creation of the universe.

this has been bugging me lately, I guess because it's a question without answer (yet).

How was the Universe born? It seems all so impossible, and yet here we are. Anyone else bothered by these thoughts sometimes?

Less of this.

There is currently no definitive answer as of yet, but there are some hypotheses. First, note that the Big Bang Theory is generally accepted and has solid evidence, but it only covers what happened about 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds AFTER the initial event. It makes NO claims about what actually happened during or "before" (if there was such a thing) that first fraction of a second. The Big Bang Theory itself has been updated several times and is sometimes referred to as Inflationary Cosmology (or whatever they call it now).

Do some research on the Big Bounce and Quantum Loop Gravity for some of the current buzzwords. If I were you, though, I'd avoid bothering with String Theory, unless the LHC manages to provide evidence for it. As it stands, the various String Theories have exactly ZERO real evidence, so they aren't really "theories" at all.

>>3
String theory already predicts quite a lot about the universe. As far as currently testable predictions go, though, it doesn't offer anything beyond other popular models.
That's an important distinction.

>>3
Big bang has a pretty big set of unknowns/holes too. While I can't vouch for another theory (all of them suck in one way or another) It's safe to say that Big bang and evolution (in their present state) are as big a joke as religion.

The truth: We know fuckall about this world, about life and especially (despite a questionable theory taught as fact in high schools) how\why stars work.

>>3
The big bang theory (as a subset of GR) actually does predict all the way to the limit of the initial event.  We might not believe such predictions (strong force, quantum gravity, etc), but they exist.

It's not like LQG has any more evidence to support it.  I've heard it predicts an object that has an entropy corresponding to a black hole, but are you even sure that object is a black hole?  Does it reduce to the Newtonian limit far away from the thing?

>>5
Less of a joke, since they have more than 1 piece of evidence, whereas religion has ZERO.

It is true that our knowledge is still quite limited, but that's why scientists are still employed.

You doubt how/why stars work?  You best be joking nigger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-proton_chain

God has always been.

>>4
I theorize that the universe will spring forth from my butt 30 years from now and travel back in time to when the universe occurred. I have as much reason to believe I'm correct as string theorists have.

>>5
Ignorant dipshit is ignorant. Evolution is the most strongly supported theory in all of science.

>>5

>>a questionable theory taught as fact in high schools

No, it's taught as a THEORY. Hence the name, "Big Bang Theory".

You're stupid.  God says you're a heretic, BTW.

>>10
You and >>5 don't understand the meaning of theory and fact in a scientific context. I don't know too many high schools that teach Big Bang theory either way.

>>11
>>5


Same person.

>>9
Is correct. Evolution itself is fact. It is observed constantly. As for the Theory of Evolution (or Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, or whatever name floats your boat), it is so enmeshed and central to such a significant number of Science branches, that to deny it is simply ridiculous. There may still be some questions to solve, but that doesn't mean it isn't accurate.

Basically anything that relates in any fashion to a "Life Science" was completely revolutionized if not newly founded due to Evolution. Before Darwin and Mendel came along, the entire field of Biology was a joke. From their work came significant and rapid advancements in areas like Biochemistry and Medicine. In fact, nearly EVERYTHING in modern Medicine relies on Evolution.

Get the fuck over it. Evolution is real. Even the Pope has accepted it.

God was before and will be after. The Alpha and the Omega.

May his mercy shine upon you, niggerfags.

>>14

He's sitting right next to you and he's angry. Why won't you listen to him?

Heretic.

>>14
A christfag's only shred of evidence of their fairytale is the book in which the fairytale is described. They know the fairy is real because their book says it is real. They know the book is true because the fairy says in the book that the book is true.

Do you really not see the problem here? Not to mention the thousands of logical inconsistencies with the book itself, the logical impossibilities of the fairy, the blatant plagiarism from other fairytales which are then condemned, etc, etc, etc.

>>16
God will forgive you, Sodomite.

>>17

As you sit there with a dildo in your ass.

"Hey, it's not sodomy if it's rubber."

>>18
I'm not pleased with you...

>>19

Hey, you made the Bible.  I didn't.  I'm younger than you.


Dad wants you to turn off the lights when you go.

>>13
Mendel's work was critical to genetics, but he wasn't appreciated until some hundred yrs after his death.

I still fail to see how Darwin's work is important, except for taxonomy.  How is it relevant to biochem?  Does it tell us anything about why ethanol causes inebriation?  Why methanol is toxic?

>>21
Children don't look like their parents.

God says that's genetisomething.  Children are supposed to look Hispanic if a white has sex with a Asian. Or a nigger, or anything else.

>>21
Well, evolution is important to understanding things like antibiotic resistance, though that postdates Darwin by quite a bit.

Nobody knows.

>>21
Evolution explains the diversity of life, and why things are the way they are. It's the single most powerful idea in the history of the universe. Besides a deep understanding of life, we also owe modern medicine (for example) to it.
Without evolution, biology is just stamp collecting. Biochemistry is a subfield of chemistry, not biology.

>>25
Modern medicine is almost entirely biochemistry.  Aside from antibiotic resistance and stamp collecting, I can't imagine that many uses for evolution.

Sure, we can force bacteria/viruses to evolve, but how does that help?  We are better off genetically engineering them in exactly the manner we want, rather than hoping they evolve in a preferable manner.

>>1
It's a question that, if there were an answer for, never could have been asked. 

If you like it, call it your koan, and pursue it for years. There is no answer in logic, but experience.  Experience.

>>26
Ignorant faggot is ignorant.

Modern medicine is almost entirely biochemistry.
Hurf durf. It isn't.

I can't imagine that many uses for evolution.
I'm not surprised. You don't seem too bright.
Here's another ``use'': pest control.

Sure, we can force bacteria/viruses to evolve, but how does that help?  We are better off genetically engineering them in exactly the manner we want, rather than hoping they evolve in a preferable manner.
What the fuck do you think genetic engineering is? How do you think genetics can be understood without evolution?

You're an idiot.

>>28
That I'm stupid/idiotic/ignorant/fag should be obvious; insulting me is redundant.

What else did I neglect in modern medicine?  Have we not mapped the whole human genome?  That Stanfurd project that attempts to simulate protein folding?  Designing all sorts of chemo drugs that more specifically attack cancer?

Pest control = DDT resistant insects/viral resistant rabbits in Australia?  They would have been obvious empirical facts; evolution could not have predicted ahead of time whether insects would grow resistant to DDT or completely die off.

I've always imagined genetic engineering as modifying genes at the molecular level, by PCR or otherwise.  We can also coerce bacteria to absorb plasmids, but I wouldn't call that evolution.  Actually, evolution can be used to filter out the bacteria that failed to absorb the plasmids, so that's at least one use.

If biology was math, they'd call evolution the fundamental theorem of biology because it is so fundamental

>>29
The entire concept of a genome doesn't even make sense without evolution.
And yes, scientists did predict DDT resistance. That's one of the myriad reasons it was outlawed for personal use before they developed immunity.

I would hope you're just a poorly executed troll, but I don't have that kind of fate in public education.

>>31
Why would the concept of genome require evolution?  Is the genome (for humans), not just ~3 billion nucleotides, which encodes for every damn protein in our bodies?  Isn't it true that once we've solved the problem of how all the encoded proteins interact, we've completely figured out how a human works, from kidney to brain, and life to death?

Unfortunately, I'm not a poorly executed troll.  I took AP bio 4 yrs ago, and we used Campbell.  We were taught what evolution was, and some examples (like those moths that changed color according to air pollution).  We learned some mechanisms that speed up evolution like bottlenecks, and mechanisms of speciation like allopatric speciation.  Of course, the reason I seem so retarded is because they never bothered to explain why evolution was so important.

>>32
The reason you seem so retarded is because you never realised it on your own.