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ZURICH (Reuters) -- Scientists have smashed together proton beams for the first time in a 27-kilometre tunnel under the French-Swiss border in an initial step toward discovering how the universe came into existence, they said on Monday. Scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) hope experiments will already start giving clues about the origins of the universe in the coming months as the world's biggest particle collider starts moving to full power. "It's a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer about the collision, achieved by sending...

Pro-Darwin consensus doesn't rule out intelligent design --snip-- (CNN) -- While we officially celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on November 24, celebrations of Darwin's legacy have actually been building in intensity for several years. Darwin is not just an important 19th century scientific thinker. Increasingly, he is a cultural icon. Darwin is the subject of adulation that teeters on the edge of hero worship, expressed in everything from scholarly seminars and lecture series to best-selling new atheist tracts like those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The atheists claim that...

So efforts by scientists to re-create the big bang — that moment, if one can speak of a moment, as in time, before there was time, or at least a decent wristwatch, when energy, or some hot gooey primordial stuff, spewed out a burgeoning universe, eventuating in the birth of galaxies, the advent of life, and the eventual cancellation of Charles in Charge — have failed once again. It seems that the quixotic quest to find Higgs Boson, once thought to be the front man for an Air Supply tribute band, but which turns out to be the “God” particle,”...

Evolutionary philosophy is a bottom-up storytelling project: particles, planets, people. Naturalists (those who say nature is all there is) believe they can invent explanations that are free of miracles, but in practice, miracles pop up everywhere in their stories. This was satirized by Sidney Harris years ago in a cartoon that showed a grad student filling a blackboard with equations. His adviser called attention to one step that needed some elaboration: It said, "Then a miracle happens." Examples of miracles in evolutionary philosophy include the sudden appearance of the universe without cause or explanation, the origin of life, the origin...

Why Evolutionary-Based Science Is A Menace To Scientific Research, Discovery, and Progress Evolutionary-based research always begins with the inaccurate and unscientific presupposition that the Theory of Evolution, i.e. the Big Bang, the spontaneous generation of life, and common descent, is true. Due to this systemic problem, scientific discovery and progress is severely hampered, not to mention the hundreds of millions of research dollars that are squandered every year. In a time in which almost ANY alternative thought is given a platform, the evolution industry is silencing dissenting scientific evidence, even when it’s from fellow evolutionists! See the growing list of...

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint? EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? .... Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence...

PARIS (AFP) – It took 13 billion years to reach Earth, but astronomers have seen the light of an exploding mega-star that is the most distant object ever detected, two studies published Thursday reported. The stunning gamma-ray burst (GRB) was observed by two teams of researchers in April, and opens a window onto a poorly known period when the Universe was in its infancy.

Oct 19, 2009 — Science news outlets have put out some bizarre headlines recently.  Readers can judge whether they should be blessed with the label “science” or belong instead at supermarket checkouts. Women are evolving fatter:  New Scientist and PhysOrg said that natural selection is making women shorter, plumper and more fertile.  “The take-home message is that humans are currently evolving,” said Stephen Stearns of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina.  “Natural selection is still operating.” Killer algae heading north:  Science Daily said that toxic algae was a key player in mass extinctions in the past, and...

Denver, Colo., Sep 30, 2009 / 03:35 pm (CNA).- Contemporary astrophysics hold the scientific key to prove the existence of God, but unfortunately very few know the scientific facts, said Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J, PhD, during a conference delivered on Sunday at the John Paul II Center for the New Evangelization in Denver, Colorado. The Honolulu-born Jesuit is the past president of Gonzaga University and is also well-known philosopher and physicist who is involved in bringing science and theology together. Fr. Spitzer is currently engaged in an ambitious project to explain the metaphysical consequences of the latest astrophysical discoveries,...

I came across a news item in the USA Today website, dated August 18, that got my attention. It concerns "Dark Energy", the mysterious force that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, that no one can find or explain. Two scientists say is doesn't exist now because of a "mathematical solution they have produced, that suggests it is a natural result of the Big Bang. Part of the article is reproduced here. "What's the answer? It doesn't exist, suggest mathematicians Blake Temple and Joel Smoller, in a study released Monday by the Proceedings of the National...

Scientists have peered further back in time than ever before using instruments designed to search for a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago but not yet proven to exist. An American observatory hunting for ripples in space and time called gravitational waves has produced its most significant results yet, despite not having directly detected any. Tycho's Supernova The “non-discovery” offers insights into the state of the Universe just 60 seconds into its existence. Previous research has been unable to look back in time further than about 380,000 years after the big bang. The new window on the...

Biological Big Bang: Another Explosion at the Dawn of Life July 23, 2009 — Eugene Koonin and two friends from the NIH went tree-hunting. They examined almost 7,000 genomes of prokaryotes. They found trees all right – a whole forest of them. They even found 102 NUTs (nearly universal trees) in the forest. Unfortunately, it’s not what they wanted to find: a single universal tree of life that Darwin’s theory requires. They had to seriously consider the question: was there a biological big bang? Publishing in an open-access article in the Journal of Biology,[1] they began with the founding father’s...

Not surprising or unknown to readers on the Free Republic, but this article illustrates the bias existing in the "scientific" community. Empirical data are merely observations and numbers - meaningless without interpretation. In the interpretation we see bias. Bias could be circumvented by a plurality of research from other sources, most especially those from dissenting views. However, the mainstream, or "majority rules," mentality has corrupted scientific objectivity and squelched meritorious dissent. Hence we have horribly fallacious THEORIES masquerading as established fact: Anthropogenic global warming, evolution, big bang, etc. Having abandoned scientific principles and objectivity, we are now living in an...

rom Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion to Bill Maher’s Religulous, the media is filled with half-truths and whole lies about what it means to be a believer in God, and more often than not, Christian. Dawkin’s argues that there is contradictory evidence to the existence of God while Maher pokes fun at the members of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, while simultaneously asking the usual theological questions. For example: Do you think that, if when you were a kid, they transposed the Bible stories with fairy tales, that you would know the difference as an adult? Yes Mr. Maher, I would. It...

String theory “philosophy” challenged --snip-- The big bang is fundamental to cosmic evolution or the idea that somehow the universe made itself. The article majored on the varying ideas that emanate from big bang philosophy, such as dark energy and dark matter etc. that are used to solve some of the “science” problems of the big bang. It then went on to say that string theory is just another one of these ideas with no basis in experimental science...

Re-Analysis of the Marinov Light-Speed Anisotropy Experiment Reginald T. Cahill School of Chemistry, Physics and Earth Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide 5001, Australia E-mail: Reg.Cahill@flinders.edu.au The anisotropy of the speed of light at 1 part in 10^3 has been detected by Michelson and Morley (1887), Miller (1925/26), Illingworth (1927), Joos (1930), Jaseja et al. (1964), Torr and Kolen (1984), DeWitte (1991) and Cahill (2006) using a variety of experimental techniques, from gas-mode Michelson interferometers (with the relativistic theory for these only determined in 2002) to one-way RF coaxial cable propagation timing. All agree on the speed, right ascension and declination of...

Does Dark Energy Really Exist? Or does Earth occupy a very unusual place in the universe? Scientific American, March 2009 By Timothy Clifton and Pedro G. Ferreira ... Most of us are very familiar with the idea that our planet is nothing more than a tiny speck orbiting a typical star, somewhere near the edge of an otherwise unnoteworthy galaxy. In the midst of a universe populated by billions of galaxies that stretch out to our cosmic horizon, we are led to believe that there is nothing special or unique about our location. But what is the evidence for this...

Shedding Light on the Protein Big Bang Theory March 13, 2009 — The precise three-dimensional structure of a typical protein molecule is so complex, its origin would seem hopeless by chance. What if evolutionary biologists were to discover a whole host of proteins literally exploded into existence at the beginning of complex life? We can find out what they would think by looking at an article on the “protein big bang” found on Astrobiology Magazine...

WMAP ‘proof’ of big bang fails normal radiological standards by John Hartnett Satellite maps of the big bang? The WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite1 was launched with the intention of mapping the very small anisotropies (temperature fluctuations) in the cosmic microwave radiation (CMB) (figure 1). After the successful mission of the COBE (COsmic Background Explorer) satellite2 George Smoot as team leader built WMAP for NASA and the data obtained resulted in him being awarded the Nobel prize in Physics last year.3,4 The anisotropies in the 2.7 K CMB temperature maps contain information regarding the radiation from the fireball 380,000...

In January 2009, ICR received a copy of a recent ministry letter published by television personality Dr. John Ankerberg. For many years, Dr. Ankerberg has skillfully tackled tough issues related to the church, society, the Middle East, and other topics of interest to believers. Christians everywhere need to be informed, challenged, and also taught sound doctrine—there is no substitute for the Bible. However, the January letter from Dr. Ankerberg’s television ministry reveals a dangerous trend toward subjugating the accuracy, understandability, and authority of the Bible to the foolish musings of men—namely, scientists who deny that God’s revelation in the book...

Since the Big Bang story of the origin of the universe has been refuted by a host of external observations and internal contradictions,1 secular science has been forced to postulate additional, exceedingly improbable events to keep it afloat. One of these is “inflation,” which attempts to explain the apparent uniformity of the universe.2 But new observations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe are forcing cosmologists to revamp inflation, at the cost of inventing yet another miraculous event to prop it up...

A Brief History of Intolerance in Modern Cosmology by Dr. Jerry Bergman January 21, 2009 Abstract A review of some recent well-documented cases of intolerance in the cosmology field illustrates a common problem in science. Many relate to the Big Bang theory, such as the case of Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge and Halton Arp. None of the accounts involved Intelligent Design advocates or creationists. This selection removes this compounding factor from the evaluation, but the cases have direct relevance to both Intelligent Design and creationism because both groups face the same resistance. It was concluded that it is critical for...

When I debated atheist Christopher Hitchens recently, one of the eight arguments I offered for God’s existence was the creation of this supremely fine-tuned universe out of nothing. I spoke of the five main lines of scientific evidence—denoted by the acronym SURGE—that point to the definite beginning of the space-time continuum. They are: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Expanding Universe, the Radiation Afterglow from the Big Bang Explosion, the Great galaxy seeds in the Radiation Afterglow, and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. While I don’t have space to unpack this evidence here (see I Don’t Have Enough Faith to...

ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. "I was taken aback," he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang "singularity", the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening? Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory...

BIG BANG Recreated!!! That's fantastic!!! Someone recreated the big bang, or a model, rather. But hey, ya can't have a recreation without an original creation. Perhaps scientist will realize, if their INTELLIGENCE has brought them to this point of modeling a big bang, then there must exists an INTELLIGENCE, who many years ago gave ignition to the original, and could only endow it with life to boot!

Three different trends in physics each suggest that our universe is just one of many.We usually think of the universe as being “everything there is.” But many astronomers and physicists now suspect that the universe we observe is just a small part of an unbelievably larger and richer cosmic structure, often called the “multiverse.” This mind-bending notion – that our universe may be just one of many, perhaps an infinite number, of real, physical universes – was front and center at a three-day conference entitled "A Debate in Cosmology — The Multiverse," held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics...

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed—inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, the observations made by astronomers fatally contradict the ‘predictions’ of big bang theory.11,12 Such continual appeal to new fudge factors to bridge the gap between theory and observation would not be tolerated in any other branch of physics. Rather, physicists would question the underlying theory...

Forget the superfast electrons or bosons or whateverinos and 17 miles of magnets. Just get yourself two cats at 10 pm; let them know that you are phenomenally tired, and go to bed. The only trick is to arrange their trajectories so that they are on a collision course. You’ll get your Big Bang. I guess you could call them mewons.

Excerpt - GENEVA, Sept 10 (Reuters) - Scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) started up a huge particle-smashing machine on Wednesday, aiming to re-enact the conditions of the "Big Bang" that created the universe. Experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, a 10 billion Swiss franc ($9 billion) accelerator built underneath the Swiss-French border, could unlock the remaining secrets of particle physics and answer questions about the universe and its origins.

Scientists preparing to fire up the world's largest atom smasher are being flooded with phone calls and emails – even death threats – from people worried that the Large Hadron Collider, when activated, will obliterate planet Earth.

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang. The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old. Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

BALTIMORE — Mario Livio tossed his car keys in the air. They rose ever more slowly, paused, shining, at the top of their arc, and then in accordance with everything our Galilean ape brains have ever learned to expect, crashed back down into his hand. That was the whole problem, explained Dr. Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute here on the Johns Hopkins campus. A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in...

Observations of the cosmic microwave background might deal blow to theory. The background patterns of space could help us focus on quantum problems.NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage Team The question of whether quantum mechanics is correct could soon be settled by observing the sky — and there are already tantalizing hints that the theory could be wrong. Antony Valentini, a physicist at Imperial College, London, wanted to devise a test that could separate quantum mechanics from one of its closest rivals — a theory called bohmian mechanics. Despite being one of the most successful theories of physics, quantum mechanics...

A telescope on the far side of the moon could probe the "dark ages" of the universe while blocking out the radio-wavelength noise of Earth civilizations. Up to one hundred thousand antennas would form the Dark Ages Lunar Interferometer (DALI), the largest telescope ever built, and allow astronomers to hear faint whispering signals from a time when no stars even existed. "This will look at one of the most fundamental questions ever conceived, back when the universe was made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium — no stars, no galaxies," said Kurt Weiler, senior astronomer at the U.S. Naval...

The quasar OJ287 contains two black holes (this slightly dated illustration lists the larger black hole's mass as 17 billion Suns, though researchers now estimate it is 18 billion Suns). The smaller black hole crashes through a disc of material around the larger one twice every orbit, creating bright outbursts (Illustration: VISPA) The most massive known black hole in the universe has been discovered, weighing in with the mass of 18 billion Suns. Observing the orbit of a smaller black hole around this monster has allowed astronomers to test Einstein's theory of general relativity with stronger gravitational fields than ever...

Mysterious Explosion Detected In The Distant Past, Halfway Back To Big BangNobody knows how the short gamma-ray burst GRB 070714B was triggered, but a leading possibility is the in-spiral and merger of two neutron stars, depicted in this artist rendition. (Credit: NASA/Dana Berry) ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang....

The history of cosmology – the study of the Universe – for the last five hundred years is often portrayed as a clash between science on the one hand, and the cold hand of religious dogma on the other. Part of this is rooted in fact – the Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation for instance was suspicious of intellectual innovation and experiment, with its harsher elements longing for the certainties of the age before Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. The desire to make the Universe fit into a pre-ordained and orderly scheme that needed no correction reached its infamous,...

Creation Cosmologies Solve Spacecraft Mystery by D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D.* A groundbreaking new technical paper1 shows that several creationist cosmologies can explain the "Pioneer anomaly," a decades-old mystery about distant spacecraft. Big Bang theorists cannot use this solution, yet they have found no alternative explanation they can agree upon. Thus the Pioneer data are evidence against the Big Bang and for a biblical, young universe....

Abstract Background Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of...

To the ancients, exploding stars were bad news. To astronomer Adam Riess, poring over data from a telescope in Chile, it looked like supernovas were still cursed. He and his colleagues were measuring the brightness and distance of supernovas in order to figure out the little matter of whether the universe would end in fire or in ice. Would it halt its expansion and collapse back on itself in a gnab gib (that's the reverse of the big bang, and passes for humor among astronomers) or expand forever, its light and warmth fading into eternal cold and darkness? But when...

In the opening of any book today that involves origins, dinosaurs, ECT. you can always expect to see the term billions of years as they know for a fact. Like some one was there to record this event. Well here is another fine example of the evolutionist religious belief. From the book Natural Wonders of the World, by P.J. Banyard, Page 6 Once there was nothing. There was no space and there was no time. (Now you will have to understand this if there is nothing the laws of conservation of energy state you can not create or destroy matter,...

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. - Ralph Alpher, a physicist whose pioneering work on the underpinnings of the "Big Bang" theory went unheralded for years while others won a Nobel Prize, has died. He was 86. Alpher died Aug. 12 in Austin, Texas. He had been honored by President Bush with a National Medal of Science in July, but was unable to attend the ceremony because of his failing health, Union College in Schenectady said in announcing his death. He had been on the Union faculty. The "Big Bang" theory holds that the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of...

Take one part unidentified goop. Add three parts mysterious energy. Throw in a dash of ordinary atoms. Mix. Compress. Explode. Let expand for 13.7 billion years. It's an absurd recipe, but it's one that makes cosmologists drool. Ten years ago, no one could agree on what the universe is made of, how it is shaped, or what its ultimate fate will be. But less than five years later, long-awaited measurements and one stunning discovery forever transformed our picture of the universe. The resulting model, often called the concordance model, holds that 22 percent of the universe is composed of dark...

Last night, nearly 3,000 people received a mini lesson on the origin of the universe from perhaps the world’s most famous cosmologist, Stephen Hawking. Hawking spoke to a packed audience in Zellerbach Hall about how Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum theory explained the creation of the universe. ... His lecture, which touched upon subjects such as black holes and spacetime, was peppered with quips that drew laughs from the audience. “If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was, what happened before the beginning,” Hawking said. “What was God doing before He made...

We exist, therefore we question. Or at least, that paraphrases (poorly) an old quote from an old scholar... We know the masses and general composition of the four inner (rocky) planets in our solar system, and from basic chemistry, we know the number of atoms in a gram of any material. Multiplying Avogadro's number x the mass of these four planets, dividing by a weighted average atomic weight for the materials in each planet, we get about 3 x 10^ 50 heavy nuclei produced since creation/the big bang. Take your pick, that's the number of atomic nuclei we have to...

LONDON (AFP) - As the guitar power in the legendary British rock band Queen, Brian May conquered most of the planet -- and now he has his sights set on mastering the universe. The star musician, who wrote hits like "We Will Rock You", "The Show Must Go On" and "Flash", has switched his plectrum for a pen and co-authored a book with two leading British astronomers, telling the story of the big bang and how the universe has evolved since. Brian May addresses the media during a photocall to launch a book entitled "Bang! The Complete History of the...

The latest interview was with an Independent Scientist called Ron Pearson. Ron spent much of his life a University lecturer in Thermodynamics and Fluid mechanics. He was the inventor of the Gas Wave Turbine and in his retirement he studied the Physics and Mathematics found in Quantum Theory and Relativity. Because of this unique background Ron was able to see huge flaws in the Big Bang Theory and in the theories of Relativity. He has therefore spent the last 16 years developing a new theory on the creation of the Universe that did away with the previous inconsistencies as well...

FOURTEEN years ago, when a Berkeley astronomer named George F. Smoot declared that he and his satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, had detected the astrophysical equivalent of the fingerprints of God, his euphoria was easy to understand. For a few happy years, one of the last big pieces of the cosmological puzzle seemed to be in place — an explanation why the universe has blossomed into such an interesting place to live. Had it not been for the whorls and dimples Dr. Smoot and his NASA collaborator, John C. Mather, found in the background radiation — the afterimage...

Two American astronomers who uncovered evidence on the origin of the universe and how it grew into galaxies were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday. The astronomers, John C. Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and George F. Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, will split the prize of 10 million Swedish kroners, about $1.37 million. Dr. Mather and Dr. Smoot led a team of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and technicians behind the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, satellite launched in 1989. Its mission was...