hole, a billion times more massive than our sun, which is swallowing vast amounts of material from its surrounding galaxy. The eruption was discovered with the Chandra X-ray observatory operated by Nasa, the US space agency, and is reported in the journal Nature. Brian McNamara of Ohio University, the study leader, said he had previously observed vast cosmic bubbles of hot gas extending outward from "supermassive" black holes in distant galaxies, but "what literally almost knocked me off my chair...

New York (AsiaNews/CWN) – Anthony Flew, the British scholar who has been one of the world's most proponent of atheism, has conceded that scientific evidence points to the existence of God. A prolific writer and energetic lecturer who has advanced atheist arguments throughout his long academic career, Flew made his dramatic concession at a conference in New York in which he recanted the ideology of a lifetime conceding that there is scientific evidence for the existence of God. Flew said that the latest biological research “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce...

Astronomers who think they know how the very early universe came to have so much interstellar dust need to think again, according to new results from the Spitzer Space Telescope. In the last few years, observers have discovered huge quantities of interstellar dust near the most distant quasars in the very young universe, only 700 million years after the cosmos was born in the Big Bang. "And that becomes a big question," said Oliver Krause of the University of Arizona Steward Observatory in Tucson and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. "How could all of this dust have...

If you can make sense of it, here's the article: Stellar encounters as the origin of distant Solar System objects in highly eccentric orbits SCOTT J. KENYON AND BENJAMIN C. BROMLEY The Kuiper belt extends from the orbit of Neptune at 30 AU to an abrupt outer edge about 50 AU from the Sun. Beyond the edge is a sparse population of objects with large orbital eccentricities. Neptune shapes the dynamics of most Kuiper belt objects, but the recently discovered planet 2003 VB12 (Sedna) has an eccentric orbit with a perihelion distance of 70 AU, far beyond Neptune's gravitational influence....

90-Day Mars Trip Said Possible By Irene Mona Klotz, Discovery News Oct. 20, 2004 — A team of University of Washington researchers believes it has found a way to cut roundtrip travel time between Earth and Mars by 95 percent, giving astronauts a much higher chance of pulling off a successful mission while minimizing their exposure to dangerous radiation. "If it's going to take 2 1/2 years (to travel back and forth to Mars), the chances of a successful mission are pretty low," said project head Robert Winglee, a professor of Earth and space sciences at the Seattle-based university. Taking...

Universe's 6,000th birthday ... Tim Radford Friday October 22, 2004 The Guardian Britain's geologists are about to celebrate the fact that the universe is exactly 6,000 years old. At 6pm tonight at the Geological Society of London, scientists will raise their glasses to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (below), who in 1650 used the chronology of the Bible to calculate the precise date and moment of creation. Working from the book of Genesis, and risking some speculation on the Hebrew calendar, he calculated that it began at 6pm on Saturday October 22, 4004 BC. Actually, he put the date at...

Scientists studying the deepest picture of the Universe, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, have been left with a big poser: where are all the stars? The Ultra Deep Field is a view of one patch of sky built from 800 exposures. The picture shows faint galaxies whose stars were shining just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "Our results based on the Ultra Deep Field are very intriguing and quite a puzzle," says Dr Andrew Bunker, of Exeter University, UK, who led a team studying the new data." "They're certainly not what I expected, nor what...

Something strange is tugging at America's oldest spacecraft. As the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes head towards distant stars, scientists have discovered that the craft - launched more than 30 years ago - appear to be in the grip of a mysterious force that is holding them back as they sweep out of the solar system. Some researchers say unseen 'dark matter' may permeate the universe and that this is affecting the Pioneers' passage. Others say flaws in our understanding of the laws of gravity best explain the crafts' wayward behaviour. Excerpted - see link

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 July 11 WMAP Resolves the Universe Credit: WMAP Science Team, NASA Explanation: Analyses of a new high-resolution map of microwave light emitted only 380,000 years after the Big Bang appear to define our universe more precisely than ever before. The eagerly awaited results announced last year from the orbiting Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe resolve several long-standing disagreements in cosmology rooted in less precise data. Specifically, present analyses...

In the last few decades, scientists have discovered that there is a lot more to the universe than meets the eye: the cosmos appears to be filled with not just one, but two invisible constituents –dark matter and dark energy – whose existence has been proposed based solely on their gravitational effects on ordinary matter and energy. Now, theoretical physicist Robert J. Scherrer has come up with a model that could cut the mystery in half by explaining dark matter and dark energy as two aspects of a single unknown force. His model is described in a paper titled “Purely...

<p>Can you access the flash of emancipation you felt the first time you were able to stay up on a bike or propel yourself through the water? Can you remember the way your new knowledge enhanced your life? And can you recall the gratitude you felt toward those people who had the skill and the patience to pass that knowledge along to you?</p>