[OleBerg]

luke warm, on Aug 29 2010, 03:21 PM, said:

okay, so winston's hand-of-God (an invisible entity) thrust holds at least a little water

As much as this reasoning:

"Some men have beards."

leads to:

"So God as a bearded man holds some water."

[USViking]

luke warm said:

how can anyone argue with such airtight logic?

You can't.

luke warm said:

i don't believe i said what you are quoting me as saying

I believe I did. Look up "sic"

luke warm said:

okay, so winston's hand-of-God (an invisible entity) thrust holds at least a little water

Not OK.

Whether or not atomic theory is falsifiable he did not offer
impossibility of falsification as ground for insinuating God.
In fact he did the opposite: he said Dark Matter theory was
having "falsification problems", and that those stupid panicking
scientists had concocted a theoretical "Zeus" to plug the gap.

[USViking]

luke warm said:

i don't believe i said what you are quoting me as saying 

USViking said:

I believe I did...

Pardon me, I did in fact misattribute to luke warm a quote from Winstonm.

The quotation function here is different here from all other boards
I have ever posted to, and lends itself to a confusing series
of quotes within quotes within quotes.

[gwnn]

You called?

[matmat]

Physics doesn't work. It's all a bunch of lies. The world is a puppet controlled by strings.

[hanp]

matmat, enlighten us.

[matmat]

hanp, on Aug 29 2010, 02:21 PM, said:

matmat, enlighten us.

Thought I just did? it's all a sham.

[hanp]

But what about this god thing then, is that a sham too? And what does sham mean anyway? I'm so confused.

[matmat]

hanp, on Aug 29 2010, 02:55 PM, said:

But what about this god thing then, is that a sham too? And what does sham mean anyway? I'm so confused.

no, that's more of a throw, a fuzzy one.

[PassedOut]

barmar, on Aug 28 2010, 03:32 PM, said:

You might want to read the book Is God a Mathematician.

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow provide some definitive answers in their new book, The Grand Design, coming out this month.

[matmat]

PassedOut, on Sep 2 2010, 07:06 PM, said:

barmar, on Aug 28 2010, 03:32 PM, said:

You might want to read the book Is God a Mathematician.

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow provide some definitive answers in their new book, The Grand Design, coming out this month.

I don't like the word "definitive" here.

[PassedOut]

matmat, on Sep 2 2010, 09:37 PM, said:

I don't like the word "definitive" here.

[phil_20686]

mikegill, on Aug 27 2010, 01:58 PM, said:

Cosmology is not my area of astronomy, so I'm trying to not say anything that is clearly considered to be wrong, but I haven't ever heard anything that I thought was 100% clearly definitive proof that dark matter is correct. I don't think any serious scientists would believe in MOND if there were. However, I think dark matter it is a more elegant theory - if the laws of gravity were to suddenly change at some distance scale, why would that be? Why not some other scale? It seems arbitrary and doesn't really make sense. On the other side, we DO know of at least one object in the universe that 1) doesn't emit radiation 2) has mass and 3) doesn't interact with baryons except through gravity - the black hole. A black hole in space without enough matter around to form an accretion disk cannot be detected at all except by its gravitational influence on other matter. It seems to me easier to believe that there exist other such particles/objects in the universe than it does to believe that for some unexplainable reason a law which is known to be correct and constant for all distance scales up to X suddenly changes. That being said, science isn't about what the majority of people believe - it's about who happens to be right, so who knows.

FYI, the bullet cluster was essentially regarded as proof positive for the existence of dark matter.

It has probably killed off MOND, though people still argue about it from time to time. People have suggested that the X-ray brightness is not fully consistent with the the gravitational lensing.

Somewhere there is a great false colour image of the density of the colliding galaxies constructed from lensing experiments that looks pretty much exactly like a two clouds of invisible dust colliding. I failed to find it on the internet though.

[phil_20686]

PassedOut, on Sep 2 2010, 07:06 PM, said:

barmar, on Aug 28 2010, 03:32 PM, said:

You might want to read the book Is God a Mathematician.

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow provide some definitive answers in their new book, The Grand Design, coming out this month.

No one in my dept is having an end-of-career party, so i seriously doubt that is true.

More likely they are falling back on the winning formula of combining reasonably old uncontroversial science with questionable value judgements.

[phil_20686]

USViking, on Aug 27 2010, 11:54 PM, said:

luke warm said:

are you sure it's inaccurate?

Yes.

Lol.
Showing a lot of faith there Norseman.