Scientist:  “I don’t need God anymore!  I have learned to make a man from dirt,just as he did!”

God:  “Prove it!”

Scientist picks up a load of dirt, takes it to his laboratory and starts to create artificial life.

God:  “That does not prove anything!”

Scientist: “Why not?”

God:  “You got to make your own dirt! That was my dirt you started with!!!”

Some people say a man is made out of mud.
A poor man’s made out of muscle and blood.
Muscle and blood and skin and bone,
a mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong.

I was born one morning, the sun didn’t shine,
I picked up shovel and walked down to the mine.
‘ Lifted sixteen tons of number nine coal,
the straw boss said “Well bless my soul”.

You lift sixteen tons and what do get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don’t call me ‘cause I can’t go,
I owe my soul to the company store.

TEF

>God:  “You got to make your own
>dirt! That was my dirt you started
>with!!!”

heh heh....reminds me of the Telecomunications battles here in Australia....the infrastructure built up over a long time by Telstra and predecessors, and along come a new bunch who want to claim the market as their own without putting in the hard yards.

The quest for a starting material for the Scientist leads toa a conumdrum.  Even if he were omnipotent, whatever is available to him: protons, quarks, energy, even the Big Bang, is still God’s!!!  He has to go outside this Universe to start a life on his own.

Here is an interview with Professor Stephen Hawking.  His take on science, the origins of the universe, and God.

http://tinyurl.com/ploky

Pierre

Perhaps, one of Napoleon’s cave-dwelling
ancestors knew .....

pete

>Here is an interview with Professor
>Stephen Hawking.  His take on science,
>the origins of the universe, and God.

they say that The brief History of Time is the most “sold on” book in the world....I guess it keeps the second hand book trade brisk.

I am sure that Stephen Hawking is daydreaming when he says that this Universe came from nothing.  Even though two antiparticles, such as electron and proton, can annihilate each other and turn into pure radiant energy, energy cannot turn into mass without some mass being already present as a catalyst. 

Mass is energy and energy is mass: E equals MC squared. When mass turns into energy, energy is released. When energy turns back into mass, the energy that was released is absorbed. Nothing gained, nothing lost. However, a physical change requires energy as a “catalyst”, but this energy is either released or absorbed, depending on the direction of the physical change (I’m not sure physical change is the right way to describe the transformation).

For example, if a particle collides with its anti-particle with sufficient speed, the collision itself produces the energy required to produce the anihilation (sp?), i.e., transformation of mass into energy.

Anyway, this is my simplistic interpretation of the quantum physics I learned way back when. Any physicists in the LOL community are welcome to correct me if I have erred in some way.

Pierre

If energy could turn into mass at random, the Universe would be full of all kinds of random particles.  No such random distribution of particles has been observed.  All observed particles have been produced by well known processes.

The Universe is full of empty space, with all kinds of random particles scattered about. They are indeed produced by well-know processes and “science” is discovering new ones periodically (pun intended). Energy does turn into mass at random; particle collisions of sufficient speed will do that. But thank “God” these collisions have very low probabilities of occuring. That’s the reason there are particle accelerators to observe these phenomena.

Pierre

How the present physical laws operate can be determined by conventional science with little controversy.  How the Universe came into existence requires more thought, but it should be possible to deduce.  At the moment it was born, the same physical laws that are valid today became valid also then.

The Universe can be neither infinite nor eternal. If it was eternal, all the energy sources would have been exhausted, all the stars burned out.  Oscillating Universe is also out of the question.  While enegy can alternately be converted from potential to kinetic energy and back, entropy accumulates with time and cannot be converted back in energy.  In time it would swamp all evergy sources.

The birth of the Universe could not be a simple burst of radiation because radiation can be converted into matter only in the presence of matter as a catalyst.  Consequently, the initial injection must have contained not solely radiation, but also matter.  That rules out the “out of nothing” hypothesis.  Are we stuck with a creative God, or some kind of a supernatural intelligence?

“The Universe can be neither infinite nor eternal.”

How do you define your universe ?

Visu labu,

The Universe of mine sonsists of all the energy and matter that I can see or otherwise detect.

The event that led to the formation of your universe, did it take place in another universe, parallel or sequential, or in a different dimension ?

Visu labu,

It’s a brave new world. How perfunctory is the physics of singularity? There must be a paradox someplace or if the laws of physics are true to form, as we know them, than we can give Hawking the benefit of doubt by accepting that there was “nothing” prior to the big bang moment, eh guys? Consider that the Intelligent Designer (ID) defies the physical and chemical laws, it is within the ID’s power, and creates energy and matter side by side for this one big event – the explosion of the universe. We cannot discount the ID as a causal factor and hence there is no need for your normal fudge factor. Far fetched? Not if you are a believer and cannot explain it all! :D

Besides matter and energy that resulted in temperature, pressure and volume in the beginning, there also was space and time. In addition to fission there is the more difficult fusion that provides interplay between matter and energy. This is already known. But consider where the speed of gravity, travelling point to point, may actually be sneaking through the various dimensions taking short cuts to arrive at its destination. It defies the known. There is far too much that’s unknown out there in our universe. We are still speculating on 96% of it and guessing at the remaining 4%. Anything goes! Einstein’s relativity is the best thing that we have out there for now, but the jury is still out and the testing still goes on. It does help to build on the scientific matrix and when there is a break through we can try to fit it in. That’s theory of everything.

Our universe has been around for 13.7 billion years and when we hit 78 billion years theoretically the lights go out unless of course, we are smart enough to turn them on again or there is intervention by the ID. We still have time.

Cheers, Ivars