Big Bang - Big Dud

As I remember it, the atom bomb at Hiroshima used up about a gram of matter and poofed it off as energy. 1 gram x (30,000,000,000 cm/sec)^2 = 9 x 10^20 ergs = 3.3 x 10^7 horsepower-hours. So yup, you have "more energy", since it's not in the form of matter anymore.

We know this how, exactly? Both the assertion that humans have one of them thangs, and that animals don't... What does that mean? All the people I know have complex emotions, care about at least a few of their neighbors....like other social animals, but more "intelligent" or at least better communicators. What's wrong with that?Back to the topic:
"Big Bang" was a term coined by Sir Fred Hoyle to be derisive of the theory - it was in contradiction to his, now disproved, theory of a "steady-state" universe with matter constantly popping into being. Don't get hung up on "explosions" or "bangs" as analogies, 'cause they're not very good ones. Read Sylas's stuff - linked above - instead.

Let's say that I'm quite sure, based on several lines of evidence, that my ancestors a couple of hundred thousan years ago were sorta apish looking critters in Africa. I could be shown to be wrong on that - they might have been in Asia instead - but that's not where current evidence points.

There's about 9,000,000,000 years of stars forming and dying between the "unfolding" and the beginning of our solar system - it's only been here for the last one-third of the time since the BB.Most likely, chance put our planet where it now is, and then, with liquid water and some other amenities, life arose. But as Crash mentions, we're not at one precise distance from the Sun. It's very odd to me how that notion, and even the claim that Earth has the most nearly circular orbit in the solar system, are commom from creationist/ID sources. Any freshman astronomy text or two minutes with Google prove both wrong.

Certainly there is that possibility. But if it didn't happen like that, why to we have the cosmic background radiation all around us, helping contribute to the static on the televisions of those poor folk still on rabbit ears? Why are distant galaxies all receding from us, the more distant ones more quickly?You're perfectly welcome to posit some creator to start it all, if that's what floats your boat. But in my view, such a thing is just one more level of complexity to explain in an already complex universe - and a level with no physical evidence for itself.

I'll bet the BB can't even address that one question, but have you considered just how many base pairs are in your or my (or Crash's) genome? We just about have to be unique with as many possibilities for recombination as we have. There's only 6.3 billion of us on this planet, after all.AbE:
I'll get back on topic now, NN.This message has been edited by Coragyps, 01-28-2005 16:39 AM

Your book has that one right - we return to dust.

There was "no scientific law" to allow an electron (or a baseball...) to have the properties of a wave (wavelength, frequency, ability to be diffracted) until eighty years ago, either, but they always did and still do. Just because you or I are ignorant of the things physicists are working on means not that they don't exist.And of course the Casimir Effect still works without the metal plates - it's just a helluva lot harder to measure it that way.

Virtual particle pairs are forming and annihilating whether the plates are there or not. The plates just provide the means to detect the effect.