Peanut Gallery Comments on Great Debate

Dr. Hawking also said the universe would reverse back to a big crunch.That view has been rejected.Dr. Hawking is not always right.

Isn't this what I said? Ancient peoples invented deities and creation stories. Yes, all of them. Sentient beings with an ability for creative abstract thinking make up monsters, myths, demons and dragons to fill the void of ignorance. It's a property of human evolutionary development. Read Joseph Campbell. All matter is energy in a different form and vice versa. That is what E=mc² is all about.Your own hero Dr. Hawking says so in that lecture you cited.Quarks are fermions. Matter particles. Fermion - Wikipedia You're as able to search for those sites as am I, Reverend.If you want to claim intellectual deficiency or cognitive disassociation let me know. I'll help find someone willing to walk you through a Google Search, because I am not willing to put up with this BS. That polarization is socio-political. It is not part of the scientific process that holds more sway in the larger community of scientists. Then you are not close enough to the discipline to understand the checks and balances ALL true Scotsmen Scientists are required to follow.Do the names Andrew Wakefield, Paul Cameron, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons mean anything to you? Oh, Reverend, I have been so wrong about so many things in my life. I learned a long time ago not to trust half of what I think and to question the other half. That is why I have read and studied so many things and have had to change my views on so many things.At this point I know I am not an expert on anything but I also know I am very well versed in a broader range of subjects and disciplines than most humans will achieve in their lifetimes. And yes, I rely on the field of experts in the sciences because I have personally seen the benefits and studied the histories. I have experienced the successes and the failures and I have been a part of the enforcement of the scientific discipline. I know where the bodies are buried.I know, Reverend, as well as any man can know anything in this life, that your gods and your religions are poisons to the mind of the human species. Your bible says the love of money is the root of all evil, when, in fact, it is your religions that are the root of all evil in this world. One but need read and understand the history of humanity to see the evil hand of religion behind every strongman, warlord and bloody belligerent from the khans in the east to the kings in the west.It is you, Reverend, that has been captured by the demons of myth and mystery. Your religious fervor is what rules you, not critical independent thought. Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Good grief, Reverend, I covered this. Pay attention.

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Message 143 Sentient beings with an ability for creative abstract thinking make up monsters, myths, demons and dragons to fill the void of ignorance. It's a property of human evolutionary development. Read Joseph Campbell.

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That's why. So what? Did you scatterbrain on me again? That may be so but the mechanism does result in a universe that matches our observations by resolving problems that General Relativity and QFT, known to be exceptionally accurate, leave open in the early universe. No one has yet put forward anything as productive and predictive as inflation theory. Until there is a better resolution inflation theory is the best answer we have. Remember the subject was finding the new physics to explain cosmic origins. When it comes to the science of cosmology physicists don't care if the king is left or right or if the donor is Gates or God. The only thing of importance is the efficacy of the physics. You believe in phantasms. Gods and demons that are not really there.I don't care what specific dogmas you may follow. This is enough to call into question your intellectual disposition on a whole range of subjects.

An extension of animism. First, reverence for the animals and plants that sustained them then the awesome powers of the storms, volcanoes, floods, earthquakes, etc. that so terrified them, add in some apophenia and pareidolia and, presto ... powerful beings to be feared. Emergent properties from the electro-chemistry of the physically advanced neural locus we call a brain in a species of social animal that evolved abstract reasoning and creative thinking and planning capabilities combined with what I said above. That is where gods come from. Precisely. Except for the good/evil part. Those are human constructs that came about from the eons of experience in the "social" animal aspect that is characteristic of all primate species. Early hominids didn't know or care about good and evil. All they know was safe, warm and happy from deadly, sick and sad.You really should read some Joseph Campbell. No. We made up the gods to explain the great and terrible powers that moved our lives. At the time we were too ignorant to separate the natural and the supernatural. There were the spirits of the bison and forests that gave themselves for our benefit and the spirits of the sky and the mountains that would become angry and violent. Lots of different hypotheses having to do with the development of language abilities in our early socialization schemes and the power of cooperative planning in the hunt.One of my favorite thoughts is of a group of pre-proto-humans sitting around a fire when one of the young women, feeling safe, warm and fed starts humming. No real tune but kind of a cat purr in happy tones.Language starts with music as abstraction develops in the hominid consciousness. I don't know what this has to do with this discussion ... but since you asked.They are not talking about two quarks being fused but two baryons being fused. Baryons are a three-quark composite particle like a proton or a neutron. You have to be careful with the science press. They are too often stupid and don't get things right.The baryons in this case are heavy bottom-quark baryons, which don't actually exist, but contain a bottom quark and one each of the normal up and down quarks. Two of them, the math models say, could be fused to form a hypothetical 6 quark baryon.The energy required to do the fusion is enormous but the result, which is highly unstable, disintegrates in a few pico-seconds releasing an even larger amount of energy. That extra energy comes from the rearrangement of the gluons (strong nuclear force bosons) in the two quite different baryons that emerge from the disintegration. The quarks are not turning into energy.Problem is that the bottom quark is not a usual thing and would need to be made in an accelerator, requiring a big expense of energy, and it disintegrates in just a few pico-seconds itself. So you would have to make the bottom quarks, get them into the proper configuration of heavy bottom-quark baryon then get two of these baryons to smash into each other and fuse all before the original bottom quarks disappear.That's a tall order. That's the same box of band-aids Einstein used when he hypothesized the measure of the speed of light to be the same regardless of any frame of reference. The result solved many problems in special relativity and made predictions that held up to observation.The same for Inflation theory. The same for the germ theory of disease and plate tectonics.Our history is full of band-aids that actually work. Oh, come on, Reverend, have you never heard of the Perimeter Institute? Leonard Susskind? Ivan Agullo? Paul Steinhardt? Lee Smolin?Blacklisted/ostracized? Not even close. I don't know where you are getting your info but it is way wrong. You contradict yourself. You *do* believe in phantasms. Gods and demons that are not really there. You are just too delusional to recognize your delusion. Of course you do.You believe in Jesus? You believe in his teachings? You believe in the crucifixion? You believe in the resurrection?That is dogma.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Unfortunately we have the same kinds of stories from believers in other religions with other gods and other demons. We also have equally fantastical stories from those known to be mentally delusional.Sorry, Reverend, but you have a screw loose. I do not doubt that you believe your fantasies but the evidence of all history informs us this universe does not operate that way. But, we know that humans with loose screws do. That is way wrong.I do not know how the universe began nor do I know how life began. These are *not* articles of faith for me in the way they are for you.If you hadn't noticed I am a hard and fast objective realist. I require a preponderance of evidence before accepting *any* proposition. In the absence of a preponderance I can only go where the present evidence logically points.There is not enough evidence to conclude what/how the beginning of the universe happened. But the evidence we do have indicates that there was such a thing.There is not enough evidence to conclude what/how the beginnings of life proceeded but the evidence we do have indicates that it most probably came from natural chemical interactions.Except as a convenience in discussion I make no distinction between life and non-life. Chemistry reacts. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster and more prolonged. Replication, the start of what most would call life, appears from the evidence we do have to be nothing more than a set of chemical reactions in a repetitious cycle. How that first replicator came to be is not yet known. And should a cycle in motion cease, we call that death.No need for faith in any of this. I accept the natural explanations, and expect only natural explanations because this universe has shown us nothing else but.I have never been so off my nut that I have experienced anything, or known of anything viably reliable, that was not a natural physical phenomenon. Psychochemical stimulants exempted, of course.I have no need of faith. I have reality.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Yeah, funny.But truly, one of the greatest feelings of happy I have ever experienced was when I was sitting in my chair reading my book and my daughter was sprawled out on the floor reading her book when she started softly humming a happy little tune. All the world’s cares melted away and life was never more beautiful. Then I realized the tune was Justin Bieber and the spell broke.

Oh, Reverend, one can have a whole bunch of screws loose and still be a kind considerate giver.I have no doubt that you are a kind and caring man. What I doubt is that your faith, your desire to live a life as Jesus would, is what made you that way. You could have been an atheist, Buddhist, Muslim and would been just as considerate and generous because that is the man in your heart. I submit you were always that man, would have been that man regardless of what religion or none entered your soul and you would have been just as happy and fulfilled in your life.And bad miserable mean people are just as bad miserable and mean regardless of the same religious beliefs as yours or mine. Religion or no are just molds you pour a mind into. The mold can form an outward appearance of a man but the mind is the man.What you miss out on in being a religious nutter is the true wonder, the true beauty, the true freedom of this universe.You have your universe made for you. Let there be poof! and it is there. Mine is a so much grander a creation. Bigger than any one god and built without majik, without someone’s will or dictate or plan. Just nature, left to her own processes, unplanned, without guide or purpose. You miss out on the wonder, the sheer audacity of what this universe has become on its own accord. The real magic is not in some god’s majik poof but in the boundless wondrous creations of a free and volatile nature.You also miss out on the real knowledge of yourself. Can you really know who you are, Reverend, when you have been poured into that mold with a moral code dictated by some long dead and disappeared priests that MUST be followed under penalty of your immortal soul? I’m not talking about the usual socialization training we give children but those choices we all face in life; where we must choose at life’s moral crossroads. Do you have to lean on Jesus to tell you what he wants or can you know in your own mind what is right, what is proper, just by virtue of being you?Related to the above are other decisions. Those of family, politics, society. Again, do you let millennia old mores of ancient peoples past dictate who you befriend and who you abhor? Do you harden your heart because the ancient priests say you must? Do you pick and choose which physics and sciences to embrace based on myths in ancient books? Are you free to embrace new human freedoms where your ancient priests counseled disgust and ostracism?How can you trust a man whose mind is so weak he has to be told what to think? Our species history is filled to the brim with bad disastrous decisions made based on religious considerations instead of the reality of the universe around us. Even today pastors ignore the science of reality citing their god’s powers while their parishioners die gasping in the ICU.This is what the religious mind misses out on.I am happy that you are happy and fulfilled. I congratulate you on your life’s success.It could have been so much more fulfilling without the religious handicap.