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Author | Topic: Big Bang...How Did it Happen? | |||||||||||||||||||
crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I haven't seen anyone so far saying where they got any of there information. Well, a number of them are actually professionals in biological fields, so they got their information first-hand, through experiment, training, and research. The rest of us are generally referring to well-known sources or aren't making controversial claims, so we generally omit the sources unless someone asks. You're free to challenge us for a source for any claim you'd like supported, of course. Just as we're free to challenge you for your sources. If you want a source for a particularly controversial claim, just ask.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Hrm, you still don't quite get it, yet.
You have to make your own arguments, because you're participating in the debate. We can't debate with the author of that website because he isn't here. It's fine, again, for you to use material other people have written, if you tell us where it's from, but you can't use it instead of making your own arguments. You can only use it to support your own arguments. You're here. The author of that site is not. It's you we want to debate with, not him.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
yes I understand I have to show where I get the information I post and cannot claim it as my own. That's half of it. The other half is making your own arguments, or phrasing them in your own words, so that you can defend them and participate in the debate. Otherwise, what are you hear for? We've seen all the creationist websites, we've heard all the arguments, and we've seen all the creationist "proofs" that you could Google for. You're not going to be showing us anything we haven't seen before, and if you have this idea that the only reason we're still evolutionists is because we haven't seen some website you know of, you might as well know that it's not like that - we've seen way more creationist stuff than you ever have. But we've never talked to you before. Maybe you've got a way of arguing that will convince us. But if all you do is post other people's websites, you're not going to get anywhere, because we've already seen them.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
That's a couple of absolute statements and how do you know you have seen more creationist sites than me you just said you don't know me. It's just a guess, based on the fact that so far you haven't quoted from what creationists wind up considering the primary sources in their movement; organizations like Answers in Genesis, Duane Gish's Institute for Creation Research, and authors like Michael Behe, Phillip Johnson, Kent Hovind, Ken Ham, etc. The fact that you don't seem to have heard of these guys implies that you've only just got into the debate and haven't done a great deal of research yet. I could be wrong, of course. But I'm still willing to bet that I know well more about creationism, creationist organizations, and creationist arguments than you do.
whos we? Us "regulars", I guess. I've been posting here for about two years or so.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
The very idea that matter can spontaniously appear from nothing whithout a prior source such as energy is messed up. Well, I'm sorry you find it "messed up", but it does happen. It's the source of a well-known effect in quantum mechanics called the "Casimir effect."
A basic law is that for an effect to occur there must be a cause. Even in Quantam Machanics. Correct me if I am wrong. You're wrong. Especially in quantum mechanics there are a number of things that happen uncaused, such as atomic decay. You see, you can't predict when a given atom will decay. Given a bunch of atoms and a certain length of time, you can predict how many of them will have decayed, but not which ones. There's no known cause that makes specific atoms decay, but it happens. Ergo, an uncaused effect. Not every effect requires a cause.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I don't have to be a scientist to understand that if I drop a pen it will fall to the ground even as a child I new this. Ok, but the stuff we're talking about is way, way more complicated than that. For instance, you do essentially have to be a scientist to understand the consequences of the collission of two m-branes in higher dimensional space, which is one purported cause of the Big Bang. You do have to be a scientist to read this paper:
quote: and understand what it says about the evolution of mammals. (That's just the abstract, by the way, where they usually simplify things a little bit.) This is science we're doing, and a fair bit of science outright contradicts common sense. Which it should, since "common sense" is nothing but what folks who don't know any better have been telling you is always true. Well, what the hell do they know? As it turns out, not as much as scientists. A bunch of what you consider "common sense" is outright wrong under some conditions. The universe is under no obligation to operate in a way that makes sense to you. Making sense of the universe through science starts when you stop demanding that everything make sense right away.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
If you don't understand quantam-mechanics well then you don't know there is no cause. No, it turns out that the most accurate quantum models are always the ones that include randomness and uncertainty; furthermore experiments to detect underlying structure have always failed. While it's true that we can't conclude for sure that there's no underlying determinism to quantum mechanics, it's also true that there's no reason to conclude that there is, and so asserting that "cause and effect" is a universal law is simply wrong. We don't know if it is or not, and the evidence suggests that it isn't.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I am 13 and I know alot about strings and quantim mechanics. Science interests me greatly and I have read alot of books and saw alot of documenteries about the inner-workings of our universe. Right, but how much of the math have you done? I was all up into this stuff when I was your age, too. I thought I knew all about relativity and shit, but then, when I got to college, I found out that what I knew was jack because I didn't know any of the math. It's one thing to have heard that time dialates as a function of velocity. It's quite another to see the mathematics that proved this to Einstein, or to even calculate the amount of time difference for a given velocity. I'm glad you're into science and I hope you continue that interest in your studies. But I also hope you come to the same realization that I did; that it's one thing to hear about science on PBS and quite another to do it yourself.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
You must have a full understanding of something to dismiss or enstate(Hope I used that word right) laws or ideas about it So we're agreed, we don't know if cause and effect is universal or not.
otherwise it is a hypothesis or theory. No, it's neither of those things. Theory is what you have when you've come to an understanding. Until then, what you have is "conjecture."
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Well, I have been looking for where I can learn physics math It's called "calculus". Start with that, or algebra. From there, I don't know where you go, because I sucked at math - because I always ignored it at your age, because I didn't realize how integral it was to science.
I just can't find it online anywhere because it assumes to much prior knowledge of itself and therefore teaches you absolutley nothing. Yeah, it generally assumes a working knowledge of calculus. I'd talk to one of your teachers. Tell them that you want to learn calculus ahead of schedule. They'll be able to set you up with the texts the upperclassmen use, or maybe even find you college-level texts.
I have been programing enough to have the mathamatical skills to learn it. It turns out that these are two different kinds of math, sort of. Programming generally involves what they called at my college "discreet math", that is, functions that were not continuous. Continuous functions are calculus, and it's how you model physical motion. I wish I had some books to recommend, but I don't - I'm not really interested in math, because I suck at it.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
That's starting with something to cause the nothing to explode which isn't starting from the beginning. right? I don't think m-branes count as "something", actually. They're certainly not matter or energy. I don't really know; I don't know anything about the theory.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Logic would be the better word. Actually, it wouldn't. "Logic" is a kind of mathematics where you derive conclusions from initial principles that aren't tested but assumed. That is, you assume some general things are true, and then, from those things, you determine what else would be true if those first things were true. Logic doesn't really get us anywhere in terms of finding out about the universe because we don't know what aspects of the universe we can assume are true. So we have to work backwards, through induction instead of deduction, and determine what general principles we can infer about the universe based on specific observations. That's called "the scientific method." See the difference? Logic starts with general assumptions and results in specific conclusions. Science starts with specific observations and results in general conclusions. What will really bake your noodle is that the scientific process isn't logically valid. (This is called the "inductive fallacy", which is an extension of "the fallacy of affirming the consequent.") Because this is so, it turns out that all the scientific conclusions we make have to be tentative.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
When you type in messages, there's a link next to the text box that says "UBB Code is ON". Click that and it'll show you the list of markup codes we're all using.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
i thaught that strangness in quantam mechanics is a result of parralel universes. Eh? That is a cause. Well, it's not a "result" of parallel universes; the parallel universes thing (called "the Sum-Over-Histories interpretation") is just one way that some folks came up with to try to make sense of what's going on in quantum mechanics; to try to make it deterministic to some degree. But it turns out that this guy (I don't remember the details) says he's done an experiment that proves this interpretation false. So we're back to the random, weird world of quantum mechanics.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1788 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
so basicaly what you are saying is that erashional thaught and elogical thaugh gives us an advantage at discovering new things? No, I'm just saying that "logic" doesn't mean "rational thought", it refers to a specific mode of reason that doesn't really apply to the universe. The scientific method is certainly rational; but its conclusions are not logically valid. That doesn't mean they're wrong, just, that we can't entirely trust them. Some new data could come along and change everything, you see. We don't know. So, we're tentative. Every scientific conclusion is tentative. That doesn't mean we know nothing at all, though - it's this same illogical process that made the computer you're in front of, after all - just, that we don't know anything for sure.
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