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                   GREAT THEOLOGIANS AT WORK

Curiouser and curiouser!

I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!

                                                                                              alice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANNqr-vcx0

Philosophy takes my mind off of things.

Today's subject involves the speed of light.

I have read tales that inform us that one flood destroyed all life on this planet.

I have read tales that describe King Arthur personally challenging and ultimately slaying hundreds of enemy soldiers in a single battle.

More recently I have read tales that inform us of the wonders performed under the George W. Bush Administration.

And yet, here is Conservapedia. What is a mother to do? http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page

Let us examine, once again, the issues surrounding the speed of light.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second through a vacuum. There is no such thing of course. I mean there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum. Scientists and engineers have perfected mechanisms that can come close to that ideal of course.

You could never really ever see a perfect vacuum anyway since you need light to see anything. Once light is introduced into a vacuum, it ceases to be a perfect vacuum anyway.

We see planets that have to be sending us their light or we would not see them.

We see suns that have to be sending us their light or we would not see those suns.

We see galaxies that have to be sending us their light or we would not see them.

And light seems to travel through space at a certain speed;  around 186,000 miles per second--since space has an assumed temperature of 3 degrees ABOVE ABSOLUTE ZERO; space turns out to be pretty close to a vacuum depending on the space you find yourself in, in space that is.

So, Conservapedia would like to confuse all evidence that light travels at 186,000 miles per second. That is because, if we there are detectable objects millions and millions of light years away; the universe cannot be only 6000 years old.  You see, if we surmise that the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across, OUR GODDAMN PLANET COULD NOT BE 6000 YEARS OLD. Okay, okay, I shall calm down.

There are no intelligent design aficionados out there getting press coverage who are not really Fundamentalists.  Hell, I am all for intelligent design. There does seem to be quite a bit of order out there, at least I discern the magnificent order in all those wonderful photographs of space I view at the National Geographic Magazine site.

No, the intelligent design idiots we hear about on MSM are all Fundamentalists who would spread Texas Texts throughout our universe demonstrating that we are the dumbest intelligent beings in that universe.

So the Fundamentalists, cloaked in intelligent design costumes, must attack the one scientific finding upon which the earth's entire communications system is currently based; that is the speed of light. GPS would not work without a relatively invariable speed for light. Neither would radios, TV's, telephones or this PC notebook I am working on. 

Or, the Fundamentalists, if they admitted that the cosmos is more than 6,000 years of age must acknowledge that the Bible was not written by God. I mean this is bullshit as it were, but read on.

Conservapedia would contend that a real Christian would not worry about some lame scientific arguments against this contention:

Some creationists have proposed that the light we see from stars more than 6,000 light years away was not emitted by those stars, but was created 'in transit' by God. Some question why we would see an image of a star exploding if the explosion did not actually occur, but the finest artistic design is often illusory.

In other words, we do not have to worry about time and space and the findings our scientific community has made over the centuries. Our entire universe is illusory.

 Some creationists promoted an idea by Parry Moon and Domina Spencer that light somehow takes a shortcut through "Riemannian Space", taking no more than 15 years to reach Earth from the outer limits of the universe. However, this idea never really caught on and appears to no longer have adherents.[6]

So this idea never really caught on. Really?

In 1994 Dr. Russell Humphreys proposed a new cosmology[13] that includes a bounded universe with a center and an edge, that God had created 6,000 years ago as a much smaller body than today, then stretched it out, making it much larger. In Humphreys' model, because the universe has a center and an edge (unlike the unbounded model of the Big Bang universe), the center of the universe is also the center of a gravity well, meaning that gravity is stronger at the center of the universe than at the edge.

As gravity can affect the rate at which time passes, he calculated that while the six days of creation week were passing on Earth, billions of years' of time was passing at the edge of the universe. According to this idea, the Biblical references to time are according to an observer (real or imaginary) on Earth, so ages are given in "Earth time".

However, this theory is not without problems.

Okay, so these theories are not without problems. I am sooooooo very glad that this fact was acknowledged by a comic book encyclopedia.

And interpretations of the theories of Adam Smith might have SOME PROBLEMS.

And the aura of Sarah Palin might have some problems.

And the black board of Glenn Beck might have SOME PROBLEMS.

And the new teabagger discussions concerning a twelve million people round-up might have some problems.

And the assertions that Obama has Muslim seeds might have some problems.

Dr. John Hartnett, a creationist physicist, spurred by Humphreys' model, has proposed an alternative time dilation model, by theorizing the Earth was in a time-dilation field during the first few days of creation, from Earth's point of view, while billions of years passed for the rest of the universe. According to the Bible, God "stretched out"[15] the heavens (space), and this movement during creation week caused time to travel faster for those objects, in accordance with Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, adding to the time dilation caused by gravity, per Humphreys, in accordance with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.[16]

But 'spurred on' by some Humphrey's Model, we have a time dilation field. All righty then!!!

This might sound plausible to those who are so amenable to the retardable.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Starlight_problem

When you reach further into this propaganda, you will find conservapedia writing about what some physicist might say and what some atheist might say. It is like the world has turned around and there are Christian physicists and then there are atheists.

DID I TELL YOU ALREADY THAT THESE PEOPLE ARE NUTS?

Oh but I am told that not all Fundamentalists are the same.

Of course they are not.

And my goodness, Intelligent Design....of course the Design of this universe as I see it, is godlike. Why would I have a problem with that? 

There are people at NASA who go to mass every single Sunday, without fail.

There are great geologists who attend temple every single Saturday.

There are great archeologists who attend their Mosque every Friday.

And there are great theoretical physicists who visit their local comic book store every Wednesday night

I mean each and every single theory concerning the origin of the universe can acknowledge a God of some kind or nature. Maybe not a kind and natural God; but that is for theologians to argue about in between political fund raising activities.

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So this all got me thinking about alternative universes.

I mean, why not?

Recent discoveries require us to rethink our understanding of history. "The histories of the universe," said renowned physicist Stephen Hawking "depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history."

In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment, which showed that particles of light "photons" knew -- in advance −- what their distant twins would do in the future. They tested the communication between pairs of photons -- whether to be either a wave or a particle...

The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what an observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past." Part of the past is locked in when you observe things and the "probability waves collapse." But there's still uncertainty, for instance, as to what's underneath your feet. If you dig a hole, there's a probability you'll find a boulder. Say you hit a boulder, the glacial movements of the past that account for the rock being in exactly that spot will change as described in the Science experiment.

But what about dinosaur fossils?...

History is a biological phenomenon − it's the logic of what you, the animal observer experiences. You have multiple possible futures, each with a different history like in the Science experiment. Consider the JFK example: say two gunmen shot at JFK, and there was an equal chance one or the other killed him. This would be a situation much like the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate.

We must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos," says Constance Hilliard, a historian of science at UNT. Choices you haven't made yet might determine which of your childhood friends are still alive, or whether your dog got hit by a car yesterday. In fact, you might even collapse realities that determine whether Noah's Ark sank. "The universe," said John Haldane, "is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

I mean why worry about history at all?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KTFoMJi3uE

Maybe the Fundamentalists are correct.

Maybe Glenn Back has points to make.

Maybe it is better that Sarah Palin does not read newspapers.

Maybe it is better to just ignore those tomes that purport to describe 'history'.

But if we hold this kind of perspective to our chests, we might end up clinging to a concept of chaos.

Chaos.

ll. 116-138) Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth......   http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/theogony.htm

And we still have chaos after all of these aeons. Ha!!!

Curiouser and curiouser.