The cosmos thread

[BladeRunner]

Twinkies post is interesting to me.

http://greatplainsvoices.com/index.php?topic=10886.msg255553#msg255553

I don't have the answer.  We don't know how life began.  They're trying to figure it out, but to my knowledge haven't yet.  And that's ok.  I'm fine with saying "I don't know".  I don't need to make up an answer, like Christians do.

It is quite fine for him to say "I don't know".....however I can remember numerous times when he was trashing Christianity by talking about the God of Old Testament slaughtering of societies. He asked Christians why God did that. And when those Christians couldn't answer or said "I don't know" that was not good enough for him. He demanded answers........

Can anyone else say...... 


The biggest problem of those that deny this universe was designed is they can't separate religion from it. I believe the science of intelligent design can be studied and taught without religion whatsoever. One has to have an open mind and be objective about it. Just as how a Christian should approach the theory of evolution. Look at the facts presented. Look at the statistics involved in everything happening strictly by coincidence.

It is not hard to draw your own conclusion.

[Jammer]

Twinkies post is interesting to me.

http://greatplainsvoices.com/index.php?topic=10886.msg255553#msg255553

I don't have the answer.  We don't know how life began.  They're trying to figure it out, but to my knowledge haven't yet.  And that's ok.  I'm fine with saying "I don't know".  I don't need to make up an answer, like Christians do.

It is quite fine for him to say "I don't know".....however I can remember numerous times when he was trashing Christianity by talking about the God of Old Testament slaughtering of societies. He asked Christians why God did that. And when those Christians couldn't answer or said "I don't know" that was not good enough for him. He demanded answers........

Can anyone else say...... 


The biggest problem of those that deny this universe was designed is they can't separate religion from it. I believe the science of intelligent design can be studied and taught without religion whatsoever.  One has to have an open mind and be objective about it. Just as how a Christian should approach the theory of evolution. Look at the facts presented. Look at the statistics involved in everything happening strictly by coincidence.

It is not hard to draw your own conclusion.

Absolutely 100% agree with you Blade.   I do however have one additional conclusion and that is the reason God ever created liberals in the first place is that he knew there would be a movie someday called "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".   God also knew that if he only created conservatives there would be nobody to play the parts of the Bad and the Ugly, hence he created liberals.

[Gomezz Adddams]

I watched the new "Cosmos" and came away disappointed. It no only devoted too much time with an attack on religion but also was too political with it's oblique references to global warming (Venus) and the rape of the New World by the Old (queue the silhouette of the Santa Maria arriving in the Americas with the comment "for better or worse"). The science presented was at best elementary school science dressed up with some fairly decent CGI and unfortunately Neil Tyson gets some of the science wrong. WTF?   

1. Venus Was Not Caused By Global Warming
Tyson assures us right away that we are to “question everything” so we have to ask why he thinks Venus is the way it is due to the greenhouse effect — which is another way of saying global warming. Venus is almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit and the clouds are sulfuric acid. Even the most aggressive climate change models and their 20-foot ocean rises don’t predict that for Earth, no matter how many Chevy Volts we don’t buy.

2. The Multiverse Is Not Science
Any time a scientist begins a sentence with “Many of us suspect,” it is codespeak for “we sit around and discuss it at the bar.”

There’s nothing wrong with that. Should you get the chance to join them at that bar, please avail yourself of the opportunity, because there are few occupations where the participants are as funny and engaging as scientists. But “many of us suspect” is a logical fallacy, an appeal to authority, and that makes for terrible science, as Sagan noted often.

3. There Is No Sound In Space
To go on this journey, we need to be “free from the shackles of space and time”, Tyson tells us. And apparently all of the other laws of physics. Why can we hear his spaceship when he is exploring the cosmos? Yes, it is a “spaceship of the imagination,” but I would hope Tyson’s imagination is more scientifically accurate than that of a teenager playing “Mass Effect.” If it’s instead my imaginary spaceship, there is no sound in space and (sorry Neil) the captain is Alessandra Ambrosia. Perhaps the “Star Trek” producer convinced them to put the sound in. If I am watching the original “Star Trek” episodes and the song and that spaceship whooshing sound are not in the opening credits, you can be certain I am writing a letter to Congress, but in a 2014 program it stands out as an error.

4. Giordano Bruno Was Not More Important To Science Than Kepler And Galileo
According to Cosmos, at the dawn of the age of astronomy there was “only one man on the whole planet who envisioned an infinitely grander cosmos, and how was he spending New Years Eve of the year 1600? Why, in prison, of course.”

Now we are getting away from the cosmic stuff and into the juicy personal side of science, with its anarchy and back-stabbing, and insurrection — a much different reality than the cold, logical, evidence-based perception of scientists. What science giant are they talking about? Galileo? Kepler? Brahe? No, Tyson is instead talking about Giordano Bruno, who, we are told, “couldn’t keep his soaring vision of the cosmos to himself” at a time when “there was no freedom of thought.”

5. The Universe Was Also Not Created In One Year
On January 1st, we had the Big Bang and on December 31st, I am alive, less than a tiny fraction of a millisecond before midnight. That can’t be right — it took me a whole day just to write this article.

Oh, Cosmos is not being literal? Oddly, a number of religious critics, Tyson included, insist that too many religious people believe the Book of Genesis is taken literally by people who read the Bible. Unless we accept that figurative comparisons help make large ideas manageable, a year is no more accurate than six days — it is instead a completely arbitrary metric invented to show some context for how things evolved.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/03/13/five-things-neil-degrasse-tysons-cosmos-gets-wrong/

[BladeRunner]

If I said I could flip a coin 50 times and guarantee it would be heads every time a lot of people would call me crazy because the odds of it happening are about 1 in a million billion. And I'd agree.

However, intelligent design deniers will believe the astronomical odds that this universe and it's ability to support life just happened by chance.

And the odds are quite more unlikely that this universe and it's ability for life to originate by chance, then exist by chance, then evolve by chance all just happened by coincidence to the next coincidence to the next coincidence.

[Skeptical]

However, intelligent design deniers will believe the astronomical odds that this universe and it's ability to support life just happened by chance.

I get a kick out of the "intelligent scientists" over at that other place.

If science is so infallible as they claim or at least infer then it should be childs play for Justin, for example, to fully detail how man progressed from an unintelligent (by present standards) proto-human nut and berry gathering wanderer to become the thinking man that popped upon the world scene overnight, so to speak in the overall age of humanoids on this planet!

No doubt he or the other "brains" over there will have to resort to using the "missing link" argument at least once in the explanation!

[BladeRunner]

Here is one scientist's thoughts on the universe and it's ability to exist and just how delicate it really is.....

For the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner— specifically, in a way that converts seven one-thousandths of its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly— from 0.007  percent to 0.006 percent, say— and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist of hydrogen and nothing else. Raise the value very slightly— to 0.008 percent— and bonding would be so wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since have been exhausted. In either case, with the slightest tweaking of the numbers the universe as we know and need it would not be here.

This is just one example of strong evidence that things had to be just right for the universe to exist.

[Gomezz Adddams]

Here is one scientist's thoughts on the universe and it's ability to exist and just how delicate it really is.....

For the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner— specifically, in a way that converts seven one-thousandths of its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly— from 0.007  percent to 0.006 percent, say— and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist of hydrogen and nothing else. Raise the value very slightly— to 0.008 percent— and bonding would be so wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since have been exhausted. In either case, with the slightest tweaking of the numbers the universe as we know and need it would not be here.

This is just one example of strong evidence that things had to be just right for the universe to exist.

I don't believe Bryson is a scientist. In fact if I remember correctly he dropped out of Drake University. He wrote a great book called "A Walk in the Woods" which is about a hike on the Appalachia Trail.

There are some alternative theories of the Universe that do seem to indicate a fine tuning such as Bryson talks about one being Eternal Inflation:

To demonstrate just how strange our universe is, Carroll considers all the other ways it might have been constructed. Thinking about the range of possibilities, he wonders: “Why did the initial setup of the universe allow cosmic time to have a direction? There are an infinite number of ways the initial universe could have been set up. An overwhelming majority of them have high entropy.” These high-entropy universes would be boring and inert; evolution and change would not be possible. Such a universe could not produce galaxies and stars, and it certainly could not support life.

It is almost as if our universe were fine-tuned to start out far from equilibrium so it could possess an arrow of time. But to a physicist, invoking fine-tuning is akin to saying “a miracle occurred.” For Carroll, the challenge was finding a process that would explain the universe’s low entropy naturally, without any appeal to incredible coincidence or (worse) to a miracle.

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/apr/25-3-theories-that-might-blow-up-the-big-bang#.UyPXxa1dXVt

[Darth Cheney]

I also wrote a book..."my Summer vacation"

Third grade, Ms. Johnson

[Skeptical]

I also wrote a book..."my Summer vacation"

Third grade, Ms. Johnson

Heard you used the entire box of new crayons too.  

[Gomezz Adddams]

DrP hammers Tyson et al in an awesome post on why not only the history but also the science is suspect in Neil Tyson's floundering Cosmos. Countdown to justincase's non-sensical response 3...2...1...

http://greatplainsvoices.com/index.php?topic=10886.msg256255#msg256255

For those who don't go there or can't see GLPVQ™, here's the post:

"You don't talk about the spherical earth with NASA and then say let's give equal time to the flat-earthers" -Neil deGrasse Tyson

Well Tyson is wrong. Not only is he wrong by advocating a stifling of free speech and a free press, but he also abuses history once again by promulgating the myth that religious beliefs and Christian scholars advocated and taught the idea of a flat Earth. Tyson seems all too eager to embrace the flawed reasoning of the discredited science/religion Conflict Thesis put forth by Andrew White and John Draper.

In fact the whole Cosmos series so far has been riddled with historical errors as the Tyson/Druyan/McFarlane triumvirate plays fast and loose with historical fact in order to make their revisionist history more malleable to fit their obviously bias narrative.

Several critics called Tyson out on his use of Giordano Bruno as a martyr for science when the historical record clearly shows that that was not the case. And in the last episode, Tyson tries to make the case that Newton went into seclusion after being publicly accused of stealing ideas on light and spectrum from Robert Hooke. However an examination of the historiography of that incident shows that Hooke had a disagreement with Newton, whose reclusiveness was his nature, over competing theories of which Newton's was the correct one.

The major dispute that Hooke had with Newton was over the inverse square law that Hooke first mentioned in his Gresham lecture in 1670 and later was so convinced it existed he wrote to Newton about in 1679, years before Halley approached Newton. However due to the lack of math (calculus) that was yet to be invented by Newton (or was it Leibniz?) the proof was not possible. However these details are brushed aside by T/D/Mc in their rush to place the white hat on Newton and the black hat on Hooke.

And while many might make excuses for a astro-physicist not been well versed in history, the science has not been spot on either. During the second episode Tyson attempts to make the evolution of domesticated dogs settled fact when recent DNA studies show that domesticated dogs are more closely related to a wild dog from 33,000 years ago than it is to the wolf that Tyson stakes his claim on.

Tyson also mistakenly claims that evolution turned the black bears fur white, but "science" shows that a polar bear's fur is hollow and translucent and only appears white due to the same effect that makes the sky blue ... Rayleigh Scattering of light.

Why so many mistakes and missteps in a show that is supposed to be about the discovery of truth and knowledge in the Universe? I can only speculate that T/D/Mc are more interested in painting the Creationism/ID crowd with the broad brush of ignorance and in their eagerness splatter a great deal of their pig-ignorance on themselves.

[BladeRunner]

Little Justy's post:

http://greatplainsvoices.com/index.php?topic=10886.msg256243#msg256243

That about says it. Anyone who thinks creationism is anywhere close to being science doesn't have the first clue what science is.

Serious? Why not prove that statement?

I have read plenty of Intelligent Design and there are a lot of SCIENTISTS that support it.

It can be debated apart from religion.

ALSO, Intelligent Design doesn't have to include the belief of a young earth.

[Gomezz Adddams]

Well that didn't take long. Justincase (formerly known as RWB) reveals he's lurking around over here. Wotta a douche. Of course neither of his identities cares to engage in a discourse over that piece of crap show of Neil Tyson's.    

http://greatplainsvoices.com/index.php?topic=10886.msg256263#msg256263

[BladeRunner]

So LittleJusty is too afraid to talk over here about the topic.

Of course he would be as he is used to the shroud of protection he has at GPLV.

[Gomezz Adddams]

So LittleJusty is too afraid to talk over here about the topic.

Of course he would be as he is used to the shroud of protection he has at GPLV.

The thread at GLPVQ™ has pretty much devolved into personal attacks on DrPangloss (aka Gomezz Adddams). Hmmm? Isn't that in violation of some rule?

Interesting to note, "Cosmos" audience is dropping like a lead fork. Series has lost 1.5M viewers since it's debut. What amazes me is how much science they are getting wrong, let alone the revisionist history they are throwing out. And I thought Neil Tyson was some kind of brainiac.

[BladeRunner]

Rules only apply to non-libs there. The liberals can say whatever they want and get away with it. The place is dying a slow death. It is [almost] painful to watch.   

LittleJusty says the following about you:

What? You mean DrP and Gomezz are the same person?

That's not the least bit sad.

So a person isn't allowed to have different names on two forums? I didn't see him complain about RWB when he was here and over there as someone else......(I wonder who).......

And the libs are too afraid to come over here and talk. They won't have their savior moderators here to protect them.

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