Origins and Dark Energy/Matter

[mindlight]

How much of the car can you see?

Even if I cannot see all of the car all of the time I have sense memories of my experience of it.

If I forget what it looks like I can check. Its like the old analogy of does Australia exist.
Shernen would say yes. I tend to believe him because the cumulative evidence for that is overwhelming.
I could check this one out but do not need to. When talking about dark matter/ energy nobody has experience of what is out there and noone can check.

So we know next to nothing about the universe, base our scientific theories on a fraction of the evidence and maybe not even the most significant evidence realting to the question of our origins.

The theories may have mathematical integrity much as Terrals dispensationalism is a coherent view with a strong scriptural reinforcement.
But are they true - right now I do not think thatwe can know unless we claim the special divine insight that Terral does.

Is that insight legitimate or not. I need to test that further.

 

[Assyrian]

You only see light bouncing off the outer layer of electrons in the outer layer of molecules of the paintwork. Even if you saw the outer layer of metal and deduced that the metal was the same all the way through, you still only see light bouncing off the outer layer of iron's electrons, 0.01% of the mass of the iron atom. Almost all the mass is in the nucleus of the iron atom which you have never seen and which is basically inferred by studying the properties of the atom.

How much of Australia had they seen when it was first discovered? IIRC the earliest maps just show a section of coast. When can we say they knew Australia, or New Holland as it was called them, existed?

 

[gluadys]

CS Lewis spoke to a different generation as did Tolkein. A generation where the scientific materialism of communism and Nazi eugenics had reduced mankind to something less than human. They recovered a sense of our dignity in the world of art and imagination allowing the human spirit to soar again beyond the planned state and collective. People are not trusting of scientists and their motives today and amongst the new generation there has been an explosion of interest in the occult and the spiritualities of different religions. In this era it is less clear that science is the panacea of all goods and people have become superstitious and will believe any old yarn so long as its a good story. In this context a more rigourous, authentic and historical approach to Christianity becomes more of a witness than previously. We do not tell stories of monkey gods and multi headed hydras - we speak of things that actually happened.

I don't see the relevance of this. C.S. Lewis was quite firm that Jesus actually happened. That he was the historicization of the anticipations of ancient mythology.

Furthermore, speaking of the historical truth of the bible is far removed from finding modern science--like dark matter--in scripture. So this seems to be shifting away from the topic under discussion.

What I do not agree with is saying that it cannot be regarded as historical.

What we need to remember is that ancient peoples did not speak of history as we do. This doesn't mean they didn't speak of history, but that they spoke of history in a story-telling way that incorporated non-historical narrative elements. So we need to be careful not to latch on to every detail as if it must be history.

A good many people who basically agree with a literary approach to scripture do see Adam and Eve, or Noah, as actual individuals in history. That doesn't mean that chapters 2-3 of Genesis with its magic trees and talking snake is history--though it refers to a historical fact: the fall of humanity into disobedience and sin. What we see in places like this is history being wrapped up in a story-telling technique that is not basically historical.

And again, this is far removed from finding modern science in scripture.

Some of that sounds like relativism.

Sometimes it is, but that is not what I am advocating. However, we see this kind of relativism (making scripture mean what you want it to mean) in many guises. I would point to Terral's posts as a good example of such relativism.

Nevertheless, I would say that a preacher has a responsibility to make scripture relevant to his flock. And that often means digging under the surface of the text---which is no longer relevant in a modern context---to find the spiritual truth which can still be meaningful.

So, I guess we come back to my original question. Why do you think it necessary to find modern science in ancient scripture? Is this necessary, in your view, to make it relevant to a modern American congregation?

Each text has a meaning which we need to interpret in the original context but that does not preclude later meanings also.

It precludes later meanings being a literal meaning of the original text. Later meanings are attributed to the early text through allegory and symbolism. (And if the original text was symbolic in the first place, this means layering the symbolism.)

God is transcendent and inspired the text. That he did it through primatives living in tents will make no difference while reading them on a deck chair on the moon or mars.

But if the people reading them on the moon or mars don't take time to understand what the primitives intended to say, they will attribute their own meaning to the text and that meaning may be something quite different from the inspired message.

We have discussed this in other threads. The church quite simply misinterpreted these verses

So we say, but we say that from the lofty perch of hindsight. Not very convincing.

Hebrews 11 v 3 was probably intended to refer to the primacy of the unseen and spiritual universe.

Exactly.

But now that we think we know more about dark matter and energy new possibilities arise to complement that understanding.

I don't think this leads to a new understanding of the text. At most it provides a new analogy. What I would be concerned about is letting this analogy overwhelm the original intended meaning. It is still the case that Hebrews 11:3 speaks of the primacy of the unseen and spiritual universe. Turning it into a reference to dark matter leads toward the unbiblical perception that matter is eternal and uncreated--that creation is nothing more than the shaping of uncreated matter into its current form. That is paganism.

Who was this talking about to the original audience?

Isaiah 52-53

The nation of Israel in exile in Babylon. It was not originally a Messianic text. There are a good many texts in the OT that were not originally Messianic but were turned into such by the NT apostles and evangelists e.g Hosea's reference to the Exodus ("Out of Egypt I have called my son") and Jeremiah's reference to the fall of Jersualem (Rachel weeping for her children).


All of these, btw, follow the procedure I mentioned above of applying these texts to Jesus as Messiah via symbolism and allegory, often imprinting a new layer of symbolism on top of an earlier one.

 

[mindlight]

I am way behind in answering posts - apologies terral, Assyrian, glaudys,mallon etc.

But just to show that scientists are all workign hard to answer my questions ;-) CERN goes live today with its spanking new Collider , although of course the leftist BBC have misnamed it the Big Bang experiment:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7604293.stm

 

[shernren]

evidence[/B] for that is overwhelming.
I could check this one out but do not need to. When talking about dark matter / energy nobody has experience of what is out there and noone can check.

So we know next to nothing about the universe, base our scientific theories on a fraction of the evidence and maybe not even the most significant evidence realting to the question of our origins.

(emphases added)

I can't read too much into the choices of individual words, but it does seem like you are taking up double standards for scientific evidence: one bar for whatever you like, and another for what you don't like.

Do you have evidence that Australia exists? Sure you do. You've seen photos of kangaroos, Ayers' Rock; you could look up the great journies of Captain Cook and the others in the library; you know Australians.

Do you have an experience of Australia's existence? Perhaps not - not unless you've actually set foot on Australian soil before.

So it is well possible to have irrefutable evidence of Australia's existence without ever having experienced it. I know for sure that Africa exists but I've never set foot there.

To take a more scientific example, think about atoms. Have you ever seen an atom before? No. Neither have I. You have no experience of atoms, and quite frankly you wouldn't know how to check that all matter is made of atoms if I asked you to. There are some pretty STM (scanning tunneling microscopes) "pictures" of "atoms" - but those are just visualizations produced by a computer crunching a few billion numbers, not anything anyone has ever seen.

So why should you believe that atoms exist? Or nuclei, or electrons, or elementary forces? Think about it. Suppose you stubbed your toe on your bedpost in the dark. I show up and tell you that what really happened is that even though your toe is 99% empty space, and your bedpost is 99% empty space, your toe refused to pass through your bedpost because billions of electrons in each bunch of matter just won't pass through each other. Why should you believe me?

And yet non-believers in atomism aren't even stupid. They are just non-existent.

The reason everyone believes in atoms, although nobody has seen them, is that they are simply the best explanation of all available evidence at hand.

In the same way, the reason most cosmologists accept dark matter and dark energy, although most don't yet have a cogent explanation for them, is that they are simply the best explanation of all available evidence at hand. A universe modeled with ~75% dark energy, ~21% dark matter, and ~4% baryonic matter (IIRC) looks a whole lot more like our actual universe than, say, a universe filled with pink teddies interspersed with ping pong balls.

I mean ... what do you want to know about dark matter and dark energy? Ask away. You might be surprised at what we know.

 

[busterdog]

But just to show that scientists are all workign hard to answer my questions ;-) CERN goes live today with its spanking new Collider , although of course the leftist BBC have misnamed it the Big Bang experiment:

Dont take this too seriously. I had a twinge of rising malice, but I am mostly in it for the laughs at the minute. Some of you may need to reach for your blood pressure pills now.

The "God Particle" or Higgs boson was invented by Peter Higgs to explain why other particles exhibit mass. He starts with assuming the existence of a particle that has only mass and no other characteristics, such as charge. So the Higgs particle is like no other in our experience, since all normal matter is composed of electric charges that respond to electromagnetic influences. (Dark matter falls into the same category.) However, we observe that the mass of a charged subatomic particle is altered by the application of electromagnetic forces. At its simplest (and Nature is economical in our experience) it indicates that mass is related to the storage of energy within a system of electric charges inside the particle. That’s what E = mc2 is telling us. So how can a massive particle be constructed without electric charge? It shows the problem inherent in leaving physics to mathematicians — there is a disconnect between mathematical concepts and reality.

The notion that subatomic particles exhibit mass as a result of their interaction with imaginary Higgs particles occupying all of empty space like some form of treacle should have caused a sceptical uproar, if it weren’t for the appalling apathy of the public toward such nonsense. The ‘annihilation’ and ‘creation’ of matter is invoked when particles at particular points arise from ‘fields’ spread over space and time. Higgs found that parameters in the equations for the field associated with his hypothetical particle can be chosen in such a way that the lowest energy state of that field (empty space) is not zero. With the field energy non-zero in empty space, all particles that can interact with the Higgs particle gain mass from the interaction.

This explanation for the phenomenon of mass should have been stillborn if common sense was used. To begin, the annihilation and creation of matter is forbidden by a principle of physics. It is tantamount to magic. Second, field theory is a purely imaginary construct, which may or may not have physical significance. And third, it is not explained how the Higgs particle can have intrinsic mass but no charge and yet interact with normal matter, which has charge but is said to have no intrinsic mass. Rather than explain the phenomenon of mass, the theory serves to complicate and confuse the issue. The most amazing feature of this $6 billion experiment is the confused and illogical thinking behind it.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/thornhill.htm

I think the nature of dissent is always interesting. The news on the LHC says really nothing at all. So, I appreciate another angle on the whole thing.

 

[Tinker Grey]

Dont take this too seriously. I had a twinge of rising malice, but I am mostly in it for the laughs at the minute. Some of you may need to reach for your blood pressure pills now.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/thornhill.htm

I think the nature of dissent is always interesting. The news on the LHC says really nothing at all. So, I appreciate another angle on the whole thing.

I'm not sure I follow the guy's argument, but it sure seems like he's wrong on the whole creation and destruction of mass. Every time you burn a log in the fire place you convert mass to energy. You've destroyed mass (some of it -- minus the ashes) and replaced it with heat. The relationship between the two is expressed by E=mc[sup]2[/sup] as expressed in the article.

From the burning log experiment, it's kind of clear that going one way in the relationship is easy. We do it all the time. What we don't do--ever, that I'm aware of--is go from energy to mass. If we assume that the proto-particle of the universe is most simply expressed as (and best expressed as?) energy, then where did mass come from?

As I understand it, Higgs posited an answer that at least mathematically works. Based on the math, the Higgs-boson is just inside the ability of the LHC experiments to detect. If the particle is found (and how we would know that is beyond me), then the math was right. Since the particle is on the threshold for LHC experiments, then not detecting it wouldn't necessarily prove it was wrong. OTOH, if we ever build a collider that is, say, an order of magnitude more powerful and still didn't detect it, I assume that physicists would head back to the drawing board.

The article writer's premise seems to be "if I can't understand it, it must be wrong." Just because we use constructs to visualize science doesn't mean the science itself is merely a construct.

 

[Jim Larmore]

I'm not a physcists or cosmologist , only an engineer who has taken quite a few physics courses. So my question is this. BTW, forgive me if this has already been adressed here in this thread.

Question:
1. How can dark matter have mass without having atoms?

2. How can dark energy effect the cosmological constant if it has no "quanta" or "photons" measurable ?

God bless
Jim Larmore

 

[shernren]

I think the nature of dissent is always interesting. The news on the LHC says really nothing at all. So, I appreciate another angle on the whole thing.

Yes indeed, I always find it interesting when people who know next to nothing about science take it upon themselves to correct the academy which has had centuries of experience.

Don't take this too seriously either, busterdog. I'm just pushing your buttons the way you love to push ours.

I'm not sure I follow the guy's argument, but it sure seems like he's wrong on the whole creation and destruction of mass. Every time you burn a log in the fire place you convert mass to energy. You've destroyed mass (some of it -- minus the ashes) and replaced it with heat. The relationship between the two is expressed by E=mc[sup]2[/sup] as expressed in the article.

From the burning log experiment, it's kind of clear that going one way in the relationship is easy. We do it all the time. What we don't do--ever, that I'm aware of--is go from energy to mass. If we assume that the proto-particle of the universe is most simply expressed as (and best expressed as?) energy, then where did mass come from?

Well anything that absorbs energy gains mass - sunbathers put on weight because their bodies are warmer than when they started. But in terms of elementary particles:

Energy doesn't spontaneously convert to mass on the scale that we're familiar with simply because most photons have pretty low energy. There is a process called "pair production" that is pretty important in nuclear physics (in fact, it's at the heart of what I'm doing now in my research project - we're measuring the rate of this process in the decay of an excited nuclear state), in which photons annihilate each other to produce a particle-antiparticle pair.

However, photons need to have a minimum energy to actually produce this pair. Firstly they need to have enough energy to convert simultaneously to both particles in the pair. Secondly, there needs to be enough leftover kinetic energy for both particles to be ejected at a large enough speed away from each other so that they don't just kill each other a few nanoseconds later.

How much energy is this? Well pair-production most often happens with gamma photons producing electron-positron pairs - and the mass of an electron, in energy units, is 511KeVs or thousand electron-volts. So for a single photon to generate an electron-positron pair, it must have about 1MeV. By comparison the strongest X-rays have about 120keV per photon, a tenth of what's needed. Remember we're talking about the radiation that, in the doc's office, slices through your soft tissues without breaking a sweat, unlike infrared or even ultraviolet radiation that dumps all its energy in your skin making you feel all warm. The reason we aren't familiar with energy to mass conversion is simply because it isn't apparent in everyday life.

As I understand it, Higgs posited an answer that at least mathematically works. Based on the math, the Higgs-boson is just inside the ability of the LHC experiments to detect. If the particle is found (and how we would know that is beyond me), then the math was right. Since the particle is on the threshold for LHC experiments, then not detecting it wouldn't necessarily prove it was wrong. OTOH, if we ever build a collider that is, say, an order of magnitude more powerful and still didn't detect it, I assume that physicists would head back to the drawing board.

The article writer's premise seems to be "if I can't understand it, it must be wrong." Just because we use constructs to visualize science doesn't mean the science itself is merely a construct.

I was looking up the actual science and it turns out that "why particles have mass" is a hideous, hideous misunderstanding of what the Higgs boson is supposed to do. Rather, the boson explains why W and Z bosons have mass, not just electrons and protons and all those.

And right now I'm too lazy to explain further.

 

[shernren]

I'm not a physcists or cosmologist , only an engineer who has taken quite a few physics courses. So my question is this. BTW, forgive me if this has already been adressed here in this thread.

Question:
1. How can dark matter have mass without having atoms?

2. How can dark energy effect the cosmological constant if it has no "quanta" or "photons" measurable ?

God bless
Jim Larmore

1. We don't know. ^^

Do keep in mind that we already know of one elementary particle that does the job (in part), namely the neutrino. The neutrino does not interact with the electromagnetic force, and thus never generates electromagnetic radiation which we can see, but it does have mass as well as the propensity to interact with the weak nuclear force (thus it is emitted in beta decays).

2. I'm too lazy to come up with a simple explanation.

 

[Jim Larmore]

1. We don't know. ^^

Fair enough, thanks.

Do keep in mind that we already know of one elementary particle that does the job (in part), namely the neutrino. The neutrino does not interact with the electromagnetic force, and thus never generates electromagnetic radiation which we can see, but it does have mass as well as the propensity to interact with the weak nuclear force (thus it is emitted in beta decays).

I'd say based on what I have read about neutrinos and what we really know about them we may not know too much for quite some time if they are actually related to dark energy.

2. I'm too lazy to come up with a simple explanation.

Sometimes there really isn't a simple explanation. However, if our old friend Albert Einstein was correct there should be a fairly simple explanation to the relationship between the expansion of the universe and this so called dark energy if they are indeed related.

God Bless
Jim Larmore

 

[Tinker Grey]

shernren,

Thanks for the added info.

 

[mindlight]

(emphases added)

I can't read too much into the choices of individual words, but it does seem like you are taking up double standards for scientific evidence: one bar for whatever you like, and another for what you don't like.

Do you have evidence that Australia exists? Sure you do. You've seen photos of kangaroos, Ayers' Rock; you could look up the great journies of Captain Cook and the others in the library; you know Australians.

Do you have an experience of Australia's existence? Perhaps not - not unless you've actually set foot on Australian soil before.

So it is well possible to have irrefutable evidence of Australia's existence without ever having experienced it. I know for sure that Africa exists but I've never set foot there.

To take a more scientific example, think about atoms. Have you ever seen an atom before? No. Neither have I. You have no experience of atoms, and quite frankly you wouldn't know how to check that all matter is made of atoms if I asked you to. There are some pretty STM (scanning tunneling microscopes) "pictures" of "atoms" - but those are just visualizations produced by a computer crunching a few billion numbers, not anything anyone has ever seen.

So why should you believe that atoms exist? Or nuclei, or electrons, or elementary forces? Think about it. Suppose you stubbed your toe on your bedpost in the dark. I show up and tell you that what really happened is that even though your toe is 99% empty space, and your bedpost is 99% empty space, your toe refused to pass through your bedpost because billions of electrons in each bunch of matter just won't pass through each other. Why should you believe me?

And yet non-believers in atomism aren't even stupid. They are just non-existent.

The reason everyone believes in atoms, although nobody has seen them, is that they are simply the best explanation of all available evidence at hand.

In the same way, the reason most cosmologists accept dark matter and dark energy, although most don't yet have a cogent explanation for them, is that they are simply the best explanation of all available evidence at hand. A universe modeled with ~75% dark energy, ~21% dark matter, and ~4% baryonic matter (IIRC) looks a whole lot more like our actual universe than, say, a universe filled with pink teddies interspersed with ping pong balls.

I mean ... what do you want to know about dark matter and dark energy? Ask away. You might be surprised at what we know.

I think the main point about method is the level of verification that can be brought to any question. I do not doubt the existence of Australia because I could potentially employ all 5 senses to check that out, know many Australians who have already done this and saw too many episodes of neighbours as a student or songs by Kylie Minogue to doubt the existence of the place. Not to mention Rolf Harris.

Dark matter is not as heavily represented by the senses and appears to be observed by its remotely observed effects. I may not doubt the existence of atoms but how do I know that dark matter even has atoms or is even configured in a similar way to the matter we see, touch, taste, smell and hear. Who has actually observed dark matter and what did they find? How far were they from what they observed and how many variables must I accept as remaining constant between the observor and what was seen?

People have to explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Other forces are required and all the old calculations are overthrown.

These experiments at CERN are also about exploring the nature of dark matter if that is to be generated or observed by smashing light beams into each other and examining the sub atomic debris. Or is the weight of one particle or another to be explained in terms of simple matter wading through God particle fields (Higgs Bosen). I am genuinely interested in what they find. Of course its possible they will find nothing to explain the apparent extra mass of the universe , the acceleration of its rate of expansion or the behaviour of light in the vicinity of perceived pockets of dark matter.

I am not sure it matters if my toe is perceived as being 99% empty space or awash with unmeasured overlapping forces and particles. I feel the pain and know that the bed post is there. I have yet to trip on dark matter in the darkest of nights and only have the guesses of scientists to tell me that they are not sleep walkers through the universe dreaming up the stuff they find as they stumble along in the dark. Maybe the Hadron Collider will change that or maybe not.

 

[mindlight]

Dont take this too seriously. I had a twinge of rising malice, but I am mostly in it for the laughs at the minute. Some of you may need to reach for your blood pressure pills now.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/thornhill.htm

I think the nature of dissent is always interesting. The news on the LHC says really nothing at all. So, I appreciate another angle on the whole thing.

They have some pretty cool equipment and the basic idea of smashing light beams and observing effects is an interesting one.

I am not sure I care if they sold it to the politicians on the basis of stuff that may appear ludicrous in a few years time. Science is science and this experiment should yield new insights into the nature of Gods creation. I am getting pretty used to hearing the party line from the media and screening out the rubbish but there may well be diamonds in the dirt.

We will see!

 

[mindlight]

Yes indeed, I always find it interesting when people who know next to nothing about science take it upon themselves to correct the academy which has had centuries of experience.

Don't take this too seriously either, busterdog. I'm just pushing your buttons the way you love to push ours.

Well anything that absorbs energy gains mass - sunbathers put on weight because their bodies are warmer than when they started. But in terms of elementary particles:

Energy doesn't spontaneously convert to mass on the scale that we're familiar with simply because most photons have pretty low energy. There is a process called "pair production" that is pretty important in nuclear physics (in fact, it's at the heart of what I'm doing now in my research project - we're measuring the rate of this process in the decay of an excited nuclear state), in which photons annihilate each other to produce a particle-antiparticle pair.

However, photons need to have a minimum energy to actually produce this pair. Firstly they need to have enough energy to convert simultaneously to both particles in the pair. Secondly, there needs to be enough leftover kinetic energy for both particles to be ejected at a large enough speed away from each other so that they don't just kill each other a few nanoseconds later.

How much energy is this? Well pair-production most often happens with gamma photons producing electron-positron pairs - and the mass of an electron, in energy units, is 511KeVs or thousand electron-volts. So for a single photon to generate an electron-positron pair, it must have about 1MeV. By comparison the strongest X-rays have about 120keV per photon, a tenth of what's needed. Remember we're talking about the radiation that, in the doc's office, slices through your soft tissues without breaking a sweat, unlike infrared or even ultraviolet radiation that dumps all its energy in your skin making you feel all warm. The reason we aren't familiar with energy to mass conversion is simply because it isn't apparent in everyday life.

I was looking up the actual science and it turns out that "why particles have mass" is a hideous, hideous misunderstanding of what the Higgs boson is supposed to do. Rather, the boson explains why W and Z bosons have mass, not just electrons and protons and all those.

And right now I'm too lazy to explain further.

You are of course right I for one know so little about science. What you do is of course beyond the expertise of most scientists located in other specialities also.

But it seems to me that you must be interested in the results of the Hadron Collider experiments as they will combine lots of photons banging into each other with more than enough energy to produce some very interesting results. Also some pretty good observational equipment with fancy computer programmes also.

This is an opportunity to prove or disprove theories or at least gain a deeper insight into the nature of the problem.

 

[shernren]

But it seems to me that you must be interested in the results of the Hadron Collider experiments as they will combine lots of photons banging into each other with more than enough energy to produce some very interesting results. Also some pretty good observational equipment with fancy computer programmes also.

This is an opportunity to prove or disprove theories or at least gain a deeper insight into the nature of the problem.

Oh I am certainly very excited. (They are smashing protons together, btw, not photons.) I was talking to my dad the other day, though, and he was mentioning the LHC after I told him about my own protons project. He essentially said "Those people ... it's just man trying to outsmart God again."

-awkward silence-

Dad: "No?"



I don't begrudge him that feeling, really. For example if my Christian economist friends tried to explain to me how capitalism isn't one giant expression of human hubris, pride and greed, ... I don't know. To each his own.

Dark matter is not as heavily represented by the senses and appears to be observed by its remotely observed effects. I may not doubt the existence of atoms but how do I know that dark matter even has atoms or is even configured in a similar way to the matter we see, touch, taste, smell and hear. Who has actually observed dark matter and what did they find? How far were they from what they observed and how many variables must I accept as remaining constant between the observor and what was seen?

People have to explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Other forces are required and all the old calculations are overthrown.

These experiments at CERN are also about exploring the nature of dark matter if that is to be generated or observed by smashing light beams into each other and examining the sub atomic debris. Or is the weight of one particle or another to be explained in terms of simple matter wading through God particle fields (Higgs Bosen). I am genuinely interested in what they find. Of course its possible they will find nothing to explain the apparent extra mass of the universe , the acceleration of its rate of expansion or the behaviour of light in the vicinity of perceived pockets of dark matter.

I am not sure it matters if my toe is perceived as being 99% empty space or awash with unmeasured overlapping forces and particles. I feel the pain and know that the bed post is there. I have yet to trip on dark matter in the darkest of nights and only have the guesses of scientists to tell me that they are not sleep walkers through the universe dreaming up the stuff they find as they stumble along in the dark. Maybe the Hadron Collider will change that or maybe not.

You know that your bed post is there and your toe is there. But do you know they are made out of atoms?

Actually, here's a good exercise, and I'm curious to see how it would turn out too. Forget everything you've ever seen in your science textbooks. (Considering most textbooks are pretty bad, that shouldn't be too hard to do. ) Now restrict yourself to every conversation you ever understood, and every sensory experience you can ever remember. Would you be able to convince yourself from those that:

- it's the Earth which goes around the Sun, and the Sun that stays fixed relative to the distant stars, rather than the Earth staying fixed relative to the distant stars and the Sun going around it?

- everything is made out of atoms?

Would you know how to find out if those things were true?

Because I think the process of challenging cherished beliefs sheds a lot of light on what science really does. And I believe that, quite frankly, everybody alive today who has undergone science education (myself included) at some level believes that atoms exist, without knowing how they would be justified. But as recently as one and a half centuries ago their very existence was debated, and they were considered at best a helpful hypothetical device that helped in chemical calculations!

 

[MoNiCa4316]

If dark matter exists, then it was created by God along with everything else..

I don't think that the idea of dark matter/dark energy goes against anything in the Bible.

 

[juvenissun]

If dark matter exists, then it was created by God along with everything else..

I don't think that the idea of dark matter/dark energy goes against anything in the Bible.

It just hit me the other day when Assyrian quote a verse from Psalm which says that God creates light, and also "creates dark". Scientifically, it makes no sense because you only need to create light, then you would automatically get the dark wherever the light is not there. I think no matter how ancient were people (cave man?), they should understand this feature by simple experience.

What kind of "dark" is created by God? Extremely interesting.

 

[Assyrian]

 

[Chesterton]

Agreed, Assyrian!