Leave the graffitti, or paint it over?
I feel it depends on the content.

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'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
("`-/")_.-'"``-.,,
\. . `; -._( );, `)
(v_,)' _ )`-. \ ``'`
_.- _..-/ /((.'
((,.-' ((,/

If it was cussing, I would say paint over it. But since it s a pretty good look inside his head, I say leave it for all to see.

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Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

On other boards, I would agree; but not this one.
It reminds me of the quote: "I may not agree with your opinion, but I will defend to the death your right to voice it."
I feel the term 'opinion' is key here. That was not an opinion. I intend to drop the subject.

__________________
'Sir........, I don't like these numbers.'
'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
("`-/")_.-'"``-.,,
\. . `; -._( );, `)
(v_,)' _ )`-. \ ``'`
_.- _..-/ /((.'
((,.-' ((,/

I would leave it up. If it was cussing, I'd say edit it to indicate that obscenities were edited out by replacing the words with *.

Speak for yourself. I happen to be very significant. [-X

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The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/

As to the possibility or impossibility of ever knowing what occurred before or at the beginning of the big bang if that model is correct:

First, I think the model is correct as far as it has been described which is back to a particular fraction of a second after it began.

Second, conclusions about a precondition can be correctly drawn from the state of something now, so I don't hold to the premise that, 'we can never know'.

We may in the future discover other universes and thereby learn more about ours.

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The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/

Hi guys. How are things?

I've heard it said that the Big Bang theory does not deal with the actual explosion. OK, so the explosion is something separate. I gather that the Big Bang theory itself would then refer to the theoretical formation of stuff after the bang. My arguments concerning thermodynamics and dark matter mostly deal with this anyway, and the explosion is naturally closely related, so that also should be discussed.

Tobin Dax (I'm a fan of DS9), you mention that dark matter, should baryonic particles and neutrinos be so classified (I know nothing about either) still is not enough to account for gaps between galaxies. The universe is obviously uneven, with galaxies in one place and expanses of vacuum in another. This does not square with formation from an explosion, after which the universe should be of uniform density.

Musashi: Matter being outside of time does appear to be the general Big Bang explanation in the first place. The reasons for its appearing from nowhere and suddenly exploding for no good reason - yes I know you have said that is not part of the theory, but the theory depends on it - would appear to be nonexistent. God is not 'sidestepping' the rules by being outside of time. Naturally this is a matter of belief, but being eternal as the Bible says, that is His basic status.

Someone else brought up the subject of why we Christians must interpret the Bible literally, and why we can't put both it and the big bang together. Firstly, it's because we'd rather believe what God says, and the six-day purposeful creation outlined in Genesis (along with the genealogies, which add up to several thousand years) directly contradicts the big bang theory. There is a much more important reason as well. The Bible reports that everything was perfect before Adam sinned:

The mainstream chronology of big bang, evolution, and survival of the fittest requires billions of years of death and suffering. We see diseases such as rheumatism in the fossil record, as well as animals buried and some in the middle of having lunch. But all this was supposed to be before man, and the Bible says that before Adam's first sin there was no sin at all. Thus, the evolutionary chronology does not fit the Biblical viewpoint. Furthermore, the latter verse up there demonstrates that if there was no basis to Adam's original sin, there would have been no basis for Jesus Christ to rid the world of sin by dying on the cross. Without sin, no need to clean it up.
So, the big bang and the entire evolutionary theory completely contradicts every facet of the Christian faith.

TruthSeeker: The Bible also says, Love your neighbour. Please do be polite. This is supposed to be a place of amenable discussion.

Makes sense to me why it's hard for a believer to try to make some of the creation account be a story and still hold that the rest is true.

What doesn't make sense then, is why so much evidence exists that the creation account in the Bible isn't true. You note yourself that, "We see diseases such as rheumatism in the fossil record, as well as animals buried and some in the middle of having lunch".

My favorite contradiction in the Bible from the original sin story is that women were to be punished for sin by having to bear pain in childbirth. So did god come along and invent anesthesia 1900 years after Jesus for any particular reason?

I know this is getting away from astronomy, but I bring it up because it's less questionable than arguing against the science of dating techniques or BB theories. In other words, it doesn't take a science background to understand the weight of the evidence.

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The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/

At the beggining, maybe equal amounts of positive and negative enery were created. That made it possible for the universe to originate from nothing! :wink:
(-ax + ax = 0 )

What do you think? + = {}

I don't understand the logic behind the thought that if the universe were created by an explosion that it should be uniformly dense. Explosions rarely ever seem to be uniform. Large chunks fly this way, small chunks fly that way. If the universe was the result of some violent explosion then the our current model seems quite reasonable.

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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan

Calling it an "explosion" is not accurate and can lead to many misconceptions.

As ocasey points out, this is not accurate. An explosion is very uneven. The BB "event" could be expected to be uneven, too, as the newly created matter interacted with itself, setting up gravitational eddies. I forget the exact number, but as I recall, all it would take to get a universe with today's "uneveness" is a "disruption factor" in the first second on the order of 0.1% (I think that's high.).

Well, the second reason derives from the first, and the first reason depends on accepting on faith that the Bible is either the direct Word of God or at least God-inspired.

But, then, every Religious Book of Choice (RBOC) makes that claim. And many disagree on the Origin of Everything. How do we know which one is real? (Won't we all feel silly if, when/assuming we make it to Heaven, we find a bald guy in a safron robe waiting for us, and wanting to know why we never gave at the airport?)

The Pope might disagree with you, as well as several mainstream faiths, Christian and non-Christian.

Aha! A point of strong agreement. (For those who prefer something non-Biblical, follow the Thumper Rule.)

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

So now you're speaking for all Christians? Fascinating. I suppose those Christians who disagree with your views are not True Christians, then.

The microwave background is interpreted as the relic of that explosion and it is very uniform. The fluctuations astronomers measure in the CMB are just a fraction of a degree K. So if the CMB is the remnant radiation from the beginning of the universe, it suggests the universe began very uniform. One of the benefits of the Inflationary model is that it offers an explanation as to why the CMB is smooth.

As someone else said, the Big Bang wasn't really an explosion, and should not be thought of as such. As for uniformity, do you consider a diamond uniform? It has large gaps in it between the carbon atoms. The universe *is* uniform. It looks the same from every direction, from every point. Fluctuations did happen on a small scale at first, but tehy grew over the billions of years since then. However, they stayed uniform in distribution.

........hmmmm.....
.....
...
.....hold on....
.....let me drink some coffee first... ... ....
.....aaahh!.....
....
..ok...
...
.. so.... why is it that a belief in a certain structure of religion would have anything to do with why and how our universe moves or expands or whatnot? The age of the earth is most definitely older than 6 thousand years, and we have records to show this... WE HAVE RECORDS TO SHOW THIS... we have recor---- oh... i said that already... =)
**sip coffee**
anywayz...

This CMB, a big cosmic microwave background of sorts... it has an appearance of being smooth from our perspective... but, from another perspective, as in being infront of the so-called expanding wave of the CMB, the form of the CMB may be totally different from what WE see...
The aforementioned bits and pieces of debris flying aorund, that would be on the OTHER side of the CMB that we are seeing... not on this side...
the unevenness that we may see throughout our universe is more than likely caused by the formations of gravitational singularities that had formed either by the CMB expanding or by amounts of Dark Matter/Energy being present before the CMB commenced its journey...

Our universe as a whole could have been a certain charge at first, be it negative or positive... and an opposite charge could have been introduced that caused the reaction prior to the BB expansion.... or there could have been a plentiful amount of negative and positive amounts of matter/energy everywhere but with no force to conduct their charges together to cause the BB, so a certain element could have been used to help that conductive charging of particles... like a 9V battery.... stick your tongue on one tip, either negative or positive, one at a time, and you get nothing.... but stick your tongue on both charges at once... OI!!

We do have very old particles that are still around, that were around even before the birth of our world, just floating in space... pockets here and there, empty voids of matter with nothing to do but be pushed and pulled... any mixture of certain particles that might create such a CMB could have been used to excite the BB into reality... .. .

. .. ...and about there being a Creator to all of this... well, of course there is!! You think we are here just because? If we are learning what it means to have a mind and a will and an intensely, unending excitement towards finding our origin of birth, than we are most definitely related to something that has given us these wants and needs of understanding and overcoming the obstacles put before us to achieve what it was that our ancestors couldn't... If you recall, the Bible was written just recently compared to the actual longevity of our world... only 2 thousand years prior... within a time when Man could finally use words and the reach of the Holy church to establish a rule of how Man should be....

This was Man's decision to allow the voice of Religion to gain a foothold on the soul's of Man... .. . Man wrote the chapters in the Bible as we see them... and the Church organized it as it saw fit to do... .. even leaving out chapters that have been written by others, but didn't really reflect with what the Church had in mind... ..

Religion aside... we are here, and we need to be there... so how do we get there with all the different feelings rolling around inside of us?

A certain platform must be established in order for all voices (intelligent or not) to be heard that may have an interested opinion in the matter of why and how... if i die, will i be cast into fire? i most definitely DO NOT think so.... as my parents and church has seen to drive into me since i was young.... but, being older now, 28 as of January, i have finally begun to realize that 1) there is no reason to condemn someone to a life of gnashing teeth and eternal torment if they've done nothing wrong (being that that person is actually a good person).. and 2) we didn't find ourselves to be the center of the universe.... far from it.... literally... as had a certain Text has proclaimed... something does not match up with the words that are written by Man.... the Words that are written by the Creator or NOT the words written by Man.... Man may have tried to interpret a meaning of something shown through their consciousness, as how the Bible seems to be done... but, Man could never fully understand what it is that has created us enough to understand how it was that we were formed.... give these visions of Creation to someone of today's understandings..... i believe that the Bible may look alittle bit different than what we read today....
The Words of the Creator are above us, in the night sky.. in the far reaches of the cosmos.... in the stars... the formation of galaxies... the turning of planets around suns.... the explosions of supernovae cascading their particles all over the regions in which they inhabited... the unknown sources of negative and positive energies that we still have yet to discover their full meaning...
Yin and Yang... formlessness... an open mind... a transcendence from a form of solid matter to formless energy, that inturn can create its own matter.... and so on... .. .

Be good to eachother... and don't take things so serious that you can't see flaws when they are present, on both sides of the argument... give way when another view may lead to progress... keep morality within reach, but personal beliefs at arms length, yet close to your heart (if it gets you up in the morning, let it)... view from the third perspective, one outside of right and wrong, but one not so distant that you couldn't see the finest details of those lines being drawn....

No one ever mentions the fact that if God created light, then would Satan be the Darkness that we see.... its an argument better left for a time when we can more fully understand ourselves and our universe first... everything is just.... speculation..... and nothing to get worked up over, especially since we have such a looooooooooong way to go...

**sips coffe again**

....ok!! =)

. ..-={A}=-.. .

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. ..-={A}=-.. .

i'm not going to take sides right now, but i do recall a certain model that we used in my Earth Science class a couple semesters ago. (it relates to uniformity, hold on!)

imagine the universe as a loaf of raisin bread. a really BIG loaf. the BB theory is sort of like watching the cooking channel--you don't worry about where all the stuff comes from, you just worry about what it does once it's arrived. theories of pre-BB origins are something else.

anyway, for the rest of this i'll quote from my book. (yes i kept it...partly cause the bookstore ordered a new edition. darn bookstore! also cause i'm a "nerd" though. :-? )

here goes: i'll pause here to explain the diagram. (figure 22.24) there is a picture of a small loaf and a raised loaf. in the small loaf there are many raisins, three marked. one is the "local cluster" galaxy in the analogy. raisin two is two centimeters away. raisin three is five centimeters away.
in the raised loaf, we still see just as many raisins. the "home" raisin is marked, but raisin two is now three times farther away--six centimeters. raisin three is also three times farther away--fifteen centimeters. in the same three hours one raisin moved four centimeters and one moved ten. this is due to the dough growing at a uniform rate of one centimeter an hour (slow bread, but hey). the difference also grew constantly. the original difference of distance was 3centimeters (5cm-2cm). the new difference is three times that--9cm (15cm-6cm).

anway, onto the second (and last) paragraph: (cluster=raisin here) and it goes on to talk about Hubble and the BB in more detail.

all quotes taken from "Earth Science", ninth edition, by Tarbuck and Lutgens. page 622, paragraphs 3-4.

now as i said, i'm not going to jump on one bandwagon or the other. Hubble was a pretty smart guy. not to be dismissed lightly as far as i can tell. so is God from what i can tell. i'm sort of stuck in the middle as to how to resolve the apparent differences between them. bit by bit though i find hints. some are good, some awful, still others painful or joyful. science is an ongoing process, as am i. someday i may have a complete answer, but until then i'm going to keep trucking away! anyway, enough of me, your eyes are probably tired of reading by now so i'll let you go--for now. maybe more later if i think of it.

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None to speak of

Please don't imply that you speak for all Christians. You most certainly do not speak for me. What God says? This has been coverd in other threads and is a bit OT, but nowhere in the Bible does it even claim that more than about a hundred words is the literal word of God. The very most that can be claimed is that it was in some way INSPIRED by God, which is a very different concept indeed. Accepting this simple fact will allow you to INTERPRET the Bible and end your losing battle with reality. Like others have said, the term "explosion" isn't quite right, but in any case, an explosion in space (supernova) is exactly radially symmetric. It has to be because of gravity.

I would simply like to point out that this statement, often repeated by BB critics, would not be true, even if it were not wrong to think of the BB as an "explosion". Just look at the Crab Nebula, or this new HST image of SNR LMC N49, or just about any other supernova remnant you care to choose. There's no doubt that SNR's are the results of a real explosion, and they are anything but "uniform". Especially the HST image of the core of the Crab. Just think of the filaments in the Crab as analogous to the filaments in the universe, along which galaxies form, and the two are actually quite similar.

The reason for this is that in an explosion, or in the BB, the fabled 2nd law of thermodynamics forces the formation of non-uniform distributions as a direct result of cooling by expansion. No fancy cosmology required, this common anti BB argument