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George Rebane

IntelligentDesignThe best brains in cosmology ranging from Stephen Hawking of Cambridge to Alan Guth of MIT have been trying to munge the equations and the data to come up with some/any kind of support for the proposition that the universe did not have a beginning.

NewScientist.com reports in ‘Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event’

YOU could call them the worst birthday presents ever. At the meeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday – loftily titled “State of the Universe” – two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.

One shows that a problematic object called a naked singularity is a lot more likely to exist than previously assumed (see “Naked black-hole hearts live in the fifth dimension”). The other suggests that the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. “A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God,” Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

After looking under every theoretical rock available today, and then some, the bottom line is that “all these theories still demand a beginning.”

As a proponent of Intelligent Design (not to be confused with Creationism), I continue to celebrate such corroborative reports as satisfying Occam’s razor to the max.

Posted in , ,

126 responses to “Science still says, ‘Creation occurred.’”

  1. Paul Emery Avatar

    I dunno Todd. Probably because they never grew a thumb. What’s your explanation?

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  2. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Todd might just as well ask, “How come we humans stick with a transportation system that kills 40,000 plus Americans every year when in fact we have the technology and capabilities to design and implement a much better system, systems which have been talked about for over 50 years?” What dinosaurs had, worked for them, but it wasn’t meteor-proof. Reminds me a lot of our economic supposed system.

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  3. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    BTW, no meteor, and we would not exist.

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  4. Gregory Avatar

    “no meteor, and we would not exist”
    Keach, you don’t have a clue.
    I had dinosaur ova for breakfast. Anyone else?
    Our ancestors hadn’t managed to develop opposeable thumbs when they were scampering about on all fours developing a taste for those dino eggs. Old habits die hard.

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  5. Ryan Mount Avatar

    Thumbs or not, let’s take a poll and decide who right here, OK? And then enter that as proof. We can do it on Facebook!…
    Perhaps we should commission a Gallop poll to ask the public about the nature of gravity? Then whatever the popular opinion is, along with some of the more fringe theories like Gravity is caused by influx of former Nazis into the hollow Earth or similar, we rewrite our textbooks and college lectures to include whatever new “facts” the discussion. Sound familiar?
    Look, Intelligent Design is a theological construct–ostensibly one without God, but with an equally Big Designer that looks enough like him/her/it to be his smarter brother/sister/whatever–and an attempt to pretty-up creationism in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets cannot be experimentally verified or, more important, falsified. The falsification bit is the key part of the scientific method since we started thinking about these kinds of things. The burden is on you (IDers) to come up with the rational proof, else all we have is good night time stories.
    But here’s the trick ID friends, something I think you missed in your post-modern Deconstruction studies. If you want to undermine/reform/ignore the Science paradigm because you believe it is corrupt, bought-off or just-plain-wrong, you’re gonna need to come up with an alternative. (That’s Thomas Kuhn’s main point in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Pick up a copy. You’ll like it.) If you believe that falsification is not a fundamental pursuit in science, then you need to come up with a new system. I would be anxious to see what you come up with. Because I, like I dunno billions of other people would love to see the God equation or whatever that might look like.

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  6. George Rebane Avatar

    RyanM 255pm – It sure looks like you are attacking what you think is a single, unified, and coherent notion of ID held by the commenters in this thread. Please consider my 439pm.

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  7. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    OK, so ID’ers are about as organized as the Republican Presidential candidates? Usually in science you have to agree on a few things, and not on the basis of faith. GG, take a good look at the Yucatan peninsula, and the iridium layer found around the planet, and tell me again how without that meteor we would have evolved into what we are? T Rex would still be ruling, most likely. His modern descendents are the interlocking directorships of the major corporations, and al the little birdie flying about the sky, as you so aptly pointed out, to what end, I am not sure.

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  8. George Rebane Avatar

    I believe it would be a mistake to take the various opinions of RR readers here as ‘ID science’. There are people, like Stephen Meyer author of Signature in the Cell, who claim to practice and act as apologists for what may be called ID science. However, ID is not so much a science, as a latent hypothesis that seems to explain some awkward facets of broadly accepted science. Therefore it remains viable in the pantheon of causes. ID satisfies Occam and falsifiability; the latter in that if it is proven that WHAT IS has always been and always will be (the Einstein condition), then ID will have taken a big hit. Until then it is a plausible hypothesis further strengthened by H.sapiens now starting to muse how it can create (virtual) universes that to their occupants will be as real as ours is to us.

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  9. Gregory Avatar

    Like I said, Keach, you don’t have a clue. Primates were around at the K-T extinction event, and mammals had been around for something like 190 million years before that.
    There is absolutely no reason to believe hominids would never have evolved without that meteor hitting. Or that we’d have turned out better or worse, in fewer or greater numbers, without that or any other event of the past 500 million years or so.
    Keach, you have a long history of making incredible leaps of illogic with little information and even less contemplation or investigation.

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  10. Gregory Avatar

    George, I suspect there’s a bit of circular logic in your claim of “intelligent design” satisfying Occam, not that Occam must be satisfied for any particular decision since it’s a tendency, not a requirement. I doubt you’d get any agnostic or atheist to think it’s less complex or costly to decide there’s enough of some other Reality somewhere to support some entity capable of designing the reality we see, and we’re back to the obvious conclusion that only folks who feel it in their bones that they have a Creator somewhere will believe in “ID” or one of the older creation myths.

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  11. George Rebane Avatar

    Gregory 446pm – Not sure of your argument. Is your “entity capable of designing the reality we see” an intelligent designer?

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  12. Gregory Avatar

    George, Intelligent Designer, Flying Spaghetti Monster, call it whatever you want. A name’s just a handle and not all that important.

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  13. Paul Emery Avatar

    This whole discussion is captured by faith in rational thought. Our perceptions are so limited we don’t even have the sense of smell of a dog. George explain to me in language I can understand why you feel we have he perceptions to meaningfully contemplate such a question as the design and creation of our existence. That’s why we use religions to inspire us because we are incapable of such scope.

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  14. George Rebane Avatar

    Gregory 600pm – actually a name in this case transcribes a useful and needed additional semantic. Was the universe purposely ‘designed’, and was the designer ‘intelligent’. Given that it was designed, the latter answer is definitely a ‘Yes’ since our universe is an ordered one which permits its systematic study according an expandable and reasonable set of intellectual disciplines. “Flying Spaghetti Monsters” don’t evoke such necessary attributes in most of us, Intelligent Designer does.
    PaulE 618pm – Very well stated – yes, this whole discussion and our science would be meaningless without “faith in rational thought.” Comparing the apples of olfactory sensitivity to the oranges of our thought process with a dog doesn’t help this discussion much.
    Paul, we may not “have the perceptions to meaningfully contemplate such a question as the design and creation of our existence.” But there is something in us that compels such contemplation, and we respond by charging forth and contemplating such questions and others. It is simply our nature. And we draw great strength and buttress our resolve to continue when we see that by simply thinking in an isolated room, and manipulating symbols with a pencil on blank paper we are able to reliably predict complex futures that come to pass in this universe.
    Science now acknowledges that there exist domains of knowledge about existence that its tools are not adequate to analyze. This realization is recent, and marks a significant intellectual departure from what was dogma coming out of the Enlightenment. John Wheeler’s ‘Why Existence?’ is an early harbinger into this new era of human understanding.

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  15. George Rebane Avatar

    Re Occam – I did want to add a little vignette in response to Gregory’s 446pm dismissive comment about Occam. As a leg of science, Occam is not optional. Given a theory that at a point in time explains away the body of all previous observations and makes successful predictions about the outcomes of new experiments, it is ALWAYS possible to posit additional theories of greater complexity that do equally as well. In fact, theoretically it is possible to develop a countably infinite number of such more complex theories.
    But the history of science and the advancement of human knowledge is void of any such more complex theory being embraced and applied to carry on the business of science when alternatives are presented. Occam’s dictum has always held and rules to this day – if a simpler explanation for all the observables is discovered, it is the theory of choice. One of the beauties of our ordered universe is the way it embraces Occam (as if by design).

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  16. Ryan Mount Avatar

    George-
    First off thank you for providing this site for me to show up and be a bad house guest. I realize, do to my upbringing, that I probably not being polite. So I beg your (and other’s) pardon.
    Regarding the ID crowd, I understand the temptation to reduce the argument down to the IDers are substituting a Designer (with a capital D) for a Christian God. I in no way want to single out anyone, nor any group in this melee. Although I undoubtedly have because most of the noise, as I stated earlier, is created by those who believe Jesus rode dinosaurs. And their objectives are anti-science, anti-progress, and frankly fundamentalist. So I take it as a personal duty to raise that red flag often…even if it’s in your figurative living room. Again, my apologies.
    I am perfectly willing (and ready) to accept a Grand Designer as soon as I see the evidence and the proof. Yeah, that’s what St. Thomas said, but I happen to wish that good old St. Thomas pressed Jesus further to be honest. But he was a trouble maker who asked uncomfortable questions, eh? So they sent his butt to India to deal with even less tolerant nasties such as the Brahmin. And they promptly shot him, as legend has it, with arrows to show their appreciation for opinions.
    I guess my point is, I celebrate the skepticism, but I’m skeptical of it, if that makes and sense. And what bothers me most is how these faux debates(it’s really not reasonable) make their way into public policy. Really? ID viable topic in High School Biology? There is not debate until the IDers show up in their big boy pants: show me the evidence.

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  17. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Change any major event and even many minor events in the past and we would not exist.
    All it takes is just one ancestor at any level not meeting another ancestor because it got eaten or distracted, and Gregory Goodknight never existed, likewise Douglas Keachie, under the same circumstances.
    Now, in the more general scheme of things, would have primates evolved further along the mammalian line to something resembling the humans of today, if there was no meteor strike? That is wildly possible, but keep in mind the lawyer in Jurassic Park. Mammals were doggie snacks to T-Rex and Company. It’s rather hard to start a civilization, with T-Rex’s running around and borrowing people all the time.

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  18. George Rebane Avatar

    RyanM 706pm – your comments and repartees are most welcome – thank you for championing your points.
    As a trained scientist, I also am a skeptic and a formal Bayesian (a major area of my research). Your concerns seem to revolve around that you don’t differentiate between Intelligent Design and Creationism (ID being a ‘code word’ for Creationism). If you can’t accept that serious scientists have put a Designer into the spectrum of plausible alternatives which explain observations (a la the cited MIT Technology Review piece), then you have definitely run into a blind canyon as far as this discussion thread is concerned.
    If ID were not a bona fide factor in the current scientific debate, then people like Stephen Hawking, Alan Guth, Roger Penrose, Frank Tipler, … wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn for these considerations.
    RyanM, I’m not sure what is your ideological persuasion, but there is a strong correlation that among progressives ID is a difficult subject to discuss, since out of hand they always dismiss the subject as a fundamentalist Christian ploy to bring creationism into the classroom. (BTW, you might be interested to know that I also am against that.)

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  19. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Just to catch up, as near as I’ve been able to gather, the ID movements stems at least in part from statistical analysis which concludes that spontaneous evolution of initial lifeforms, with DNA, is simply not possible.
    As for SAT scores and Charter Schools, they do like to game their numbers, by discouraging enrollment of those likely to bring them down (based on personal conversation with principal of Charter School I once worked for) and at a higher level, the Charter School Association tries to disband schools that don’t have high scorers in their populations. In this case, please read the Appeal Democrat article from this last December, concerning the Marysville School of the Arts, at this site
    http://www.appeal-democrat.com/articles/charter-112254-least-schools.html

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  20. George Rebane Avatar

    DougK 831pm – “… that spontaneous evolution of initial lifeforms, with DNA, is simply not possible.” The more correct version should read is ‘… simply not probable within the limited time available to access and implement the trans-astronomical combinatorics required.’ But even that argument only applies to the development of life on Earth in the span of about 3-4B years. The larger cosmological issues include the extremely low probability of the chance occurrence of this universe’s physical constants (which allow life forms which can contemplate the universe to develop), and, of course, that the Einstein condition is not being met with what we observe and what we theorize.

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  21. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    So far SETI has found nada, but the old Drake equation now must be updated as reports of new planet elsewhere are flooding in monthly, if not daily. I think I caught a hint that you consider ET to be likely, and that is based on one intelligent designer? Or many? Any reason it/them couldn’t be a team?

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  22. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Put SOPA on a rope and pull the noose tighter.

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  23. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Feeling like Popeye, I’ll have a can of Larry Krause, before persevering further in the ID chase.
    http://www.npr.org/2012/01/13/145175263/lawrence-krauss-on-a-universe-from-nothing

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  24. Ryan Mount Avatar

    Hi George,
    I understand the distinction you’re trying to draw between largely the Christian narrative Creationism and Intelligent Design. I’m not sure how much more we should belabor this point, especially so early in the morning, however I’m suspicious of any attempts to try and separate ID from its largely Fundamentalist Christian roots. One only has too look at the most famous of all examples in the discussion, a text book called Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins. This is kinda where people started taking sides on the issue, and where Creationists realized that using the word Creationism was falling out of favor with mainstream America.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People
    They cynically decided to sneak the message into schools by not calling it Creation, but rather calling it to the already established term Intelligent Design because it feels less proselytizing and certainly less Christian. They re-directed the conversation away from Creationism the way a smart parent steers a child away from the candy section in a grocery store.
    Intelligent Design, even removing its theistic underpinnings, has been repeatedly dismissed of the Scientific Community because it is a belief system, and not a testable even observable empirical discipline. And because of this, and this is the point of all this rambling, it has driven it proponents to accuse the Scientific community of liberal/Progressive bias, collusion with government and other conspiracy theory-like thinking. Ben Stein made a whole ridiculous movie about this.
    So you’re certainly smarter than your average bear [that’s actually an understatement…you’re a gift to this community] on this issue, and know enough to steer the conversation away from Creation “Science,” as you did in the original blog posting. And if I and scores of others am having trouble separating ID and Creationism, it is because of ID’s theistic and untestable underpinnings. I would submit that this is not my issue to solve, but yours and the rest of the ID community to remedy via empirical research. Big claims require big proof.

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  25. George Rebane Avatar

    DougK 1029pm – You are absolutely right, I believe there is literally no chance that we are alone in this universe.
    http://rebaneruminations.typepad.com/rebanes_ruminations/2011/04/singularity-signposts-running-out-of-processing-matterenergy.html
    In talking with the former head of SETI about eight years ago, I offered that ETI may already be among us, and, if so, we are using the wrong kind of observatories trying to detect them. I posited that ETI will declare themselves when they think we are ready, and launching a serious effort like that of Wheeler’s ‘Why Existence?’ and post-Singularity studies may be more rewarding for SETI.
    By my studies of astronomy, long ago I came to the conclusion that planets were the normal companions of main sequence stars. If so, then even SETI’s search in the EM spectrum was conducted erroneously. I showed him the results of my calcs as to where to point his antennas, and he was very intrigued. I think he went back to talk to his SETI colleagues.
    RyanM 624am – Yes, I agree that ID has an unfortunate link to creationism. If someone can introduce a new label – ID2? – to what we have been discussing here, it would be a boon. We could dispense with all the accusations of hidden Christian agendas and proceed to the level with which the topic is discussed in serious science. (Denying the latter, as referenced in my post, of course will end the discussion.)
    I have extensively discussed these and closely related topics in the ‘Singularity Signposts’ section of RR which is accessible in the right panel of this blog.

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  26. Gregory Avatar

    “I did want to add a little vignette in response to Gregory’s 446pm dismissive comment about Occam.”
    I’m sorry you misread that, George. There was nothing dismissive about Occam’s Razor written or implied, only your misapplication and misinterpretation. I’ve been mindful of it for at least four decades and it has been a reliable guide, always a useful metric. However, it has never been a test that must be passed. Wikipedia has a summary I agree with: “…is a principle that generally recommends that, from among competing hypotheses, selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions usually provides the correct one, and that the simplest explanation will be the most plausible until evidence is presented to prove it false.”
    The big problem I see with this when applied to ID is that it hides the enormous physical complexity implied when you choose to add the simple in concept ‘intelligent designer’ hidden somewhere behind the scenes apparently doing their best to not be seen.

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  27. George Rebane Avatar

    Gregory 913am – Thanks for the correction on Occam, I misunderstood your use of “tendency”. But my contending your “it has never been a test that must be passed.” will just waste our time; onward!
    Regarding your “big problem” with applying Occam to ID, it seems that such applications have always been the place-holder causal factors in leading edge science. Today another such place-holder is the multiverse hypothesis that satisfies the super symmetry condition in the development of string (brane) theory.
    No tests exist for detecting another universe, let alone a cosmos that contains an infinite number of universes. Yet multiverse, as does ID, successfully overcomes the dearth of ‘probabilistic resources’ as far as the balanced design of our universe is concerned. However, ID does go further and successfully addresses the probabilistic hurdles that had to be overcome in the course of life’s evolution on earth, and presumably other planets. And as already mentioned, 1) ID is something that H.sapiens is already contemplating for our future, and 2) ID is falsifiable, at a minimum by establishment of the Einstein condition.
    So according to my lights, ID stands in the anteroom of science along with some other pre-scientific proposals, quietly doing its job in supporting the fringe structure of human knowledge, and waiting to be expelled or be invited in. As to the relevance of the ID debate, I choose to stand with Hawking, Guth, Penrose,… . And in the notion that the universe, hence the cosmos, is ‘intelligent’, I sit at the knee of Frank Tipler et al.
    http://rebaneruminations.typepad.com/rebanes_ruminations/2009/06/cosmologos.html

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  28. Gregory Avatar

    “Was the universe purposely ‘designed’, and was the designer ‘intelligent’. Given that it was designed, the latter answer is definitely a ‘Yes’ since our universe is an ordered one which permits its systematic study according an expandable and reasonable set of intellectual disciplines. ” GR 06:44PM
    George… “Given that it was designed” us the crux of your circular argument.
    By the way, Creationists of all varieties should be overjoyed today… perhaps the most active of the groups defending modern, evolutionary biology has taken on a second scientific certitude to defend… anthropogenic global warming. In 2007, when, from my own reading of the literature in journals of physical science (as opposed to the house organs of AGW researchers) I realized AGW was a house of cards, the damage of science in general was one of my biggest fears when the cards fell.
    So, Rejoice! AGW will die a graceless death as a political force in the US in the next few years, and those pesky Darwinists will be taken down a notch.
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/19/comparing-climate-skepticism-to-creationism-in-the-classroom/

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  29. Paul Emery Avatar

    George
    My reference to us not having the sense of smell of a dog is relevant in that it shows the limitations our perception in certain areas when compared even to an animal. All knowledge comes first from observation and perception. Science is a faith based belief system based on a limited capacity to observe.

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  30. George Rebane Avatar

    Gregory 1017am – ‘Given that …’ is a legitimate statement of a limiting contingency in stating a proposition. There is nothing “circular” about its well-established use. We must have gone to different schools. And re AGW, I sincerely hope that you’re right in this age of dumbth – from your lips to God’s ear.
    PaulE 1034am – yes, different critters have sensors of varying sensitivity, and that is illuminating in the general sense. As the sages have told us over the centuries – we construct the universe within ourselves, we can do nothing else. I think my 644pm stands close enough to your beliefs about acquiring knowledge.

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  31. Gregory Avatar

    Paul Emery, I was just wondering about your frame of reference… What were the last few mathematics courses you took in your formal schooling?
    Richard Feynman once wrote “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts”, and along with being a very entertaining speaker he knew more than most about the nature of science. I think your claim would almost be true if you had written “Science is a lack-of-faith-based belief system based on a limited capacity to observe”.
    In other words, you got it almost completely backwards.

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  32. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Gregory fires off another Physics and Mathematics Uber Alles pitch, to a possibly hapless player who probably didn’t even know he was signed up to play Superiority against the Mighty Menzanians.

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  33. Gregory Avatar

    Thanks to Keachie for a former public schoolteacher’s version of reality and an automatic forfeit by Godwin’s Law.
    When discussing reality one should consider the views of those who have studied it.

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  34. Gregory Avatar

    George, I doubt many recognized your argument as merely being ‘if we stipulate Reality was designed, there must have been a designer’.
    There might have been; there’s even room in Quantum Mech for a God playing dice, or even be capable of shaving the corners of the dice He decides will be used. And there’s room for no God at all.
    I personally use Occam in the creation debate, you again err in characterizing my views: I think a science that does not require an invisible being in the Aether to fill in the gaps is much simpler and cuts to a antipatheist view of the world being more likely true.
    Don’t rejoice too much about modern biology being taken down a notch in schools by your foes diluting their message with a sure loser, because all of science and reason will be taken down with it.

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  35. Paul Emery Avatar

    Gregory
    Not much math. Lots of philosophy, literature ethics and religious studies.

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  36. Gregory Avatar

    Paul, it’s hard to grok much science without a firm foundation in mathematics.
    In my physics education, and my first wife’s math education, about a third of the courseload was lots of philosophy, literature, ethics, and if you wanted religion that could also be arranged. Not to mention lots of science and math outside your intended major. It’s a shame philosophy, literature, ethics and religion majors don’t get a third of their workload in science and mathematics.

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  37. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    And for strike three, Paul is OUT! Funny how some folks believe that what they learned in college defines the sum of their learning during their lifetime. If there were not other things that interest me more, I rather suspect that if I put my mind to it, I could learn calculus, and from there, who knows?

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  38. Gregory Avatar

    “I rather suspect that if I put my mind to it, I could learn calculus”
    I rather suspect that is not the case but I’m sure it makes your lack of knowledge easier to bear. Folks tend to be interested more in the things they can reach.
    It isn’t the sum total Keach, just a foundation, and your words are just sour grapes.

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  39. Paul Emery Avatar

    Are you saying that only Science and math majors can contemplate these questions?
    That sure eliminates most preachers who speak with authority about the Guy in the Sky, heaven and hell and Christian Soldiers.
    I don’t think Bill Graham has studied advance math for example.

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  40. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Remember Paul, Greg is Dr. Science in this area, and the only intuition he believes in is his knowledge of when there will, and will not be, sun spots. Trends, without strong quantifiable scientific understanding of the exact processes involved, is mere faith, but he doesn’t see himself engaged in such activity, and he has less understanding of what’s really going on inside the sun than a freshman stock broker has of the markets. A trend is just recent history, and not a precise forecast of the future that can be relied upon with any certainty. Much like Billy Graham, actually…or in the case of Greg’s apparent choice of religious trending, the Pope.

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  41. Gregory Avatar

    No Paul, it doesn’t take a math or science concentration to ask, but if you’re going to ponder the questions it’s appropriate not to do it from a position of virtual ignorance.
    Bill Graham as far as I know ever made blanket statements about the nature of science; that was you.
    “Science is a faith based belief system based on a limited capacity to observe.” is what you wrote, but if you think about it, changing one word, it becomes arguably true: “Religion is a faith based belief system based on a limited capacity to observe”. Do you really just see science as just another religion?

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  42. Gregory Avatar

    It looks like the Keachie random thought generator is again stuck in a defamatory loop.

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  43. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Look George, d’Flame, d’Flame! Dear Greg, please tell us now, how many days of quiet sun we have ahead of us, and the date of the next major solar activity. Thank-you in advance, I know you mathematically super charged physics-oriented brain can do the calc in a jiffy, and all the world is waiting to hear the answers, Keach.

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  44. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Remember Greg, we all have faith in you. and yes, that should have been “your” not “you” in the last post. I am quite dependent on red underline squiggles to keep my typing error free, failing eyes. Actually the left eye can only take in 12 characters at a time.

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  45. billy T Avatar

    While sitting in a waiting room this morning, I read an interesting article in Time Magazine along all the same topics mentioned by posters here. New super particle may produce matter that only physicists can explain the implications and only mathematicians can explain the importance. Can’t be tested yet. Yes, it brought up theology and even the created pondering the creator. Felt like I was right at home on my computer while in the waiting room. One thing that caught my eye was a sentence that said our Sun only has about 6 billion more years of life. I guess that means in 6 billion years nobody will be complaining about Global Warming, man made or not.

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  46. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    I wil make a prediction of my own, based on past trendings. Greg will go silent for at least a couple of days, until he feels that no one will remember the pointed questions Keachie ask about his faith in “Quiet Sun.” Let’s add one more to the list. Other than past trends, what, if anything, do you base your predictions on? Please list your understanding of the the internal chemical and physical states of the sun, that cause you to make your quantifiable future prediction of a “Quiet Sun” for sometime to come.
    If you can’t do it, get of your high knightly horse, and come down to earth, and admit that you can’t even prove that you are smarter than everybody else here. Heck, you can’t even prove you are smarter than me!

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  47. Gregory Avatar

    Keach, you need to first adjust your meds and then try to describe what you think my “faith in “Quiet Sun”” is and a citation to back that up.
    We’re in the middle of a weak solar cycle 24 approaching its local maximum, and there are multiple teams of solar physicists who are expecting cycle 25 to be even weaker. Dalton is mentioned openly and Maunder is being wondered about. This is not controversial.
    Now, you seem to glom onto CO2 or ‘sunspots’ for your clueless hysterical dialectics, the choice being what you think you can best make a personal attack out of without any apparent understanding of what it all means.
    Keach, I don’t feel a need to prove I’m smarter than you, I think you’ve handled that quite well all by your lonesome.

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  48. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Greg, all you have mentioned are more trenders. Not a one of you can do anything more than project graphs of numbers forwards, with no real understanding of the mechanisms and quantities above, on, and below the surface of the sun. You don’t have enough information yet, give it a couple of years. And btw, your odds of hitting are not too bad. “Other historical sunspot minima have been detected either directly or by the analysis of carbon-14 in tree rings; these include the Spörer Minimum (1450–1540), and less markedly the Dalton Minimum (1790–1820). In total there seem to have been 18 periods of sunspot minima in the last 8,000 years, and studies indicate that the sun currently spends up to a quarter of its time in these minima.” 25% OF THE TIME YOU MAY BE RIGHT.

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  49. Douglas Keachie Avatar

    Please cite the last time I brought up CO2.

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