yeah...GN is a BFI is more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Here's our
beloved Paul Davis comparing the odds of societal collapse to that of
the simultaneous collapse of every proton in the universe:
"It is simply impossible to 'prove' anything to the absolute level
the D&G crowd demand. Can you
'prove' you will be alive tomorrow? I can't even 'prove' the universe
will be here in an hour -
the vacuum energy level might decide to drop another quantum and we
would have another 'big
bang'. Guess where that would leave us! Or, since protons now seem to
have a 'half life' of about
30 billion years, it is mathmetically possible for all of them to
decay at once, leaving a
universe without solid matter. The odds against this happening are
tremendous - but not zero. So
how can I 'prove' anything to someone who demands absolute proof?
This world just does not seem
to be built along the lines of providing absolute proof.
BUT, might I point out that ALL the really bad Y2K scenarios have one
thing in common? Every one
of them assumes the people who designed the systems under discussion
are all short sighted fools
and idiots. They are not. And that is a fact."
LOL
Paul, you're a trip...
-- a (a@a.a), January 27, 1999.
Somebody out there should start a PD is a BFI page. Re-read his last
couple of sentences. What a twerp.
On to the "Big Bang" - which always struck me as a pretty stupid
theory...
The history of time is no longer brief. The universe never actually
began: it bubbled off some other, pre-existing universe. And it will
not come to an end: other parts of the universe are being created
now.
"If life in our part of the universe were to disappear, it will
appear again someplace else," the cosmological theorist Andrei Linde
told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting
in Anaheim, California. "So the universe as a whole becomes
immortal."
Professor Linde, the Russian physicist based at Stanford University,
is one of the architects of the new universe theories. He has
discarded the Big Bang version made famous (and understandable) by
the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking.
Linde does not believe that everything began 15 billion years ago but
sees the universe in which human life developed as just one of many
inflating balls of space time that in turn produce new balls, and so
on for ever.
"The original idea was that all the universe appeared as an explosion
of very hot matter, a huge ball of fire. Then we understood that this
was not big enough, not fast enough, not explosive enough," he said.
The original hypothesis did not explain why the universe looked much
the same in all directions, or why there were so many things in it.
In the inflation scenario, an extremely small fragment of space
expanded to an area far, far larger than the visible universe in an
unimaginable fraction of a second, and everything in that space -
atoms, stars and light - condensed out of the colossal energy
released by the inflation.
"Right now there are some other parts of the universe where newer and
newer parts are being produced: they are inflating and expanding
exponentially and then they come to a stage similar, or maybe
dissimilar, to ours," he said.
The universe contained 100 billion galaxies each with 100 billion
stars. "If you start with a typical Big Bang universe with a typical
size with a typical density initially and then you count how many
particles the universe would contain, the answer would be one
particle, or maybe 10 particles, but not the amount of particles
necessary to make one journalist," he said. "So the fact that you are
here is proof something was wrong with the Big Bang theory."
Andy
Two digits. One mechanism. The smallest mistake.
"The conveniences and comforts of humanity in general will be linked
up by one mechanism, which will produce comforts and conveniences
beyond human imagination. But the smallest mistake will bring the
whole mechanism to a certain collapse. In this way the end of the
world will be brought about."
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, 1922 (Sufi Prophet)
-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), January 27, 1999.