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To: RadioAstronomer
This is what you get when Christians read Creation Science propaganda, without the benefit of a decent scientific education.

As I said before, because science and Christianity are not fundamentally opposed, there are great Creationist scientists out there. But we don't hear about them because they are quietly engaged in their research. The Creationists we hear about are more like televangelists than theologians, out there trying to make a name for themselves as Creationists. I'm betting that, as an astronomer, you have got some Evangelical Christian collegues whose reasearch you respect - because they actually know what they are talking about, and don't just shoot their mouths off.

(How the heck would the law of Conservation of Momentum have to say about the Big Bang?)

311 posted on 12/20/2004 7:19:24 AM PST by jude24 (sola gratia)
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To: jude24
I'm betting that, as an astronomer, you have got some Evangelical Christian collegues whose reasearch you respect - because they actually know what they are talking about, and don't just shoot their mouths off.

You are right on the money! :-)

315 posted on 12/20/2004 7:21:52 AM PST by RadioAstronomer
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To: jude24; RadioAstronomer
How the heck would the law of Conservation of Momentum have to say about the Big Bang?

I wondered the same thing, until our non-physics-inclined friend "clarified" with a reference to "spin". It's a reference to conservation of angular momentum, and it's one of those arguments generally promoted by folks who never took Physics 101 back in college:

The moons of several planets in our galaxy here spin counter to the direction of the planets. If, as your big bang theory posits, a whole bunch of nothing was spinning and condensed down to a speck in the nothing, then exploded. The nothing that exploded into everything would preserve angular momentum in all that exploded from it. This is a falsifiable law. Planetary bodies are not the only things subject to this law, galaxies, stars and so on are all subject to said law. Galaxies, however, do not all spin the same direction either.

I've seen this one before, and the flaws should be immediately obvious. First, conservation of angular momentum refers to the total angular momentum of the entire system - in no way does it mean that all the exploded bits have to spin in "the same direction" as the original unexploded thing. You can certainly have rotation in the opposite direction, so long as the total angular momentum is the same afterwards as it was before - a tiny smidgeon of thought will probably suggest many ways in which you can have a system with, say, 10 bodies spinning in all sorts of directions that has the same total angular momentum as a 10-body system where all spin in the same direction.

The next major problem is that nobody has bothered to explain why the angular momentum of the "pre-Big Bang" universe is a meaningful concept, or how we would measure it if it were - indeed, we should probably begin by turning "pre-Big Bang" into a meaningful concept itself. How things "spin" when spacetime doesn't exist I don't know, which doesn't suggest to me that it is a meaningful concept, but there you go. I suppose you could go out and measure the angular momentum of every object in the universe, total it all up, and arrive at a total angular momentum for the whole system in order to arrive at some conclusion about total angular momentum in the past, but obviously I'm not going to wait by the phone for the results of that calculation ;)

343 posted on 12/20/2004 7:55:33 AM PST by general_re ("What's plausible to you is unimportant." - D'man)
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