Thereâs a lot of room there 
I donât know. Theyâre the guys who do the science. Iâll wait for any results and assess as best as I can.
At the very least, I donât think the arrogance toward people of faith by scientists is warranted given the crazy shit many of them put forward as âscience.â
A lot going on there too. Iâll agree that your garden-variety religious belief certainly doesnât warrant an arrogant response, but sometimes gets it. I chat with Christian scientists (the degree holding type) a bit and they complain about this kind of thing a lot. The thing is though that beliefs can inform action, and sometimes actions can be a problem. Also, Iâm not sure how much crazy shit âmanyâ scientists are really coming up with. In general science has come up with a lot of good shit too. When crazy shit conflicts with observed fact, conflict may well be reasonable.
Letâs all be honest, nobody knows these answers and itâs quite possible we will never know (well from my point of view, I believe that to be more than just âquite possibleâ- I believe that multiverse and other speculative theories will always be in principle unprovable).
Maybe. Knowledge of string theory seems more potentially attainable to me. Theyâre just theories though, and will surely remain regarded as such until some kind of evidence can be demonstrated. Iâm pretty unconcerned that theyâre going to have some kind of spillover effectânot really something that can be said of any kind of crazy shit. Who knows, the guys with the big brains and the science degrees may just be onto something. I wouldnât put it past them.
I feel everyone is getting bored with this thread for now so let me just say that I wasnât taking issue with garden-variety scientists (
), only those that deal with the issue of the origin of the universe (and of course only a portion of those- Vilenkin I respect greatly and he is an atheist, but at least he has the intellectual honestly to point out that great mysteries remain when it comes to the beginning of the universe). As a matter of fact, I love science, physics, cosmology. On that note, hereâs something else I shared on fb some time ago:
Nearly one hundred and fifty years ago (on January 1, 1865), Clerk Maxwell published his paper âA Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field.â In it, he stated that, â[t]his velocity (of a magnetic disturbance propagated through a non-conducting field) is so nearly that of light, that it seems we have strong reason to conclude that light itself (including radiant heat, and other radiations if any) is an electromagnetic disturbance in the form of waves propagated through the electromagnetic field according to electromagnet laws.â In other words, light is an electromagnetic wave!
By showing that the science of light and optics is merely a branch of electromagnetism, Maxwell achieved what some regard as the second great unification in physics (the first being Newtonâs unification of terrestrial and celestial mechanics). Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote of Maxwell and his work related to his equations that, â[t]he American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.â
Maxwellâs equations make my head hurt; anybody who can imagine the physical meaning of the curl operator is a better man than me. And yet, understanding the behaviour of electromagnetic fields is a trivial problem compared to comprehending the meaning and origin of the universe. I donât rate humanityâs chances of ever getting close to the solution.
Partial derivatives, I believe. Once upon a time, I could do something with those. Never really understood what it all meant, though.
I gave it a better read last night. Interesting stuff!
Nah, I can cope with partial derivatives. Barely. Anything beyond that is where my math brain slinks off into a corner, whimpering.
Perhaps a more important question would be , âWhere are we goingâ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3ha18O1dAI