Posted on 12/22/2005 7:15:18 AM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo
WHEN Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he gave a convincing account of how life has evolved over billions of years from simple microbes to the complexity of the Earth's biosphere to the present. But he pointedly left out how life got started.
One might as well speculate about the origin of matter, he quipped. Today scientists have a good idea of how matter originated in the Big Bang, but the origin of life remains shrouded in mystery.
Although Darwin refused to be drawn on how life began, he conjectured in a letter to a friend about "a warm little pond" in which various substances would accumulate.
Driven by the energy of sunlight, these chemicals might become increasingly complex, until a living cell formed spontaneously. Darwin's idle speculation became the basis of the "primordial soup" theory of biogenesis, and was adopted by researchers eager to re-create the crucial steps in the laboratory. But this approach hasn't got very far.
The problem is that even the simplest known organism is incredibly complex. Textbooks vaguely describe the pathway from non-living chemicals to primitive life in terms of some unspecified "molecular self-assembly".
The problem lies with 19th-century thinking, when life was regarded as some sort of magic matter, fostering the belief that it could be cooked up in a test tube if only one knew the recipe.
Today many scientists view the living cell as a type of supercomputer - an information-processing and replicating system of extraordinary fidelity. DNA is a database, and a complex encrypted algorithm converts its instructions into molecular products.
(Excerpt) Read more at smh.com.au ...
The real thought is what happens to creation when the world ends or maybe the world will not end but thats not scientific.
nothing
Two examples which come immediately to mind are the atomic bomb and nuclear power plants.
I don't suppose you could build one for us so we can see how simple it really is? Hint: Be sure to leave out all intelligence and design in the process.
Junior, archival ping.
E=mc2 passes tough MIT test
Work to be reported in Nature
In a fitting cap to the World Year of Physics 2005, MIT physicists and colleagues from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report the most precise direct test yet of Einstein's most famous equation, E=mc2.
And, yes, Einstein still rules.
The team found that the formula predicting that energy and mass are equivalent is correct to an incredible accuracy of better than one part in a million. That's 55 times more precise than the best previous test.
Why undertake the exercise? "In spite of widespread acceptance of this equation as gospel, we should remember that it is a theory. It can be trusted only to the extent that it is tested with experiments," said team member David E. Pritchard, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT, associate director of MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE) and a principal investigator in the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms.
As he and colleagues report their results in the Dec. 22 issue of Nature: "If this equation were found to be even slightly incorrect, the impact would be enormous -- given the degree to which [it] is woven into the theoretical fabric of modern physics and everyday applications such as global positioning systems."
In the famous equation, E stands for energy, m for mass, and c for the speed of light. "In the test, we at MIT measured m, or rather the change in m associated with the energy released by a nucleus when it captures a neutron," said former MIT graduate student Simon Rainville.
The NIST scientists, led by Scott Dewey, measured E. (The speed of light is a defined and therefore exactly known quantity, so it was simply plugged into the equation.)
Specifically, the NIST team determined the energy of the particles of light, or gamma rays, emitted by the nucleus when it captures a neutron. They did so using a special spectrometer to detect the small deflection of the gamma rays after they passed through a very pure crystal of silicon.
The mass loss was obtained at MIT by measuring the difference between the mass of the nucleus before the emission of a gamma ray and after. The mass difference was measured by comparing the cyclotron orbit frequencies of two single molecules trapped in a strong magnetic field for several weeks.
Pritchard notes that the mass of the nucleus is about 4,000 times larger than the much smaller mass difference. As a result, "determining the mass difference requires the individual masses to be measured with the incredible accuracy of one part in 100 billion -- equivalent to measuring the distance from Boston to Los Angeles to within the width of a human hair!"
Despite the results of the current test of E=mc2, Pritchard said, "This doesn't mean it has been proven to be completely correct. Future physicists will undoubtedly subject it to even more precise tests because more accurate checks imply that our theory of the world is in fact more and more complete."
Maybe you missed it, but Jones' decision is limited only to his Federal District. And since it won't be appealed, the larger area of that particular Appellate Court isn't effected.
So it's not as bad or dire as it seems.
That being said, the original Dover School District members brought this decision on themselves. It's been reported that they publicly stated that their intent was to push "creationism", not "I.D.". There's a HUGH distinction between the two.
It drives me crazy when people write crap like this.
Dr. Davies is one of the most famous evolutionists and physicists in the World. Why would he lie about something like that?
Nothing in this Davies piece suggests that there was an intelligent designer of life.
"Faith and evolution coexist"
Agreed. Both schools are partly right and both are partly wrong.
Sorry to lay a bum trip on those that believe evolution is not science, but evolution is a provable scientific theory (proven through scientific experiments and through the peer review process). But what would a biologist know? What next? Natural selection, one the provable foundations of evolution isn't "science"? Natural genetic mutation rates? Inbreeding coefficients?
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