"Cosmic Fingerprints"
Offline Anyone come across this little gem yet? An Alexa email subscription put out by a bloke called Perry Marshall that apparently runs for 5 days and includes;
- The mistake Einstein later called “the biggest blunder of my career” – and a dangerous assumption that nearly blinded him to the greatest discovery of the 20th century
- “Bird droppings on my telescope” – a strange piece of radio data that was almost attributed to… well, birds – and how this Nobel Prize-winning experiment now shapes our understanding of time itself (Day 2)
- How “one extra atom” at the birth of the universe could have wiped out entire galaxies, or even the whole cosmos (Day 3)
- A riddle: So simple, any child can understand; so complex, no atheist can solve (Day 4)
- The Big Bang and new implications for science, philosophy, and beliefs about God
Can't hardly wait for day 4, but here's what gets put out on day one.
Part 1: Einstein's Big Blunder
100 years ago this year, Albert Einstein published three papers that rocked the world. These papers proved the existence of the atom, introduced the theory of relativity, and described quantum mechanics.
Pretty good debut for a 26 year old scientist, huh?
His equations for relativity indicated that the universe was expanding. This bothered him, because if it was expanding, it must have had a beginning and a beginner. Since neither of these appealed to him, Einstein introduced a 'fudge factor' that ensured a 'steady state' universe, one that had no beginning or end.
But in 1929, Edwin Hubble showed that the furthest galaxies were fleeing away from each other, just as the Big Bang model predicted. So in 1931, Einstein embraced that would later be known as the Big Bang theory, saying, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened." He referred to the 'fudge factor' to achieve a steady-state universe
as the biggest blunder of his career.As I'll explain during the next couple of days, Einstein's theories have been thoroughly proved and
verified by experiments and measurements. But there's an even more important implication of Einstein's discovery. Not only does the universe have a beginning, but time itself, our own dimension of cause and effect, began with the Big Bang.That's right -- time itself does not exist before then. The very line of time begins with that creation
event. Matter, energy, time and space were created in an instant by an intelligence outside of space and time.About this intelligence, Albert Einstein wrote in his book "The World As I See It" that the harmony of natural law "Reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."
He went on to write, "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced
that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-- a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in
the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble."Pretty significant statement, wouldn't you say?
Stay tuned for tomorrow's installment: "Bird Droppings on my Telescope."
Respectfully Submitted,
Perry Marshall
Cosmic Fingerprints, 67 East Algonquin Road, S. Barrington IL 60010 USA
So here we have an argument for The Great Cause, the effect of which is apparently the universe. I am not yet well versed enough in Einstein's biography or lexicon of statements to reliably refute what is being attributed to him here. I shall leave that to other members of this forum who are far better equipped to do that than I currently am.
What I would like to point out is that it looks a lot like Mr. Marshall is employing a trick that would serve to reinforce a theist's beliefs by appealing to the innate sense of inferiority that is programmed into us as we are mind-fucked into God-belief as we grow up. And it is something that really pisses me off.
Theism hammers into us the belief that we are minions of some greater infallible intelligence, and are not worthy of criticising or questioning that infallibility. Indeed, if we do, we will be subject to an eternity of fire, brimstone and (one would think) Big Brother re-runs as punishment. This affects the layperson to the point that when we are presented with an intelligence and celebrity such as that of Einstein, some of the awe, wonder and we-are-not-worthy-to-question normally reserved for our respective eternal tyrants transfers to the personality and work of the intelligent man/woman.
Marshall is employing that feeling of inferiority here by using Einstein to prop up the argument for The Great Cause. i.e "Einstein was an incredibly intelligent bloke, far more intelligent than you are. If HE believed, then so should you. Don't worry about having to explore his and subsequent scientists' theories for yourself. Don't worry about Life, the Universe and Everything, other people are taking care of it, you don't have to put the effort in. Cancel your subscriptions to Nature, New Scientist and the Economist. Replace them with Heat Magazine, Hello and The Sun. The sordid affairs of Britney Spears are far easier to think about than the possibilities offered by nanotech, biotech and the puzzles of the quantum universe. Expanding your horizons takes effort. Sitting on your arse, watching reality TV and never wanting to achieve anything other than lurid fantasies involving Angelina Jolie are far easier options. Don't question anything. Thinking is hard and takes up valuable TV time."
The religious pre-programming that many of us receive as kids hinders our ability to think for ourselves. It removes our faculty for critical thought, takes away that most human of human attributes - the desire to question everything. Imagine a 4 year old girl growing up in the Western world. Every 3rd word out of her mouth is "Why?" It's fucking fantastic, if really annoying, but as she grows up, the answers given to many of her questions will be absolutes in order to either shut her up, as a means of control or to keep her out of harm's way. When she eventually asks the question, "Why do I exist?" she will likely be given God as her cause. If she accepts that answer, she will lose a significant portion of her critical capacity at least until she is old enough to ask the question again. If she asks the question again.
And that is where it will start. The acceptance of an absolute answer that has no evidence given to her by someone she respects or is genetically programmed to obey will pave the way within her mind to accept other absolutes without questioning them. The child-like state of acceptance may perpetuate into adulthood and any desire to question the absolute will then be replaced with pop music, pop culture and Celebrity Big Brother. It will take a great teacher or a great argument to pull her mind out of the realm of the submissive follower into a place where she might be able to think for herself and put her mind to use.
If she is always given an answer to her question that does not include the absolute of religion i.e. "Nobody knows," her reasoning will not be impaired. Rather, she is likely to be inspired to seek the answer for herself, perhaps becoming the next great scientist to develop a theoretical tool with which we can better understand the universe.
Religion is a means of subjication, of control. It is the white noise that drowns out the potential of the human species. It is the polluting smog that hinders our progress towards true understanding and the depressing thing is that most of its adherents, like Mr. Marshall here are convinced that by perpetuating it, they are doing the right thing.
Stop that... It's silly.
- Login to post comments
You sound awfully desperate.
What an idiot that guy is. It infuriates me when they take the advancement of science and add their fantasies to it, as if that somehow legitimizies their fantasies. However, I guess that is just a consequence of their own position being so pathetic that they have to pull such stunts, along with the aforementioned appeal to authority you mentioned. Quite telling, now that I think about it.
Einstein's God was the God of Spinoza. He essentially believed that the Universe was grand enough itself to deserve awe. He did not believe in a First Mover style God at all.
I hate it when theists try to cast Einstein as a theist himself. He was most an herbal-tea-strength deist who spoke poetically of his love of the universe and its manifest laws.
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
I'm looking around for counter arguments in preparation for this group's (the Cosmic Fingerprints people) appearance in Omaha this weekend. Unfortunately this screed was a big letdown. I realize a lot of people are hurt by their religious training, fine. I realize human feelings regarding the size of the universe can lead to varied reactions of religion or spiritualism, fine. I need more to work with than rhetoric about tricks and pre-programming and what pisses off "Sadzaeater."
Infidels did some writing on the topic: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/cosmological.html
There are some links on that page as well, will probably lead you to some useful info.
Also I'm sure that Deluded God and Hambydammit [members of this site] have done essays on the topic. Take a look around, lots of information to be found.
I have. I think I probably got added to the list after selecting atheist for my religion on a website.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
This guy Marshall is a creationist and runs that page 'cosmic fringerprints'.
It came up as an ad on one of Mr Edward Currents videos.
He is an atheist satiric, to u that don't know him.
It's a new policy of You tube, I think, to spam atheists with commercials of theists pages.
And theists love to use science against atheists, or try to be scientific at least.
Even if it's hard to camouflage the nonsense they believe, as science.
a long time ago, I red a quote by Einstein explianing what he believed to be "his religion":
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind"
Get what you will from that!
Einstein was not religious in the sense that he did not believe in a prime mover with intention. He was in awe of the universe however. Someone recently paid an "ungodly" amount for a letter hand written by Einstein in German to a friend which shows that he did not believe in a prime mover.
Tony
Here is one of many references to that letter:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,2568,Childish-superstition-Einsteins-letter-makes-view-of-religion-relatively-clear,Guardian-UK
Tony
Granted that this thread is old but the sheer idiocy of this guy deserves some work. So let's start with his dating.
First, while he may have started this in 2005 and therefore the hundred years since Einstein's first work would have been valid, time marches on and it is now 104 years ago. Also, the theory of relativity is comprised of about a dozen papers published between 1905 and 1918. If memory serves, the “fudge factor” was published in about 1913.
Those are minor nits but they need to be addressed before moving on to more substantial matters. Here the question might arise as to just why Einstein's fudge factor ended up in the equations in the first place.
At the time, it was not known or even suspected that there were other galaxies. The best telescopes of the day were just not good enough to show galaxies for what they are now known to be. In fact, the assumption of all professional astronomers was that they were clouds of gas located inside our own galaxy.
Now when Einstein was working on general relativity, a good bit of the nature of stars in our galaxy had already been worked out. One of the more important bits is that distances could be worked out for a class of stars known as cephid variables. There are enough of those that are close enough to measure the distance with the older measure of stellar parallax and we can extrapolate the intrinsic brightness of others to determine how far away they are.
So knowing the approximate size of the galaxy is possible at that time as well as the fact that it is not contracting. However, at that time, the early version of general relativity made the specific prediction that since everything attracts everything else, the universe must be contracting. The problem is that all of the available evidence supported a static universe.
Faced with a nonsensical prediction, Einstein did the only thing that he could think of. He posited that there was a force that held the universe apart opposite to gravity but only on the level of the universe as a whole. He had no idea what that force would be, only that he could calculate the general properties of such a force. So he did exactly that and he called it the cosmological constant. Hey, it was the only way he knew how to save the rest of the theory, which was obviously good.
Then, in 1922 (another bad dating nit BTW and does this ass even know how to use the internet or a public library?), Edwin Hubble announced that he had found cephid variables in the cloudy wisps that today are known to be other galaxies and that they were in fact incredibly more distant than anything yet known. Subsequently, he was able to develop the red shift method for estimating the distance of galaxies that were too far away to find individual cephid variables. With that it also became apparent that the universe was expanding.
Faced with this, Einstein had another look at general relativity. If the universe is expanding, that negates the need for the cosmological constant. At least for the time being. It has come back into science in the past ten years as it helps with newer observations that nobody could have guessed at earlier. We still don't know what it is and it is still a placeholder until we have some data that let's us figure out what might be going on but there it is.
=
From the existece of Universe we must conclude any one of these "Either Mass-Energy has to be eternal (Think about Law of Conservation of Energy) or God has to be eternal . Mass-energy eternal doesn't make any sense but God(Intelligent designer) is eternal makes more more sense. No information could evolve naturally. Saying man evolved from star-dust is like saying windows,linux came from nature not created by humans... Pray to God to reveal the truth . He loves you so much. Don't lose your soul.
Welcome to the forum.
Define 'eternal.' Explain how God satisfies the law of conservation of energy.
How? Why?
Explain what you mean. Define 'evolve' and 'naturally.'
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
if I repeat the mantra over and over and over and over then I will convince myself I believe the 'truth'.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
It is far more plausible that something as simple and basic as energy, whether or not it is condensed into particles of matter or not, can just 'exist' indefinitely, than a powerful intelligent entity, which is inevitably vastly, maybe infinitely, more complex in organized structure than a formless 'sea' of photons or quarks.
Quantum Theory reveals that there is a minimum level of energy which must exist, if there is any existence at all, otherwise it would violate the Uncertainty Principle.
We have good reason to believe that complex structures can emerge from sufficiently large collection of fundamental particles, with non-zero probability. So all you need to have either always existed, or to have come into existence, is a background of minimal but non-zero energy.
How does a God make any sense in this context? What issues does positing such a being address??
Where did the Laws of Existence that would require such a being come from, since they would be a prior requirement for the being's existence? And they would be non-trivial, unlike the requirement that if there is anything, there must be energy, which is merely the capacity for action, for change. Without action we would have the sterility of a timeless realm in which nothing ever happened, not even the thoughts in the mind of a 'God'.
God makes no sense...
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology