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God’s mighty expanse by D. Russell HumphreysPublished: 26 February 2009(GMT+10) Psalm 150:1, the first verse of the last psalm, contains a phrase that has always intrigued me: … Praise Him in his mighty expanse. (NAS), or… praise him in the firmament of his power. (KJV) God made the expanse (firmament) on the second day and called it “heavens” (Genesis 1:8, plural from literal Hebrew). Later, on the fourth day, He populated the expanse with the sun, moon and stars (Genesis 1:14-19). So the expanse is not the heavenly bodies, but rather the space that contains the heavenly bodies. Normally people...

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...

Author - Alexander Mayer: This book is going to change the course of the 21st Century. Many old ideas (and inflated reputations) will die. Inevitably, some people will resist that. Science is about ideas that work. The only thing that matters in science is accurate predictions of empirical phenomena. Just read the book. Partial Abstract: The concept of geometric cosmic time is introduced, which allows astrophysical observations to be interpreted without concluding that an unknown force is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. This relativistic temporal model yields a redshift-distance relationship based on simple geometric rules that involves no free...

TIME BEFORE TIME An event like the Big Bang is about as likely as billions of coin tosses all coming up heads. Explaining why that is might take us from empty space to other universes--and through the mirror of time. by Sean Carroll • Posted August 28, 2006 11:53 AM From the SEPTEMBER issue of Seed:    The nature of time is such that the influence of the very beginning of the universe stretches all the way into your kitchen—you can make an omelet out of an egg, but you can't make an egg out of an omelet. Time, unlike...

A spinning black hole in the constellation Scorpius has created a stable dent in the fabric of spacetime, scientists say. The dent is the sort of thing predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. It affects the movement of matter falling into the black hole. The spacetime-dent is invisible, but scientists deduced its existence after detecting two X-ray frequencies from the black hole that were identical to emissions noted nine years ago. The finding will allow scientists to calculate the black hole's spin, a crucial measurement necessary for describing the object's behavior. Blinking X-rays Black holes form when very...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Scientists may not have to go over to the dark side to explain the fate of the universe.The theory that the accelerated expansion of the universe is caused by mysterious "dark energy" is being challenged by New York University physicist Georgi Dvali. He thinks there's just a gravity leak.Scientists have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding. In the late 1990s, they realized that it is expanding at an ever-increasing pace. At a loss to explain the stunning discovery, cosmologists blamed it on dark energy, a newly coined term to describe the mysterious antigravity force...

On Plato, the Early Church, and Modern Science: An Eclectic Meditation By Jean F. Drew God, purposing to make the universe most nearly like the every way perfect and fairest of intelligible beings, created one visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order. Thus does Plato (d. 347 B.C.) succinctly describe how all that exists is ultimately a single, living organism. At Timaeus20, he goes on to say: “There exists: first, the unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible, admitting no modification and entering no combination … second, that which bears the same name as the...

The Future According to Professor Paul Davies "Scientists have no doubt whatever that it is possible to build a time machine to visit the future". Since the publication of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, few, if any, scientists would dispute that time travel to the future is perfectly possible. According to this theory, time runs slower for a moving person than for someone who is stationary. This has been proven by experiments using very accurate atomic clocks. In theory, a traveller on a super high-speed rocket ship could fly far out into the Universe and then come back...