tagged w/ Universe
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This is a fantastic video explaining oneness, measurable electromagnetism in emotions and consciousness featuring Jim Carrey, David Wilcock, and more!This is a fantastic video explaining oneness, measurable electromagnetism in emotions... more
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CNN...
I don't know, so I'm an atheist libertarian
By Penn Jillette, Special to CNN
August 16, 2011 4:24 p.m. EDT
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STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Penn Jillette: I'm an atheist and libertarian because there are many things I don't know
Jillette says it's a sign of compassion to help those who are suffering
He says relying on the government to make others give is immoral and lazy
"You get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right," Jillette says
Penn Jillette on atheism and religion
I don't believe the majority always knows what's best for everyone.
--Penn Jillette
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Editor's note: Penn Jillette, a writer, television host and frequent guest on a wide range of shows, is half of the Emmy Award-winning magic duo Penn & Teller. He's the author of a new book,"God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales," He will appear Tuesday on CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight" at 9 p.m. ET.
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(CNN) -- I try to claim that I was friends with the genius Richard Feynman. He came to our show a few times and was very complimentary, and I had dinner with him a couple times, and we chatted on the phone several times. I'd call him to get quick tutoring on physics so I could pretend to read his books.
No matter how much I want to brag, it's overstating it to call him a friend. I would never have called him to help me move a couch. I did, however, call him once to ask how we could score some liquid nitrogen for a Letterman spot we wanted to do. He was the only physicist I knew at the time. He explained patiently that he didn't know. He was a theoretical physicist and I needed a hands-on guy, but he'd try to find one for me.
About a half-hour later a physics teacher from a community college in Brooklyn called me and said, "I don't know what kind of practical joke this is, but a Nobel Prize-winning scientist just called me here at the community college, gave me this number, and told me to call Penn of Penn & Teller to help with a Letterman appearance."
I guess that's close to a friend.
My friend Richard Feynman said, "I don't know." I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill's Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
"I don't know" is not an apology. There's no shame. It's a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn't know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn't know, he said, "I don't know."
I like to think I fit in somewhere between my friends Harold and Richard. I don't know. I try to remember to say "I don't know" just the way they both did, as a simple statement of fact. It doesn't always work, but I try.
Last week I was interviewed for Piers Morgan's show (which used to be Larry King's show). Piers beat me up a bit for being an atheist (that's his job) and then beat me up a bit for being a libertarian (also his job). He did this by asking me impossible questions, questions that none of us, Harold, Richard, me, (or Piers), could ever answer.
He started with "How did you get here?" and I started talking about my road to showbiz and atheism and he interrupted and said he meant how the universe was created. I said, "I don't know."
He said, "God," an answer that meant Piers didn't know either, but he had a word for it that was supposed to make me feel left out of his enlightened club.
Then he asked me what we could do to help poor people. I said I donated money, food, medical care, and services and he said, "No," he meant, what could society do to solve the problem of poor people. Again, I was stumped.
He said the government had to do it, which I interpreted as another way of saying he didn't know, but he thought that made me look mean ... even though I do care and do try to help.
What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist -- I don't know. If I don't know, I don't believe. I don't know exactly how we got here, and I don't think anyone else does, either. We have some of the pieces of the puzzle and we'll get more, but I'm not going to use faith to fill in the gaps. I'm not going to believe things that TV hosts state without proof. I'll wait for real evidence and then I'll believe.
And I don't think anyone really knows how to help everyone. I don't even know what's best for me. Take my uncertainty about what's best for me and multiply that by every combination of the over 300 million people in the United States and I have no idea what the government should do.
President Obama sure looks and acts way smarter than me, but no one is 2 to the 300 millionth power times smarter than me. No one is even 2 to the 300 millionth times smarter than a squirrel. I sure don't know what to do about an AA+ rating and if we should live beyond our means and about compromise and sacrifice. I have no idea. I'm scared to death of being in debt. I was a street juggler and carny trash -- I couldn't get my debt limit raised, I couldn't even get a debt limit -- my only choice was to live within my means. That's all I understand from my experience, and that's not much.
It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.
People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we're compassionate we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.
People try to argue that government isn't really force. You believe that? Try not paying your taxes. (This is only a thought experiment -- suggesting on CNN.com that someone not pay his or her taxes is probably a federal offense, and I'm a nut, but I'm not crazy.). When they come to get you for not paying your taxes, try not going to court. Guns will be drawn. Government is force -- literally, not figuratively.
I don't believe the majority always knows what's best for everyone. The fact that the majority thinks they have a way to get something good does not give them the right to use force on the minority that don't want to pay for it. If you have to use a gun, I don't believe you really know jack. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.
How did we get here and how do we save everyone? I don't know, but I'm doing the best I can. Sorry Piers, that's all I got.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Penn Jillette.CNN...
I don't know, so I'm an atheist libertarian
By Penn Jillette,... more
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CNN...
August 11th, 2011
09:17 AM ET
DNA discovered in meteorites
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NASA researchers have found the building blocks of DNA, the genetic molecule that is essential to all life forms, in meteorites, pieces of space rock that have fallen to Earth. The discovery suggests that similar meteorites and comets may have impacted Earth and assisted in life formation here.
With minimal chance for contamination of the meteorite samples, scientists are confident that these meteorite specimens were formed in space. “People have been discovering components of DNA in meteorites since the 1960's, but researchers were unsure whether they were really created in space or if instead they came from contamination by terrestrial life,” Michael Callahan, lead author of the study on the discovery, said in a statement.
The research team analyzed twelve carbon rich meteorites, nine of which were from Antarctica, to positively identify the basic elements of the chemical compounds they extracted from the samples. Testing revealed adenine and guanine, two fundamental components of DNA called nucleobases.
DNA is shaped like a double helix, or twisted ladder, and the rungs of that ladder are each comprised of two nucleobases, either a pairing of adenine and thymine or of guanine and cytosine. The ladder is essentially a long string of genetic code that tells cells in an organism which proteins to make. Those proteins then play critical roles in organism growth and function, making everything from hair to enzymes.
Scientists also found hypoxanthine and xanthine, two other chemicals used in biological processes and found in muscle tissue.
The meteorites also contained trace amounts of three molecules associated with nucleobases, called nucleobase analogs, but two of those are almost never seen in biology, providing the necessary proof that these DNA components were actually created in outer space.
In fact the only record of any of these nucleobases in biologic processes is within a virus. Callahan said in the NASA press release that “if asteroids are behaving like chemical 'factories' cranking out prebiotic material, you would expect them to produce many variants of nucleobases, not just the biological ones, due to the wide variety of ingredients and conditions in each asteroid,” and that is exactly what these researchers found. He says the nucleobases found, biological or not, can also be created in a lab setting, using the basic compounds hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water.
This finding contributes further to the growing collection of evidence that asteroids and comets are comprised of the proper chemicals to generate the building blocks of life. Some seem to have the ideal internal chemistry for the job.
“In fact, there seems to be a ‘goldilocks’ class of meteorites,” Callahan said in a statement, “the so called CM2 meteorites, where conditions are just right to make more of these molecules.”
.CNN...
August 11th, 2011
09:17 AM ET
DNA discovered in meteorites
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Scientific American...
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The Case for Parallel Universes
Why the multiverse, crazy as it sounds, is a solid scientific idea
By Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark | Tuesday, July 19, 2011 |
Editor's note: In the August issue of Scientific American, cosmologist George Ellis describes why he's skeptical about the concept of parallel universes. Here, multiverse proponents Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark offer counterpoints, explaining why the multiverse would account for so many features of our universe—and how it might be tested.
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PART ONE…
Welcome to the Multiverse
By Alexander Vilenkin
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The universe as we know it originated in a great explosion that we call the big bang. For nearly a century cosmologists have been studying the aftermath of this explosion: how the universe expanded and cooled down, and how galaxies were gradually pulled together by gravity. The nature of the bang itself has come into focus only relatively recently. It is the subject of the theory of inflation, which was developed in the early 1980s by Alan Guth, Andrei Linde and others, and has led to a radically new global view of the universe.
Inflation is a period of super-fast, accelerated expansion in early cosmic history. It is so fast that in a fraction of a second a tiny subatomic speck of space is blown to dimensions much greater than the entire currently observable region. At the end of inflation, the energy that drove the expansion ignites a hot fireball of particles and radiation. This is what we call the big bang.
The end of inflation is triggered by quantum, probabilistic processes and does not occur everywhere at once. In our cosmic neighborhood, inflation ended 13.7 billion years ago, but it still continues in remote parts of the universe, and other “normal” regions like ours are constantly being formed. The new regions appear as tiny, microscopic bubbles and immediately start to grow. The bubbles keep growing without bound; in the meantime they are driven apart by the inflationary expansion, making room for more bubbles to form. This never-ending process is called eternal inflation. We live in one of the bubbles and can observe only a small part of it. No matter how fast we travel, we cannot catch up with the expanding boundaries of our bubble, so for all practical purposes we live in a self-contained bubble universe.
The theory of inflation explained some otherwise mysterious features of the big bang, which simply had to be postulated before. It also made a number of testable predictions, which were then spectacularly confirmed by observations. By now inflation has become the leading cosmological paradigm.
Another key aspect of the new worldview derives from string theory, which is at present our best candidate for the fundamental theory of nature. String theory admits an immense number of solutions describing bubble universes with diverse physical properties. The quantities we call constants of nature, such as the masses of elementary particles, Newton’s gravitational constant, and so on, take different values in different bubble types. Now combine this with the theory of inflation. Each bubble type has a certain probability to form in the inflating space. So inevitably, an unlimited number of bubbles of all possible types will be formed in the course of eternal inflation.
This picture of the universe, or multiverse, as it is called, explains the long-standing mystery of why the constants of nature appear to be fine-tuned for the emergence of life. The reason is that intelligent observers exist only in those rare bubbles in which, by pure chance, the constants happen to be just right for life to evolve. The rest of the multiverse remains barren, but no one is there to complain about that.
CONTINUED…Scientific American...
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The Case for Parallel Universes
Why the... more
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Two international teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The researchers found the huge mass of water feeding a black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.
link:http://www.gizmag.com/astronomers-detect-largest-most-distant-reservoir-of-water-ever-found-in-the-universe/19347/Two international teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest... more
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The death of a comet that plunged into the sun was
captured on camera this month for the first time
in history, scientists say.
The comet met its fiery demise on July 6 when it zoomed
in from behind the sun and melted into oblivion as it crashed
into the star. It was NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO),
a satellite orbiting Earth that studies the sun, which witnessed
the comet's death-blow.
One of the SDO spacecraft's high-definition imagers
"actually spotted a sun-grazing comet as it disintegrated over
about a 15 minute period (July 6, 2011), something never observed
before," SDO officials said. [See the observatory's image of the
comet death]
kb http://www.nasa.govThe death of a comet that plunged into the sun was
captured on camera this month for... more
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The Intelligent Universe proposes a possibility: that the universe might end in intelligent life. Not life as we know it but life that has acquired the capacity to shape the cosmos as a whole, just as life on Earth has acquired the ability to shape the land, the sea and the atmosphere. As the iconoclastic Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson put it: Mind, through the long course of biological evolution, has established itself as a moving force in our little corner of the universe. Here on this small planet, mind has infiltrated matter and has taken control. It appears to me that the tendency of mind to infiltrate and control matter is a law of nature http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/submit-an-article/42985-it-takes-a-giant-cosmos-to-create-life-and-mindThe Intelligent Universe proposes a possibility: that the universe might end in... more
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11 months ago
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Los Angeles Times...
NASA spacecraft offers detailed views of Saturn's Great White Spot
The Great White Spot, which occurs about once every 30 Earth years, is a windy, towering cloud of ammonia and water spewing out super jolts of thunder and lightning. The storm is about 10,000 times stronger than those on Earth.
PHOTO: An image of Saturn taken by NASA spacecraft Cassini shows the Great White Spot in the planet's northern hemisphere. (NASA / July 7, 2011)
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By Daniela Hernandez, Los Angeles Times
July 6, 2011, 6:27 p.m.
Saturn's Great White Spot, a recurring storm on that planet that has intrigued scientists since it was first observed in 1876, is a windy, towering cloud of ammonia and water spewing out super jolts of thunder and lightning. Now astronomers and NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, have captured the most detailed views to date of the phenomenon.
The luminous storm, which may be the gaseous planet's main mechanism for dissipating heat, occurs about once every Saturnian year, the equivalent of about 30 Earth years. The storms, however, do not follow a precise schedule. The latest round, the most intense on record, was first noticed by ground-based professional and amateur astronomers as a bright speck on Saturn's northern hemisphere on Dec. 5, about nine years before schedule. The previous storm occurred in 1990.
Their observations coincided with Cassini's detection of a deluge of radio waves emitted by Saturn. These radio waves are a signature of lightning and can be used as a measure of its strength.
During the days that followed, that small blemish, moving westward about 65 mph, grew to a size nearly equal to the diameter of the Earth. Two months later, the behemoth had blanketed the entire planet, spanning more than 180,000 miles.
"It turned into a very spectacular storm, with so many [lightning flashes] we couldn't resolve individual ones," said Donald Gurnett, a physicist at the University of Iowa and a contributing author of one of two reports published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
This massive eruption of lightning is caused when heat and water vapor rise from deep within Saturn's atmosphere up to its troposphere, the region of the atmosphere where weather occurs. When that water vapor cools and condenses, it releases heat and, under the right conditions, produces lightning.
The lightning on Saturn originates deep inside the planet's atmosphere, where vapors are at higher pressure. That makes the lightning very intense.
The images and measurements gave scientists new insight into the shape of the current Great White Spot. As water vapor and ammonia were pushed to the troposphere by vertical currents, some of the materials were dragged by eastern winds, creating the storm's characteristic "head" and straggling "tail," both of which are visible from Earth.
First author Agustin Sanchez-Lavega, a planetary scientist at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and his colleagues were able to estimate that the storm's head, where most of the lightning was concentrated, extended about 160 miles below the cloud tops. Because the sun doesn't shine there, this suggests that the planet's internal heat helps the storms to form, the scientists wrote.
Great White Spots are 10 times larger than normal storms on Saturn and are about 10,000 times stronger than those on Earth. They occur seasonally due to changes in how much sunlight reaches Saturn. Scientists still don't fully understand the interplay between solar energy and Saturn's internal stores in generating these storms.Los Angeles Times...
NASA spacecraft offers detailed views of Saturn's Great... more
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Astronomers have unveiled the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a distance of 380 million light-years) ever created. Taking more than 10 years to complete, the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS) also is notable for extending closer to the Galactic plane than previous surveys -- a region that's generally obscured by dust.
LINK : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110527082038.htmAstronomers have unveiled the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a... more
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“Our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe.” In a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time, Nikodem Poplawski, a physicist at Indiana University, suggests that a small change to the theory of gravity implies that our Universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born.
Poplawski says that the idea that black holes are the cosmic mothers of new universes is a natural consequence of a simple new assumption about the nature of spacetime. Poplawski points out that the standard derivation of general relativity takes no account of the intrinsic momentum of spin half particles. However there is another version of the theory, called the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity, which does.
(read the rest at link)“Our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another... more
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Stephen Hawking dead wrong. The First Cause, Uncaused Cause, the Logos, is the cause of the universe or the Big Bang that caused the universe. Additionally, evolution cannot take place without a push and pull. Quantum Processes take place outside of space and time, and thus are transcendent to some degree. Additionally, Quantum Physics teaches us that Meaning Affects Reality. The Nucleus of an Atom contains a neuron which carries meaning, an electron which carries energy, and a quanta which changes valence, trajectory, and velocity based upon the meaning carried by the neuron. Thus, ours is a Spiritual Universe. Also, the Actual Existence of God can be logically proven. The following is my Proof for God's Existence which parallels that of Saint Anselm:
1. Assume that by definition, God is Good (Source: Jesus statement in the Bible)
2. Assume that The Good is by Definition, Positive.
3. Assume that am Important aspect of the Good is Existence.
(If no Existence then no Good)
4. Since God is Good and since an important aspect of the Good is Existence,
God Exists.Stephen Hawking dead wrong. The First Cause, Uncaused Cause, the Logos, is the cause... more
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This conversation sheds clarity on a very confused notion in the area of spirituality today—namely, the “tao of physics” and all its variations, as exemplified by the recent film What the Bleep. So what relationship, if any, does God actually have with quantum physics?
http://mattovermatter.com/2011/05/14/does-quantum-physics-prove-god/This conversation sheds clarity on a very confused notion in the area of spirituality... more
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"Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Published May 5, 2011
Two key predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity have been confirmed by NASA's Gravity Probe B mission, scientists announced this week.
"We've completed this landmark experiment testing Einstein's universe, and Einstein survives," principal investigator Francis Everitt, of Stanford University in California, said during a press briefing.
(Also see "Einstein's Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale.")
Launched in 2004, the Gravity Probe B mission used four ultraprecise gyroscopes—devices used to measure orientation—housed in a satellite to measure two aspects of Einstein's theory about gravity."
Full story and link to probe report:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/05/110505-einstein-theories-confirmed-gravity-probe-nasa-space-science/"Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Published May 5, 2011
Two key... more
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That's the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010.
link :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110420152059.htmThat's the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at... more
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Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes.Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the... more
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