Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

universe

According to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, the universe has never truly been empty

But wait. If it was truly empty, it would not exist, right? What we mean by the “universe” is everything that exists. So, if it’s “empty,” nothing exists. Of course, it could always exist as an abstract idea but then it must be the abstract idea of a Being in another dimension. Read More ›

Gregory Chaitin asks, if the universe is information, not matter, does that help explain consciousness?

Chaitin: The normal view if you dabble in metaphysics is that the universe is made from mathematics. That’s a Pythagorean idea, that God is a mathematician. And I prefer to say God is a … a computer programmer or a programmer. Read More ›

What the universe looks like, via X-rays

A different view: This orbiting telescope was launched in July last year and despatched to an observing position some 1.5 million km from Earth. Once commissioned and declared fully operational in December, it was left to slowly rotate and scan the depths of space. eRosita’s first all-sky data-set, represented in the image at the top of this page, was completed only last week. It records over a million sources of X-rays. Jonathan Amos, “Breathtaking new map of the X-ray Universe” at BBC Still amazing.

Tossing overboard the assumptions about our universe? Rob Sheldon responds

Sheldon: Since no one discusses the result as a potentially embarrassing over-correction, naturally the whole local-motion discussion is given short shrift. Just another example of the hubris that lies at the foundation of scientism and seems to especially infect cosmology. Read More ›

Why the universe cannot logically be infinite in time backwards

For example: The philosophical argument for the universe having a beginning is that past time cannot be infinite because an infinite amount of time cannot already have been exhausted so as to arrive at the present. Infinite time is limitless, inexhaustible, and thus cannot have been exhausted. Read More ›

No Big Bang – Universe Always Was

Thought it all started with a big bang? Well, not so fast. If a new theory turns out to be true, the universe may not have started with a bang. In the new formulation, the universe has never been a singularity, nor an infinitely small and infinitely dense point of matter. In fact, the universe may not have a beginning at all. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once. “The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org. “Our Read More ›

Bill Nye’s “Christianity vs. the Big Universe” myth

“The big universe is a problem for Christianity” is a claim something like “They’re out there” (meaning ET). It has nothing to do with facts; it is pure social positioning (or posturing). As with the Cosmos’s series’s “artistic license to lie,” it is a way of indicating that their social position is so powerful that they can misrepresent people. Read More ›

Why is the universe NOT homogeneous?

The largest large quasar group LQG ever has been discovered, stretching an enormous 4 billion light years from end to end. That is 40,000 times larger than our Milky Way galaxy which is only 100,000 light years across. This LQG contains 73 quasars! See: Largest Structure in the universe discovered “The quasar group appears to violate a widely accepted assumption known as the cosmological principle, which holds that the universe is essentially homogeneous when viewed at a sufficiently large scale.” Original publication: Astronomers discover the largest structure in the universe Royal Astronomic Society, Monthly Notices, January 11, 2013. If stochastic homogeneity is disproved, is there an intelligent design based argument for the existence of such an enormous Large Quasar Group?