A great article on the Big Bang and the Large Hadron Collider.

The big bounce vs. the big bang

Joseph Brean, National Post
Published: Friday, October 03, 2008

WATERLOO, Ont.. — Among the crushing throng of physics enthusiasts who gathered this week for a lecture by Sir Roger Penrose, who is to the University of Oxford what Stephen Hawking is to Cambridge, the very mention of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland elicited a resounding throaty chuckle.

Everyone knew that when the world’s biggest particle accelerator was switched on last month, its computers were promptly hacked and its superconducting magnets accidentally melted. And provided one is skeptical of all the press reports about how this “Big Bang machine” might create an apocalyptic black hole somewhere beneath Geneva, this is all pretty hilarious, just a few broken eggs for the omelette of discovery.

The capacity crowd of several hundred had a similarly blasé reaction to the nub of the lecture.

“The universe seems to go through cycles of some kind … Our universe is what I call an aeon in an endless sequence of aeons,” Prof. Penrose said in an address enlivened by his breezy Oxbridge banter (10 to the power of 64 years is, for example, “a jolly long time”), and illustrated by overhead transparencies so artful in their multi-coloured, hand-drawn penmanship that they would not have been out of place alongside a baking-soda volcano at a grade school science fair.

But this was top level, cutting-edge physics, hosted by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He described data he received just this week that appears to show traces of the previous aeon in the microwave background radiation that fills the universe and is regarded as the lingering “flash” of the Big Bang. If it actually does, a lot of science will have to be reconsidered.

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So Louisiana has a new law allowing science teachers to teach the weaknesses of time & chance evolutionary theory. What’s the big deal? Evolution by time and chance is as well tested as gravity for Pete’s sake. How long does take to convince a kid that when he throws a baseball into the air gravity will pull it back to earth? According to the theophobic evolutionists there are no weaknesses in their theory. So the teacher will quickly present just a small fraction of the “overwhelming evidence” that time & chance turned mud into Mozart, he’ll have a list of zero things to present to argue against it, and all will be well with nothing lost. The biology teacher can Read More ›

A reader of The Spiritual Brain asks,

… , you write that evolution (i.e., macro-evolution, descent by a common ancestor) is a fact, given the fossil record. Do you really believe this, or this is simply a concession to the scientific establishment, in other words, a disclaimer of sorts that is making sure that your ideas in this book can be taken seriously …

Well that was grounds for a gourmet cup of coffee!

The Spiritual Brain was an enormous amount of work. Mario and I risked much to maintain what we think the evidence supports about the non-material nature of the human mind. 

Anyone who thinks we would complicate our lives by also maintaining positions we do not support … has a future in writing afternoon soaps, where life is the art of the impossible.

So I wrote back and said,

I am intrigued by the way you put your question, “Do you really believe this?”

It reminds me of the day I was received into the Catholic Church (as an adult).

But I am not sure that a question about common descent should remind me of my reception into the Church. Let me explain why: Read More ›

Cross posted at The Christian Watershed

One of the biggest issues trends in the West – especially in America – is for people to go ‘green’ in what they do. Whether it be from getting a hybrid vehicle, to eating organic foods, to just installing energy efficient light bulbs, it is not considered chic to be ‘green.’

Though I happen to believe this is just a trend (I believe American society, at least the younger generation as a whole, to be nihilistic, narcissistic, and ‘empty-selves,’ thus concern for something other than themselves won’t last long), it is a trend that is much needed in the current world. I think all can agree that humans in the last two centuries have done a horrible job being good stewards of the environment.

On quick look at the Los Angeles skyline and we can see exactly what pollution can do. Global Warming aside, the fact does remain that Co2 emission is harmful for the environment and humans (look at asthma rates per capita in bigger cities as opposed to those in the country). This also doesn’t ignore the landfills that are constantly taking up space, the burning of fossil fuels, the toxic waste dumps that are harming land, and just random trash being strewn about on the sides of the road. Humans have done an absolutely horrible job at taking care of this world.

Should this environmental crisis surprise us though? Consumerism and humanism – focusing on ourselves and ignoring other species and even other humans – has left us blind to the effects of our desire for more. We are now left in desperate need for a solution, but can science help us? Read More ›

Observing the ongoing collapse of civil liberties in Canada, Bill asked me,

As I recall, Judge Jones in his ruling used the word “disparage” in relation to Darwin and his theory, attempting to put pressure on those who might want to disparage Darwin in the public school context. How soon before it is illegal to disparage Darwin in the U.S.?

Re “disparage” as a cue word, Bill was thinking, of course, of a recent punishment handed out by the Alberta “human rights” commission – one of fourteen shadow tribunals – to a Christian pastor, who had spoken out against the gay lifestyle (more below).

The rapid advance of fascism with a “human” face in Canada only became common knowledge in the United States recently, when popular columnist Mark Steyn was dragged before the BC tribunal.

To bring you up to date swiftly on Canada’s tribunals, I will simply quote Rich Lowry’s “Mark Steyn: Enemy of the State” summary this morning:

The country is dotted with human-rights commissions. At first, they typically heard discrimination suits against businesses. But since that didn’t create much work, the commissions branched out into policing “hate” speech. Initially, they targeted neo-Nazis; then religious figures for their condemnations of homosexuality; and now Maclean’s and Steyn.

The new rallying cry is, “If I hate what you say, I’ll accuse you of hate.” The Canadian Islamic Council got the Human Rights Tribunal in British Columbia and the national Canadian Human Rights Commission (where proceedings are still pending) to agree to hear its complaint. It had to like its odds.

The national commission has never found anyone innocent in 31 years. It is set up for classic Alice-in-Wonderland “verdict first, trial later” justice. Canada’s Human Rights Act defines hate speech as speech “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” The language is so capacious and vague that to be accused is tantamount to being found guilty.

And the remedies can be bizarre, as in this Alberta decision, “the most revolting order I have ever seen in Canada”, according to civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant. Read More ›

Richard Dawkins continues to be indignant about being “duped” into taking part in Ben Stein’s EXPELLED. His indignation is a pose. Dawkins and his TV production company tried to dupe those who disagree with him into taking part in his “Enemies of Reason” series. Some of the people in that series (and in his previous polemic against religion, “The Root Of All Evil?”) felt that they had indeed been duped into taking part. For details about Dawkins the Duper, go here. In this vein, here is something I posted last week at UD (click here for the thread): [Denyse O’Leary] hit the nail on the head in noting that Darwinists redefine “lie” to mean anything that does not promote the Read More ›

This article makes a lot of points I’ve made here in the past. The main one being that global warming is a net GOOD thing. Even the IPCC admits that it will be a good thing for at least the next several decades. Food production will increase and cold-related deaths will decline far more than heat-related deaths will increase. If the planet wasn’t warming we’d want it to be warming. If CO2 levels weren’t growing we’d want them to be growing.

The REAL inconvenient truth: Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change

By NIGEL LAWSON
The Daily Mail 4/5/08

Over the past half-century, we have become used to planetary scares. In the late Sixties, we were told of a population explosion that would lead to global starvation.

Then, a little later, we were warned the world was running out of natural resources. By the Seventies, when global temperatures began to dip, many eminent scientists warned us that we faced a new Ice Age.

But the latest scare, global warming, has engaged the political and opinion-forming classes to a greater extent than any of these.

The readiness to embrace this fashionable belief has led the present Labour Government, enthusiastically supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, to commit itself to a policy of drastically cutting back carbon dioxide emissions – at huge cost to the British economy and to the living standards not merely of this generation, but of our children’s generation, too.

That is why I have written a book about the subject.

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The Austrailian published a transcript of an interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril. Excerpt: Duffy: “Can you tell us about NASA’s Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we’re now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?” Marohasy: “That’s right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you’ve Read More ›

Rich Akin, CPA and CEO of Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (PSSI), has reported to its membership the completion of a successful five-city educational event, titled What Darwin Didn’t Know, in Spain this past January.

A week prior to the first event the national newspaper El País published a full page article that portrayed these presentations as the Americans bringing creationism to Spain. While riddled with distortions and inaccuracies, the article listed a link to the on-line registration site. The article also carried the times and locations of each event and even placed next to the article the poster prepared to advertise the events, likely increasing attendance.

This article acted like an alarm, awakening and riling up the Darwinists, who immediately began a campaign of intimidation against the locations where the events were scheduled. Read More ›

Could Florida’s Darwinian regulations be “evolving” from “fact” to free inquiry? In More on the vote on evolution and Florida’s new science standards Leslie Postal reports that teaching Evolution in schools is now mandated, but officially as the “scientific theory of” Evolution.

Will students now be able to seriously study evolution as “a scientific theory” – with all the testing, probing, and skepticism required by the scientific method? Or will they be Expelled for exercising their unalienable rights to free speech? – that founded the Declaration of Independence (which heads the US Codes Organic Laws) and are preserved by the First Amendment.
In a Special Report on the American Spectator Ben Stein writes::

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Their hypothesis featuring the boogeyman Carbon Dioxide is falling apart before their eyes. Hurricane activity set record lows the past two years right after the alarmists shamelessly tried capitalizing on the 2005 killers Katrina and Rita by saying it’ll only get worse from here. There hasn’t been any net global warming in the past 9 years even while CO2 concentration continued to build during that time. And now 2007 is going down in the record books as one of devastating cold. Don’t say I didn’t tell you that this was a big blown out of proportion hoax for attaining polictical goals disguised as “settled” science. Expect the alarmists to become even more shrill. They’re running out of time and they know it. If they don’t get treaties inked and inked soon the house of cards they built will collapse. Mother nature is showing us in no uncertain terms who was right and it isn’t the alarmists. I hope there’s enough egg to cover all the deserving faces. I know there isn’t enough crow in the world for them to eat but hopefully there’s enough so they can all choke on at least a few feathers.

Year of Global Cooling

By David Deming
December 19, 2007
Washington Times

Al Gore says global warming is a planetary emergency. It is difficult to see how this can be so when record low temperatures are being set all over the world. In 2007, hundreds of people died, not from global warming, but from cold weather hazards.

Since the mid-19th century, the mean global temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius. This slight warming is not unusual, and lies well within the range of natural variation. Carbon dioxide continues to build in the atmosphere, but the mean planetary temperature hasn’t increased significantly for nearly nine years. Antarctica is getting colder. Neither the intensity nor the frequency of hurricanes has increased. The 2007 season was the third-quietest since 1966. In 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S.

South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency.

Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.

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The New York Times is giving lip service to a letter signed and sent by 100 scientists to the UN Global Warming conference in Bali. The letter essentially said that climate change is natural, unstoppable, and attempts to control climate change rather than adapt to it only serves to make the problem of adapting to it much more difficult as vast sums of time and money are diverted to attempting the impossible when the same resources could be productively employed in solvable problems. When what is perhaps the least conservative major newspaper in the world gives space to global warming “skeptics” and doesn’t add the seemingly obligatory condemnation of said skeptics to the report I think it’s a sign that the debate is rapidly changing in favor of the skeptics. I knew this would happen. Anthropogenic global warming is based on cherry picking data to fit a bogus climate model. It was only a matter of time before it collapsed because, unlike Darwinian fairy tales of mud to man evolution over billions of years, climate change does happen quickly enough to observe over practical lengths of time. For instance, there hasn’t been any net global warming in almost 10 years yet the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased substantially over that time. The computer models of CO2’s effect as a greenhouse gas are simply and (now) demonstrably wrong.

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NEWS Release  Contact: Aaron Cook at TimePiece PR & Marketing   (214) 520-3430 or acook@timepiecepr.com FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Publisher braces for controversy as definitive book on intelligent design hits market  DALLAS – November 19, 2007 – The Foundation for Thought and Ethics has just published The Design of Life. This definitive book on intelligent design (ID) comes as a shot across the bow to dogmatic defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy. Written by two key ID theorists, mathematician William Dembski and biologist Jonathan Wells, it presents the full case for intelligent design to a general audience.  Critics, in dismissing The Design of Life, contend that intelligent design has collapsed in the wake of the 2005 Dover trial. Author William Dembski responded, “Those Read More ›

The long and the short of it is that Global Warming alarmists were wrong again. They correctly predicted that the Amazon rain forest would get drier. What they didn’t predict is that it would get greener as it got drier. It seems rainforest growth is limited by sunlight. As it experienced a drought in 2006 the clouds dissipated a little, more sunlight got through, and productivity increased. The details, satellite maps, and whatnot is in the article below.

Global Warming Puzzle: Amazon Rainforest Showed Better Growth During Drought

Accepted global climate models had predicted the Amazon forest would begin to “brown down” after just a month of drought and eventually collapse as the drought progressed. Instead, drought-stricken regions of the Amazon forest grew particularly vigorously during the 2005 drought, according to new research.

“Instead of ‘hunkering down’ during a drought as you might expect, the forest responded positively to drought, at least in the short term,” said study author Scott R. Saleska of The University of Arizona. “It’s a very interesting and surprising response.”

UA co-author Kamel Didan added, “The forest showed signs of being more productive. That’s the big news.”

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A recent survey of climate change articles in science journals finds fewer than half of the authors endorse anthropogenic global warming theories. The so-called consensus has now collapsed to a minority position. I love being right. Linked by The Drudge Report:

Breaking: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory

DAILYTECH

SURVEY: LESS THAN HALF OF ALL PUBLISHED SCIENTISTS ENDORSE GLOBAL WARMING THEORY; COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF PUBLISHED CLIMATE RESEARCH REVEALS CHANGING VIEWPOINTS

Michael Asher
August 29, 2007 11:07 AM

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

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