Is the Big Bang in the Bible?

[gwillybj]

I'll have to make time for the book. There's only so much one can put in a 2-hour movie. I don't know the message of the book, but one thing I got from the movie is if we don't blow ourselves up, maybe the aliens will come and tell us some more secrets.

[Buster's Uncle]

There's a lot more theology in the book, and Sagan was amazingly fair, IMAO, considering his own non-belief.  The book is flawed, but still much deeper than the movie.

[Buster's Uncle]

Poll: Big Bang a big question for most Americans
AP-GfK Poll: Most agree with scientists on smoking, fewer buy Big Bang, evolution or warming
Associated Press
By Seth Borenstein and Jennifer Agiesta, Associated Press  12 hours ago



FILE - This March 2, file 2013 file photo shows a woman smoking a cigarette while sitting in her truck in Hayneville, Ala. Few Americans question that smoking causes cancer. But as we get farther from our own bodies and the present, a new AP-GfK poll shows Americans have much more doubts in other concepts that scientists say are basic truth: global warming, evolution, and their largest question mark was in the Big Bang that created the universe. “Science ignorance is pervasive in our society, and these attitudes are reinforced when some of our leaders are openly antagonistic to established facts,” said 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine winner Randy Scheckman. (AP Photo/Dave Martin, File)



WASHINGTON (AP) -- While scientists believe the universe began with a Big Bang, most Americans put a big question mark on the concept, an Associated Press-GfK poll found.

Yet when it comes to smoking causing cancer or that a genetic code determines who we are, the doubts disappear.

When considering concepts scientists consider truths, Americans have more skepticism than confidence in those that are farther away from our bodies in scope and time: global warming, the age of the Earth and evolution and especially the Big Bang from 13.8 billion years ago.

Rather than quizzing scientific knowledge, the survey asked people to rate their confidence in several statements about science and medicine.

On some, there's broad acceptance. Just 4 percent doubt that smoking causes cancer, 6 percent question whether mental illness is a medical condition that affects the brain and 8 percent are skeptical there's a genetic code inside our cells. More — 15 percent — have doubts about the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines.

About 4 in 10 say they are not too confident or outright disbelieve that the earth is warming, mostly a result of man-made heat-trapping gases, that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old or that life on Earth evolved through a process of natural selection, though most were at least somewhat confident in each of those concepts. But a narrow majority — 51 percent — questions the Big Bang theory.

Those results depress and upset some of America's top scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, who vouched for the science in the statements tested, calling them settled scientific facts.

"Science ignorance is pervasive in our society, and these attitudes are reinforced when some of our leaders are openly antagonistic to established facts," said 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine winner Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley.

The poll highlights "the iron triangle of science, religion and politics," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

And scientists know they've got the shakiest leg in the triangle.

To the public "most often values and beliefs [Sleezebag] science" when they conflict, said Alan Leshner, chief executive of the world's largest scientific society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Political and religious values were closely tied to views on science in the poll, with Democrats more apt than Republicans to express confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change.

Confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change decline sharply as faith in a supreme being rises, according to the poll. Likewise, those who regularly attend religious services or are evangelical Christians express much greater doubts about scientific concepts they may see as contradictory to their faith.

"When you are putting up facts against faith, facts can't argue against faith," said 2012 Nobel Prize winning biochemistry professor Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University. "It makes sense now that science would have made no headway because faith is untestable."

But evolution, the age of the Earth and the Big Bang are all compatible with God, except to Bible literalists, said Francisco Ayala, a former priest and professor of biology, philosophy and logic at the University of California, Irvine.

Beyond religious belief, views on science may be tied to what we see with our own eyes. The closer an issue is to ourselves and the less complicated, the easier it is for people to believe, said John Staudenmaier, a Jesuit priest and historian of technology at the University of Detroit Mercy.

Marsha Brooks, a 59-year-old nanny who lives in Washington, D.C., said she's certain smoking causes cancer because she saw her mother, aunts and uncles, all smokers, die of cancer. But when it comes to the universe beginning with a Big Bang or the Earth being about 4.5 billion years old, she has doubts. She explained: "It could be a lack of knowledge. It seems so far" away.

Jorge Delarosa, a 39-year-old architect from Bridgewater, N.J., pointed to a warm 2012 without a winter and said, "I feel the change. There must be a reason." But when it came to Earth's beginnings 4.5 billion years ago, he has doubts simply because "I wasn't there."

Experience and faith aren't the only things affecting people's views on science. Duke University's Lefkowitz sees "the force of concerted campaigns to discredit scientific fact" as a more striking factor, citing significant interest groups — political, business and religious — campaigning against scientific truths on vaccines, climate change and evolution.

The AP-GfK Poll was conducted March 20-24, 2014, using KnowledgePanel, GfK's probability-based online panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population. It involved online interviews with 1,012 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points for all respondents.

Respondents were first selected randomly using phone or mail survey methods and were later interviewed online. People selected for KnowledgePanel who didn't otherwise have access to the Internet were provided with the ability to access the Internet at no cost to them.

http://news.yahoo.com/poll-big-bang-big-most-074021144.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Dark Matter Could Send Asteroids Crashing into Earth: New Theory
SPACE.com
by Charles Q. Choi, SPACE.com Contributor  17 hours ago



These illustrations, taken from computer simulations, show a swarm of dark matter clumps around our Milky Way galaxy. Image released July 10, 2012.



Dark matter could sling lethal meteors at Earth, potentially causing mass extinctions like the cataclysm that ended the Age of Dinosaurs, Harvard scientists say.

Physicists think the mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter makes up five-sixths of all matter in the universe. It was first detected by the strength of its gravitational pull, which apparently helps keep the Milky Way and other galaxies from spinning apart, given the speeds at which they whirl.

Scientists have recently suggested that a thin, dense disk of dark matter about 35 light-years thick lies along the central plane of the Milky Way, cutting through the galaxy's disk of stars. The sun travels in an up-and-down, wavy motion through this plane while orbiting the center of the galaxy.

Researchers suggest this disk of clouds and clumps made of dark matter might disturb the orbits of comets in the outer solar system, hurling them inward. This could lead to catastrophic asteroid impacts on Earth, of the kind that likely ended the Age of Dinosaurs, said theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece at Harvard University.

Past research has suggested meteor bombardment of Earth rises and falls in a cycle about 35 million years long. In the past, scientists have proposed a cosmic trigger for this cycle, such as a potential companion star for the sun with the dramatic name "Nemesis."

Instead of blaming a "death star" for these catastrophes, Randall and Reese point out that this cycle of doom closely matches the rate at which the sun passes through the central plane of the Milky Way. This hints that the galaxy's "dark disk" may be the actual culprit.



Artist’s impression of a 6-mile-wide asteroid striking the Earth. Scientists think approximately 70 of these dinosaur killer-sized or larger asteroids hit Earth between 3.8 and 1.8 billion years ago.


The researchers analyzed craters more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) wide created in the past 250 million years, and compared their pattern against the 35-million-year cycle. They found that it was three times more likely that the craters matched the dark matter cycle than that they occurred randomly.

This cycle might have killed off dinosaurs about 67 million years ago. "The cycle is slightly off for that mass extinction, but we have an incomplete data set regarding impact craters, so maybe with more information the cycle might fit what we know better," Randall told Space.com.

Although a three-to-one chance sounds impressive, the researchers cautioned that this statistical evidence is not overwhelming.

The scientists note that the European Space Agency's Gaia mission could reveal the existence or nonexistence of a dark matter disk. Launched in 2013, this mission will create a precise 3D map of stars throughout the Milky Way, potentially confirming or denying the existence of a dark disk that gravitationally influences stellar motions.

"Even if it's a remote possibility that dark matter can affect the local environment in ways that have noticeable consequences over long periods of time, it's still incredibly interesting," Randall said.

The scientists detailed their findings online April 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

http://news.yahoo.com/dark-matter-could-send-asteroids-crashing-earth-theory-103327056.html

...

Siiigh.

[Geo]

By merits of observation only, the impact rate shouldn't correlate with dark matter, but with Sol moving through the plane of the Galaxy.

Still, 5/6ths of undetected mass residing in interstellar space sounds huge. It feels unlikely this amount could be provided alone by rogue planets/brown dwarfs/whatnot.

[Unorthodox]

Past research has suggested meteor bombardment of Earth rises and falls in a cycle about 35 million years long. In the past, scientists have proposed a cosmic trigger for this cycle, such as a potential companion star for the sun with the dramatic name "Nemesis."

Instead of blaming a "death star" for these catastrophes, Randall and Reese point out that this cycle of doom closely matches the rate at which the sun passes through the central plane of the Milky Way. This hints that the galaxy's "dark disk" may be the actual culprit.

Wow, the mayan death calendar theory...in a science article!  (the Mayan calendar actually tracked this cycle of entering the 'dark matter') 

Yeah, it makes sense we go into the denser part of the galaxy, we are more likely to be hit.  No need for dark matter to be altering orbits.  Perhaps for the other thread, it's also been postulated that the increased radiation we'll be seeing for the next few hundred thousand years plays a part in global warming. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Could Tiny 'Black Hole Atoms' Be Elusive Dark Matter?
SPACE.com
by Katia Moskvitch, SPACE.com Contributor  May 1, 2014 7:07 AM



Dark matter is an invisible material that emits or absorbs no light but betrays its presence by interacting gravitationally with visible matter. This image from Dark Universe shows the distribution of dark matter in the universe



Dark matter, the invisible and mysterious stuff that makes up most of the material universe, might be hiding itself in microscopic black holes, says a team of Russian astrophysicists.

No one knows what dark matter is. But scientists do know that it must exist, because there is not enough visible matter in the cosmos to account for all the gravity that binds galaxies and other large-scale structures together.

Astronomers have been on the hunt for dark matter for decades now, using detectors both on Earth and in space. The new hypothesis, formulated by astrophysicists Vyacheslav Dokuchaev and Yury Eroshenko at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, suggests that dark matter could be made of microscopic — or quantum — "black hole atoms."

The concept is not entirely new; others have suggested that various types of miniature black holes could make up dark matter, which is so named because it apparently neither absorbs nor emits light, and thus cannot be detected directly by telescopes.

Physicists have also long believed that microscopic black holes must have existed in the early universe, because quantum fluctuations in the density of matter just after the Big Bang would have created regions of space dense enough to allow the formation of such tiny black holes.

Some researchers believe that the universe could still be full of such "primordial black holes."


Enigmatic 'friedmons'

The new study by Dokuchaev and Eorshenko suggests a specific type of quantum black hole might exist: so-called black hole atoms. These microscopic black holes would originally have had an electric charge, the researchers say. This charge would have attracted protons or electrons, leaving the tiny black hole electrically neutral, just like an atom.

The idea is partly based on the "friedmon theory" proposed in the 1970s by prominent Russian physicists Moisei Markov and Valeri Frolov of the University of Alberta in Canada.

A friedmon is a mathematical solution of the Einstein field equations, which are key constituents of the theory of general relativity. To an external observer, a friedmon looks like a micro blackhole with anelectric charge the same as that of the electron.

However, the friedmon's interior can be macroscopically large — up to the size of the known universe, Frolov, who was not involved in the new study, told Space.com.

And a friedmon with an electron moving around it is similar to an atom, he added.

Markov and Frolov never made the link between the friedmon and dark matter. But Dokuchaev says that such neutral black hole atoms should have the same properties that dark matter is thought to possess.

The black holes would have about the same mass as an asteroid, from 10^14 kilograms to 10^23 kilograms, but be even smaller than atoms. Their interaction with ordinary matter would also be extremely weak — even weaker than that of neutrinos, the researchers said.

The quantum black holes would therefore be dark, massive, non-interacting particles – with properties that “"one needs for the dark matter candidates,”" write Dokuchaev and Eroshenko write in a paper published in March in the journal Advances in High Energy Physics.


Elusive dark matter

But Frolov doesn't think that the idea quite works.

"Using [friedmons] for the explanation of the dark matter looks contradictory. Dark matter must be formed of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), while friedmon atoms 'participate' in the electromagnetic interaction," he said.

"Possibly for this reason, Dr. Dokuchaev proposed to 'put' an electron orbit inside the friedmon. However, in this case the friedmon configuration will not be stabilized by an electric charge, and its external mass may be reduced to zero value," Frolov added. "Another unsolved problem of his model is the mechanism of the friedmon's formation. One can expect that in order to produce a sufficient number of friedmons to explain the dark matter, in the early universe there must exist large small-scale inhomogeneities. This is difficult to expect in the standard inflation models."

Other cosmologists also have doubts.

"Usually, black holes are not expected to be charged in astrophysical or cosmological environments, because they quickly get neutralized by accreting charged particles of opposite sign — electrons or protons — from their environment," said Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University.

But Dokuchaev is convinced that his concept is just as good as all the other dark matter theories; after all, no one has yet spotted this mysterious invisible stuff.

Black hole atoms now join a long list of candidates for dark matter particles, from supersymmetric neutralinos, WIMPs and axions to warm sterile neutrinos and many more, Dokuchaev told Space.com. Verifying whether any of them is the real deal will require catching one first, he added.

And spotting a neutral black hole atom should be possible, the Russian researchers say, because the formation of these peculiar invisible objects might produce a detectable signal.

When an electron is drawn into a quantum black hole so that a black hole atom is formed, the process would release energy in the form of a flash of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, the researchers write. Also, electron jumps from one level to another would release photons, making black hole atoms "observable in principle," the researchers add.

http://news.yahoo.com/could-tiny-black-hole-atoms-elusive-dark-matter-110706272.html

...

Stripped of the wild fudge-factor bull, I have long wondered if this very thing could account for the "dark matter" effects (w/o the "dark matter" in the quantum black holes, of course).

[Geo]

It also sounds like a way to sent info from one quantum point to another somewhere in the universe if at the quantum level all those tiny black holes can be linked.

[Buster's Uncle]

I believe in SF they call a device harnessing the quantum observer effect for FTL communications an ansible...

[Geo]

Oh, is that how Orson Scot Card described his FTL communication?

[Buster's Uncle]

That is the term he used in the Ender books - I've seen other authors use it, too.  I assume they all mean the same thing, but I don't recall who went into it.

[gwillybj]

wikipedia says:

An ansible is a fictional machine capable of instantaneous or superluminal communication. Typically it is depicted as a lunch-box-sized[citation needed] object with some combination of microphone, speaker, keyboard and display. It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance whatsoever with no delay. Ansibles occur as plot devices in science fiction literature.

Origin
The word ansible was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1966 novel Rocannon's World.[1] Le Guin states that she derived the name from "answerable," as the device would allow its users to receive answers to their messages in a reasonable amount of time, even over interstellar distances.[2] Her award-winning 1974 novel The Dispossessed,[3] a book in the Hainish Cycle, tells of the invention of the ansible.

[Buster's Uncle]

I knew that.  I forgot that I knew about LeGuin (who rocks beyond description, BTW) and the ansibles in the Hanish books.

[gwillybj]

Yes, whereas many SciFi authors spin a good yarn, LeGuin weaves an entire tapestry.

[Geo]

Yes, whereas many SciFi authors spin a good yarn, LeGuin weaves an entire tapestry.

Whom of the three Fates you reckon she might be?