WRONG, as always! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology Kneejerk denialism on your part does not alter the empirical data in the background radiation that supports the Cyclical model of the Universe.
Given that the expansion is accelerating, that now seems unlikely. Dark energy is the big unknown. But then we didn't have to pray to discover the effects of dark energy.
Actually that makes it all the more likely. Granted we are essentially working from limited data points but the Cyclical theory is the only one that fits ALL of them. The accelerated expansion is normal as more and more stars are generated but that eats up the "fuel" needed to create new stars at a faster rate so it runs out sooner rather than later. Once there is no new star formation the energy level no longer exists to accelerate the expansion any further. At that stage entropy begins and gravity takes over to start the contraction phase. Contraction ends with another Singularity. We are talking on a scale of eons for this to happen but it is inevitable. There is another variant to this model that is purely speculative but I cannot rule it out. If you imagine that space is so vast that it can hold untold numbers of physical universes like our own. As each universe goes through their own cycle they influence the neighboring universes with what I term to be "space weather" as in Highs and Lows corresponding to hot and cold fronts in our atmospheric weather. Our universe is moving towards a High and thus placing pressure on our neighboring universes to contract. One can play with this "space weather" scenario with multiple Highs and Lows but the end result is always cyclical for any specific universe.
We don't know the nature of dark energy and the effects appear to be strongest where there are no stars - between galactic clusters. It has nothing to do with star formation, as far as we know. The most likely scenario seems to be a heat death in an ever accelerating universe.
No, the request was for someone who can describe what is known about this universe clearly enough so that those who don't happen to have a physics background can clearly understand. There is a communications gap concerning what is known and what is not known. btw: Skepticism is a foundation of science. Scientific method depends on eliminating false hypotheses through a number of means.
Your OP requests a reason that science doesn't accept the notion of a creator. You did that over and over again. NOW, you ask why anyone would address religion!?! The reason is that you ASKED for that!! You really can't have it both ways. Beyond that, I absolutely do not berate your religion - your religion is irrelevant to this discussion. I'm only interested in keeping science and religion separate.
So you didn't mean it when you wrote: "Which belief is more reasonable? Why would believing in atheistic naturalism be 'Science!', but believing in a Creator is 'Religion!'?" If you don't like your motives questioned, why do you question mine? Given your desire to bring a "creator" into the question, I doubt that's the entire topic. I am not attacking your person. I am attacking the underlying implication of your OP. Does that then excuse, in your mind, your own ad hominem?
What makes you think that I'm on the left? I get accused by the left of being on the right, daily. And why are you now making this political, anyway? I don't think that you know how to refute atheist "talking points" given that you dive straight into irrelevant topics when they come up.
No, usfan did not say that. I did. Leftists are ALWAYS denying that they/you are Leftists. It must be very embarrassing that you would deny such an obvious fact. Everything is political. Men become women and you Leftists support it and demand obeisance to such insanity. Unborn babies are murdered daily and you promote it, and claim they are not human. Anti-science is your métier. The relevant facts are that hyperemotional rhetoric and Leftist Talking Points are all you have. Facts and science continue to erode your atheist claims but you never concede a point, ever.
Two entirely different things. The dust and gas necessary to from stars is all part of the KNOWN energy and matter of the universe. The dark energy role is different however if you apply the Law of Thermodynamics to dark energy in the same manner as we do to known energy then we have the "pressure" that is driving the expansion of the universe. In order to accelerate from one speed to another there needs to be a source of energy. No energy is required to maintain a constant speed in a vacuum. After all of the energy is exhausted the assumption is that the universe will continue to expand at whatever constant speed it has reached at the point of energy exhaustion. However there are two factors that are missing. The first is that space is not a vacuum. All objects moving through space encounter dust and gas and that causes negative acceleration which slows the objects down. The second factor is gravity which attracts gas and dust particles towards larger objects. So without stars there is no longer any acceleration, merely a constant speed and the existing gas and dust combined with gravity will bleed off that speed. Gravity however will still exist and it can gradually draw in these objects as the Singularity increases it's mass and therefore has an increasingly larger gravitational force.
Right. That is why it is a theory rather than an established fact. Science simply doesn't have all the answers. Worse than zero. The math gets to "infinitely small" showing that the math is wrong and that science doesn't really understad it. Don't let these things bother you. There are countless mysteries in science but things progress.
It results from running everything backwards in time and following the known laws of physics. But my real objection was you stating your opinion as a fact. No one here is even qualified to have an opinion. At most they are wild-ass guesses.
We don't know what dark energy is. It is a total mystery, So what you said is at best pure speculation. We thought the expansion was slowing right up until we discovered it was accelerating. As it turns out, the margin of error for measurements always allowed that the expansion could be slowing or increasing. The data was so far down in the dirt it could have gone either way and merely set the limit for the magnitude of the value. But we made the Newtonian assumption that we could ignore that data. We assumed it must be slowing. This was a natural expectations based on Conservation of Energy. Eventually better equipment allowed more accurate measurements. And surprise surprise! We were wrong. Something much deeper and a complete mystery is at work.
Why don't you stay on topic and stop stinking up threads with your visceral hatred? If you can't contribute positively then clear off.
Nobody actually knows what dark energy is yet. All we have is that the data does not agree with the theory. But some very smart people are working on it and will fix the problem. *** didn't do it.
What we have is an apparent violation of energy conservation. And I don't consider a fantastically significant discovery to be a problem. It is probably the most exciting discovery of my lifetime. That this is still driving the expansion can't be ignored.
The first question is the most difficult to answer. It is speculated that there exists an inflaton field that is associated with inflationary cosmolgy. It would be a scalar field (non-directional) similar to the Higgs field that is associated with Higgs particles. The shape of the potential energy curve is not known but the one shown below is a possibility. It is taken from an article by Alan Guth at: https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Guth/Guth3.html. I also copied a portion, 8 paragraphs, of the article. It is interesting to note that the universe could have started out as a portion of space 100 billion times smaller than a proton with a very high energy density as shown in the graph (the false vacuum state). It was only this tiny portion of space that was filled with energy and some finite amount of energy is allowed to exist for a brief interval as long as the uncertainly relation isn't violated. It is assumed that other regions of space were in a true vacuum state with energy density of zero. Alan Guth describes how that tiny region can grow exponentially with time.The high initial energy density remained roughly constant during the expansion without violating the law of conservation of energy, since the positive energy of that field was balance by the negative gravitational energy contained within that expanding space. The approximately exponential expansion is characteristic of a cosmological constant kind of vacuum energy which is assumed and is a mathematical result derived using general relativity. A flat universe is one where the curvature of space averages out to be one (no curvature). I'll finish this discussion in another post. The energy density is zero if = t, so this condition corresponds to the ordinary vacuum of empty space. In this context it is usually called the "true" vacuum. The state in which the scalar field is near = 0, at the top of the plateau, is called the "false" vacuum. If the plateau of the energy density diagram is flat enough, it can take a very long time, by early Universe standards, for the scalar field to "roll" down the hill of the energy density so that the energy can be lowered. For short times the false vacuum acts like a vacuum in the sense that the energy density cannot be lowered. The peculiar properties of the false vacuum stem from its pressure, which is large and negative (see box on the right). Mechanically such a negative pressure corresponds to a suction, which does not sound like something that would drive the Universe into a period of rapid expansion. The mechanical effects of pressure, however, depend on pressure differences, so they are unimportant if the pressure is reasonably uniform. According to general relativity, however, there is a gravitational effect that is very important under these circumstances. Pressures, like energy densities, create gravitational fields, and in particular a positive pressure creates an attractive gravitational field. The negative pressure of the false vacuum, therefore, creates a repulsive gravitational field, which is the driving force behind inflation. There are many versions of inflationary theories but generically they assume that some small patch of the early Universe somehow came to be in a false vacuum state Various possibilities have been discussed, including supercooling during a phase transition in the early Universe, or a purely random fluctuation of the fields. A chance fluctuation seems reasonable even if the probability is low, since the inflating region will enlarge by many orders of magnitude, while the non-inflating regions will remain microscopic. Inflation is a wildfire that will inevitably take over the forest, as long as there is some chance that it will start. Once a patch of the early Universe is in the false vacuum state, the repulsive gravitational effect drives the patch into an inflationary period of exponential expansion. To produce a universe with the special features of the Big Bang discussed above, the expansion factor must be at least about 1025. There is no upper limit to the amount of expansion. Eventually the false vacuum decays, and the energy that had been locked in it is released. This energy produces a hot, uniform, soup of particles, which is exactly the assumed starting point of the traditional Big Bang theory. At this point the inflationary theory joins onto the older theory, maintaining all the successes for which the Big Bang theory is believed. In the inflationary theory the Universe begins incredibly small, perhaps as small as 10-24 cm, a hundred billion times smaller than a proton. The expansion takes place while the false vacuum maintains a nearly constant energy density, which means that the total energy increases by the cube of the linear expansion factor, or at least a factor of 1075. Although this sounds like a blatant violation of energy conservation, it is in fact consistent with physics as we know it. The resolution to the energy paradox lies in the subtle behavior of gravity. Although it has not been widely appreciated, Newtonian physics unambiguously implies that the energy of a gravitational field is always negative a fact which holds also in general relativity. The Newtonian argument closely parallels the derivation of the energy density of an electrostatic field, except that the answer has the opposite sign because the force law has the opposite sign: two positive masses attract, while two positive charges repel. The possibility that the negative energy of gravity could balance the positive energy for the matter of the Universe was suggested as early as 1932 by Richard Tolman, although a viable mechanism for the energy transfer was not known. During inflation, while the energy of matter increases by a factor of 1075 or more, the energy of the gravitational field becomes more and more negative to compensate. The total energy - matter plus gravitational - remains constant and very small, and could even be exactly zero. Conservation of energy places no limit on how much the Universe can inflate, as there is no limit to the amount of negative energy that can be stored in the gravitational field. This borrowing of energy from the gravitational field gives the inflationary paradigm an entirely different perspective from the classical Big Bang theory, in which all the particles in the Universe (or at least their precursors) were assumed to be in place from the start. Inflation provides a mechanism by which the entire Universe can develop from just a few ounces of primordial matter. Inflation is radically at odds with the old dictum of Democritus and Lucretius, "Nothing can be created from nothing" If inflation is right, everything can be created from nothing, or at least from very little. If inflation is right, the Universe can properly be called the ultimate free lunch. It
RIIIIIIIGHT. It's all so simple. "Ultimate free lunch." How consummately *scientific*. A Matter of Gravity by Professor John Lennox
It’s amusing how you cut out 90% of his post, which co gained he very science you are bitching about him not including, lol.
A photon is not actually part of the reaction that I had in mind. The correct process of beta decay is: a neutron breaks down into a proton and releases an electron and an antineutrino. Decay of radioactive substances releases energy at the expense of some mass [E = M x (C squared)].
Hawking was an example of atheistic conviction carried to an extreme. It's like not being able to see the forest for the trees. That's why his wife eventually gave up on him. However, unlike string theory, QM is not likely to fall by the wayside anytime soon. It is making inroads into biology (e.g. in photosynthesis and various enzyme reactions). They hitch a wild ride into the unknown and manipulate abstract concepts with admirable confidence, but it won't sell convincingly as long as their domain seems disconnected from ordinary reality. Note that the target that gives them most of their anti-religious incentive is the dubious/flawed God of the 3 main Western religions
