Posted on 03/02/2005 10:11:19 AM PST by Michael Barnes
Makes sense. I'm an agnostic and am forever bored by non-believers who pretend to have all the answers. A sour bunch.
Not me. Nothing beats the original radio series.
Hawkins understood at that moment that cosmology had actually been certifying as correct the Catholic Church's understanding of the nature of the universe. From that time on, he has been maniacal in his attempts to undermine the theories he had presented to the Pope, with preposterous results that have been proved wrong at every opportunity to observe excpected consequences.
Odd; I've read "A Brief History of Time," and don't recall anything like that in it. Perhaps you could provide a citation or link to substantiate your claim.
In the meanwhile, the readers may find this quote from the text of interest, as it indicates quite the opposite of what you have claimed.
Throughout the 1970s I had been mainly studying black holes, but in 1981 my interest in questions about the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican. The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went around the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the Pope. He told us that is was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference--the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!
What do you get when you multiply six by nine.
In base 13.
It's a Disney animation, for crying out loud. I did read a very long interview with the screenwriter, and he seemed OK. He said everyone else turned it down for fear of being remembered forever as the one who screwed up the Hitchhiker.
I think the script will be OK, but I fear for the animation. Marvin looks like a gumball machine. But maybe that's the way it should be.
It's possible I have mixed up my Hawking's sources; I no longer have the book (I took it out of the library about a decade ago), so it'll take me a little while to look it up. But it was one of those brief passages I snagged with an "A-ha!"... Not a highlighted turning point from Hawkings' perspective. Perhaps you did read it, but not attaching the same significance to it, you quickly forgot about it?
Who is the source of the quote you provide?
The Church did indeed make an error with Galileo. They went too far, extending Galileo's apostasy into an ad-hominem on all his assertions. But the author's characterizations about the constraints placed on him purport the church to be making an uncharacteristically illogical demand: Why would the Church permit the study of the period following the Big Bang, but put the Big Bang itself off limits? Or maybe what he means to state is that the Church didn't want the symposium to delve into WHY the big bang happened, as many physicists' recent exploration of that (especially Hawkings') tends to be more metaphysics than physics (e.g., Hawkings' infinite numbers of universes in infinite dimensions.)
>>>>Now, what was the question again?<<<<
>>What do you get when you multiply six by nine...In base 13.<<
>>>>What do you get when you multiply nine by five (post 13)<<<<
Doh!
Just so long as the gumballs have big, goofy grins anf wavy arms.
yeah my kids know it all already too
I'd settle for figuring out what you think you said.
I just played fast and loose with the deepest mysteries of physics AND Catholicism according to my cursory understandings and you expect to figure out what I wrote? Naaah. What's scary is there's a couple people who seem to have understood me!
she's 14, right?
To make sure I'm not misunderstood: What I wrote in Paragraph 1 of my post 25 is a synopsis of what Hawking himself wrote. What I wrote after ("From that time on...") is my characterization of what happened next.
[Sigh ...]
No, no, no.
The question Deep Thought provided the answer to (42) is
"What is 6 times 9?"
And it works (potential spoiler):
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
it works in base 13. Now, what does THAT imply?
I had forgotten that part....Gonna have to re-read the books...classics they are.
the base 13 stuff is not in the books, though if you do the math it works.
In the old LP record made from the BBC radio scripts (and supposedly in the radio show, as well) someone says in the background "base 13" when Arthur pulls out the "what is 6 times 9" from the bag.
I first got introduced to the BBC TV series, which was 9 half hour episodes made from squishing the first half of the original Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy book with the majority of Resteraunt At The End Of The Universe. My wife and I then read the books that were out then, up through "So Long And Thanks For All The Fish," while driving regularly from the Pocono's to NY for doctors visits (she'd read them aloud while I drove).
It's a rare thing to have trouble driving because you're laughing so much from what someone is reading to you.
That would be Hawking, from "A Brief History of Time"....
String Theory jives well my my Theroy of "Infinate Simultaneous Multi-Dimentional Universe and the use of the 'subconcious' to navigate it"
Power of positive will, higher level brain function, deja-vu, the "6th sense", etc...
It is true.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.