Big Bang Found

I think the real story is not "Big Bang Found" but "Predictions of Inflationary Hypothesis Confirmed". We already knew there was a Big Bang, but up until now the Inflationary Hypothesis was just an ad hoc explanation which was appealing because it ad-hoc-explained so many things at once.The corollary, which is significant for debates about origins, is that the (cosmological) fine-tuning argument now looks like even more of a crock.

This is rather sweet: one of the guys who made the measurement got a cameraman and went round to Andrei Linde's house to surprise him with the news. Video here.

That's not a broad brush. Whether we like it or not, the word "creationist" now means "science denying kook", rather than "someone who believes in a creator". If you have an issue with that, take it up with the creationists --- they hijacked the word, we would be happier if they called themselves science-denying kooks.

Well, you know, I'd be more inclined to think that the Big Bang was consistent with the Bible if the world was less full of Christians telling me that the Big Bang is an evil atheist lie contrary to the Bible and thought up by Satan to con people into rejecting God. The existence of these people, who are invariably awfully keen on the Bible and indeed never shut up about it, suggests that Ross's interpretation is not exactly clear-cut. So while I might concede that the BB is consistent with the Bible if you interpret it with enough latitude, the fact that it occurred doesn't seem to me to be evidence weighing on the side of the Bible, that would be going too far.

Well, this is how science works. If a theory works every time we can test it, we should believe that it's valid in those cases where we can't. This is the principle of science: the entire scientific method can and must be built up from that premise.So if the Inflationary Hypothesis should now be considered the Inflationary Theory, or (if we are still unconvinced) if it should one day be so considered, and if the Inflationary Theory implies the existence of many universes --- then we should either believe in many universes or we should ditch the scientific method and go find something else.

In terms of observing them directly. None --- that's exactly what make them other universes. Apparently. If you're going to ask me why, I'm not a cosmologist.

You'd make a great pathologist. "I have determined the cause of this man's death --- he was born!"Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, it's one thing to say that the cause of the fluorescence is the UV light. It's much more tendentious to point to a particular electron and say "The cause of the fall to its ground state was being hit by a high-energy photon".Suppose someone says: "John's death was caused by his interest in botany". How do you make that out? we ask. "Well, he'd never have been at the top of that cliff if he hadn't wanted to see the rare Clifftop Saxifrage". Well, this may indeed have been a necessary and sufficient condition to get him to the top of the cliff, but surely the cause of his death was whatever got him to the bottom.

What if we don't know what unicorns are yet? How dumb we'd look saying there are no unicorns if it turns out that in fact they're black and white flightless birds that look like this: Silly of us, there are lots of unicorns, they live in Antarctica and eat fish.But of course we can't be wrong about what a word means, we have to be right about that, we made the words, we defined them, it can't turn out that "unicorn" really means penguin rather than "horse with a horn". In the same way, I can't find out that "this god thingy" really is my left leg, and exclaim: "How dumb of me to be an atheist, there was a god all along, it was attached to my groin". The word "god" may not be as well-defined as "unicorn", but it is sufficiently well-defined that I can't be wrong about the existence of God in that particular way.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.