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http://www.aish.com/societywork/sciencenature/The_Big_Bang_and_the_Big_Question_A_Universe_without_God$.asp The Big Bang and the Big Question: A Universe without God? by Lawrence Kelemen The history of scientific search for the origins of the Universe gives us permission to believe in God. Until the early twentieth century, astronomers entertained three possible models of the universe:1. The universe could be static.According to this theory, though the mutual gravitational attractions of stars and planets might hold them together in the form of solar systems and galaxies, each of these stellar-terrestrial groups slide through space along its own random trajectory, unrelated to the courses tracked by other groups of stars and...

The recent discovery that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate has led many astronomers to forecast a dark and lonely future for our galaxy. According to some predictions, the rapidly accelerating universe will cause all galaxies to run away from each other until they are no longer visible. In this widely accepted scenario, our own Milky Way will become an isolated island adrift in a sea of totally black space 150 billion years from now. But two new studies by Stanford University cosmologists suggest that it may be time to rethink this popular view of a "runaway universe."...

In the decades that astronomers have debated the fate of the expanding universe — whether it will all end one day in a big crunch, or whether the galaxies will sail apart forever — aficionados of eternal expansion have always been braced by its seemingly endless possibilities for development and evolution. As the Yale cosmologist Dr. Beatrice Tinsley once wrote, "I think I am tied to the idea of expanding forever." Life and intelligence could sustain themselves indefinitely in such a universe, even as the stars winked out and the galaxies were all swallowed by black holes, Dr. Freeman Dyson, ...

At the end of March, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be up and running after a remodeling break of over two years. Physicists said on Thursday they hoped it would open the door to an even deeper understanding of our universe, now that the accelerator has twice the energy as before. "We are all very excited," CERN director Rolf-Dieter Heuer said at the opening of a press conference on Thursday, adding that the accelator would be reactivated during the final week of March, pending final tests. Since its initial launch in...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most audacious physics experiment in human history. Now scientists are about to restart the giant particle collider for a new set of experiments. Last time, they did the almost-impossible and found the Higgs Boson. This time, they might find something even more exciting. Back in 2008, just nine days into its first run of experiments, there was a significant incident at the Large Hadron Collider. A faulty electrical connection between two magnets stopped superconducting, then melted and caused serious mechanical damage to the facility. The accident delayed use of the LHC for six...

Mathematicians Chase Moonshine’s Shadow Researchers are on the trail of a mysterious connection between number theory, algebra and string theory. In 1978, the mathematician John McKay noticed what seemed like an odd coincidence. He had been studying the different ways of representing the structure of a mysterious entity called the monster group, a gargantuan algebraic object that, mathematicians believed, captured a new kind of symmetry. Mathematicians weren’t sure that the monster group actually existed, but they knew that if it did exist, it acted in special ways in particular dimensions, the first two of which were 1 and 196,883.McKay, of...

Now, you might be saying, if we don’t know what this thing is, and we can’t detect it. How do we know it’s actually there? Isn’t it probably not there, like dragons? How do we know dark matter actually exists, when we have no idea what it actually is? Oh, it’s there. In fact, pretty much all we know is that it does exist. Dark matter was first theorized back in the 1930s by Fritz Zwicky to account for the movement of galaxy clusters, but the modern calculations were made by Vera Rubin in the 1960s and 70s. She calculated...

Explanation: What are the unusual spots surrounding that galaxy? They are all images of the same supernova. For the first time, a single supernova explosion has been seen split into multiple images by the gravitational lens deflections of intervening masses. In this case the masses are a large galaxy and its home galaxy cluster. The featured image was captured last November by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The yellow-hued quadruply-imaged Supernova Refsdal occurred in the early universe far behind the cluster. Measuring the locations and time-delays between the supernova images should allow astrophysicists to recover the amount of dark matter...

Dark matter has long remained one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the universe. While its presence can be inferred from the gravitational pull it exerts on visible matter, the fact that it does not emit or absorb any radiation makes it next to impossible to detect. ... The new model put forward by a team headed by Christoffer Petersson, a theoretical particle physicist from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, suggests that the Higgs boson, discovered by the LHC in 2012, might be responsible for the birth of dark matter particles. According to this model, if supersymmetry is real,...

Physicists have gained new insights into dark energy and the theory of gravitation by analyzing data from the "Planck" satellite mission of the European Space Agency (ESA). Their results demonstrate that the standard model of cosmology remains an excellent description of the universe. Yet when the Planck data is combined with other astronomical observations, several deviations emerge. Further studies must determine whether these anomalies are due to measurement uncertainties or undiscovered physical correlations, which would also challenge Einstein's theory of gravitation. Thus, the analysis of the Planck data gives major impetus for research during future space missions.

Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior. Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different...

Scientists name new ‘object’ SDSS J0100+2802 and say it is 12.8bn light years from Earth and was formed just 900m years after the Big Bang *************************************************************A monster black hole powering “the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe” has been discovered that is 12bn times more massive than the sun, scientists have revealed.The extraordinary object is at the centre of a quasar - an intensely powerful galactic radiation source - with a million billion times the sun’s energy output.For years the nature of quasars, discovered in 1963, remained a mystery. Today scientists believe they are generated by matter heating up as...

Two physicists are trying to revive one of the great debates of twentieth-century science, arguing that the Big Bang may never have happened. Their work presents a radically different vision of the universe from the one cosmologists now work with. "The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," says Dr. Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University, Egypt. In collaboration with Professor Saurya Das of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, Ali has created a series of equations that describe a universe much like Hoyle's; one without a...

Astronomers have discovered the largest and most luminous black hole ever seen — an ancient monster with a mass about 12 billion times that of the sun — that dates back to when the universe was less than 1 billion years old. It remains a mystery how black holes could have grown so huge in such a relatively brief time after the dawn of the universe, researchers say.

Overall, the consensus among the panelists: the LHC’s second run will produce more data to refine the Standard Model—the theory that describes subatomic particles and the forces that dictate their behavior. This refinement is needed, said Heinemann, because there are still fundamental physics questions the Standard Model can’t address. Questions remain about gravity (Why is it so weak?); antimatter (Why is there so little of it?); and dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance that makes up nearly a quarter of the universe (What particle might be responsible?).

Infinity Is a Beautiful Concept – And It’s Ruining Physics By Max Tegmark | February 20, 2015 9:00 am I was seduced by infinity at an early age. Georg Cantor’s diagonality proof that some infinities are bigger than others mesmerized me, and his infinite hierarchy of infinities blew my mind. The assumption that something truly infinite exists in nature underlies every physics course I’ve ever taught at MIT—and, indeed, all of modern physics. But it’s an untested assumption, which begs the question: Is it actually true?A Crisis in Physics There are in fact two separate assumptions: “infinitely big” and “infinitely...

Do atoms understand language? Are you your brain and nothing else? If so, mind-control programming is quite reasonable by Jon Rappoport February 19, 2015 NoMoreFakeNews.com “The idea that somewhere in all the stacked-up universes, there might be a little corner that isn’t made out of matter or energy, but is truly independent of, and different from, sub-atomic particles… this idea confounds people, as if it might mean the end of all existence. It might mean a return to the old myths and fairy tales of the horrific priest-classes. It might mean everything science knows will vanish in a puff of...

Hypervelocity stars have been observed traversing the Galaxy at extreme velocities (700 km/s), but the mechanisms that give rise to such phenomena are still debated. Astronomer Thomas M. Tauris argues that lopsided supernova explosions can eject lower-mass Solar stars from the Galaxy at speeds up to 1280 km/s. “[This mechanism] can account for the majority (if not all) of the detected G/K-dwarf hypervelocity candidates,” he said. Several mechanisms have been proposed as the source for hypervelocity stars, and the hypotheses can vary as a function of stellar type. A simplified summary of the hypothesis Tauris favors begins with a higher-mass...

We’ve all heard of the claim of “settled science” when it comes to global warming/climate change, and we’ve all heard of the “Big Bang Theory”, and I’m not just talking about the popular TV show. The scientific theory goes all the way back to 1927. This is an artist’s concept of the metric expansion of space, where space (including hypothetical non-observable portions of the universe) is represented at each time by the circular sections. Note on the left the dramatic expansion (not to scale) occurring in the inflationary epoch, and at the center the expansion acceleration. The scheme is decorated...

A clock that is so accurate it will lose just one second in 16 billion years has been created by scientists. The device, made using super-cooled atoms held within a lattice of laser beams, is around 1,000 times more precise than the atomic clocks currently used to define time. Researchers say clocks with this level of accuracy could open up new areas of science by allowing tiny changes fluctuations in the strength of gravity to be measured.