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[BIG snip] Santorum's ad and his Op-Ed, meant to mock Gingrich, in reality can only distinctly not help Santorum's struggling campaign. Gingrich will surely make the inevitable -- and correct -- connection between Santorum's ad and a serious attack on the Reagan space legacy -- and the dreams of America itself. "We'll continue our quest in space…. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue," said President Reagan that tragic January night. Well, no they won't. Not if Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have anything to say about it. "I promise," says Santorum. Worse, whether Santorum's staff understands it...

Are there any other fans of FABRIC OF THE COSMOS out there? I found it to be perhaps the most fascinating science show ever produced. The information in the show is nothing less than stunning and definitely changed my view of the universe. Some of the information is so stunning that it is hard to comprehend. But guess what? Even physicists have a hard time getting their minds around it. And an oatmeal cookie to the first person who can post who the major backer of this series is.

In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and some thorny. The atoms themselves were taken as givens. In the nineteenth century, scientists discovered that the chemical properties of atoms repeat periodically (and created the periodic table to reflect this fact), but the origins of such patterns remained mysterious. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists learned that the properties of an atom are determined by the number and placement of its electrons, the subatomic...

There is extensive evidence from physics for a beginning and fine-tuning of the universe. When the complementary nature of these insights is seen, it provides compelling evidence for a transcendent, intelligent Creator. Cosmic Origins features eight world-class physicists talking about modern physics and God. They include Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias (who discovered the background radiation from the Big Bang); Templeton Prize winners John Polkinghorne (Cambridge) and Michael Heller (Vatican Observatory); Owen Gingerich (Harvard); Lisa Randall (Harvard); Jennifer Wiseman (NASA); and narrated by Stephen Barr (University of Delaware).

I hope that it's okay to post this in the Religion forum!? I have been thinking about this for quite some time now and have come to my own conclusion and that is .. GOD HAS TO EXIST and not only does he exist .. He is the main argument Against the now popular 'Multi-verse' scenario! Scientists from many different areas are pondering an infinite number of universes to explain our existence. They talk about 'string theories' and 'infinite universes' where anything and everything can and does exist! An example may be that in one universe, I am alive but...

Three researchers behind the discovery that our Universe's expansion is accelerating have been awarded this year's Nobel prize for physics. Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the US and Brian Schmidt of Australia will divide the prize. The trio studied what are called Type 1a supernovae, determining that more distant objects seem to move faster. Their observations suggest that not only is the Universe expanding, its expansion is relentlessly speeding up. Prof Perlmutter of the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded half the 10m Swedish krona (£940,000) prize, with Prof Schmidt of the Australian National University and Prof Riess...

Dartmouth College theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser has an interesting essay this week which deals with the possibility of life around the universe and, more to the point, what such life might be like. It was spurred by the recent discovery of one of the most promising possible Earth-like worlds yet, orbiting in the “Goldilocks zone� of its parent star, where water could exist in liquid form. As more and more of these planets are identified, scientists will be focusing their search for possible forms of intelligent life in those regions of the galaxy.But if life exists, Gleiser wonders, would it...

Big as it is, our universe may be just one of many, all floating in a nearly unfathomable "multiverse," scientists say. Problem is, there's been no way to test the idea. Now, though, physicists say they've devised a way to detect "bruises" from our cosmos's purported collisions with other universes. The international team has created a new computer algorithm to hunt for such irregularities in our universe, which they say would be disk-shaped—think of the temporary, circular flattening that happens when one beach ball bumps into another. Because the multiverse would likely have expanded so fast that its universes would...

This is a video of two deep space experiments using the Hubble space telescope. First, Hubble was pointed to a "dark" spot in space and left to collect data for 10 days to see if anything was there. The second is to use this data and the Red Shift to create a 3D image. The result is presented here. To me, pretty amazing stuff. http://www.flixxy.com/hubble-ultra-deep-field-3d.htm

Brilliant, But Distant: Most Far-Flung Known Quasar Offers Glimpse into Early UniverseA gargantuan black hole has been spotted voraciously devouring material just 770 million years after the big bangBy John Matson June 29, 2011 GLOWING GOBBLER: An artist's conception of a quasar ionizing the hydrogen gas surrounding it.Image: Gemini Observatory Peering far across space and time, astronomers have located a luminous beacon aglow when the universe was still in its infancy. That beacon, a bright astrophysical object known as a quasar, shines with the luminosity of 63 trillion suns as gas falling into a supermassive black holes compresses, heats up...

Scientists hoping to puzzle out how the Universe began will find a long-sought theoretical particle — or rule out that it exists — by the end of 2012, the director of the world's largest atom smasher predicted Monday. Rolf Heuer, director of the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, said his confidence was based on the latest findings from the $10 billion proton collider under the Swiss-French border. "I would say we can settle the question, the Shakespearean question — 'to be or not to be' — end of next year," he told reporters at a major physics conference in...

Astronomers have discovered the largest and oldest mass of water ever detected in the universe — a gigantic, 12-billion-year-old cloud harboring 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. The cloud of water vapor surrounds a supermassive black hole called a quasar located 12 billion light-years from Earth. The discovery shows that water has been prevalent in the universe for nearly its entire existence, researchers said. "Because the light we are seeing left this quasar more than 12 billion years ago, we are seeing water that was present only some 1.6 billion years after the beginning of...

Victor Stenger, a retired physics prof from the University of Hawaii, has given us two books that explain both atheism and "multiverses", and behold, they are one. Few other proponents of multiverses are quite as forthcoming with their logic, but clearly something besides data must motivate the science of multiverses, because by definition multiverses are not observable. Stenger makes the connection explicit, whereas Hawking or Susskind is a little more coy with their metaphysics. Multiverse-theory is designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, and that is to defend atheism. It makes no predictions, it gives no insight, it provides...

Astronomers have found a nascent star 750 light years from earth that shoots colossal jets of water -- a cosmic fire hose -- out its poles in bullet-like pulses. In a process that almost defies adjectives and analogies, each jet of water is the equivalent of a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second and the speed of the jet is the equivalent of 80 times the muzzle velocity of an AK-47 assault rifle. The blast creates huge shockwaves around the star and the process may be responsible for sprinkling the universe with water. And...

Is an Adjacent Universe Causing the Dark Flow of Hundred of Millions of Stars at the Edge of the Observable Universe? Or, Might It Be Something ElseBack in the Middle Ages, maps showed terrifying images of sea dragons at the boundaries of the known world. Today, scientists have observed strange new motion at the very limits of the known universe -- kind of where you'd expect to find new things, but they still didn't expect this. A huge swathe of galactic clusters seem to be heading to a cosmic hotspot and nobody knows why. The unexplained motion has hundreds of...

That's scientists' latest estimate for our galaxy alone, based on Kepler data Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals. These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added. These new calculations are based on data from the Kepler space telescope, which in February wowed the globe by revealing more than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs when a world transits or...

Today, looking out across a seemingly boundless cosmos filled with an unimaginable variety of exotic objects, it's easy to forget that the Universe we currently admire is the product of a violent event that occurred 13.75 billion years ago. As we know, the leading theory for universal birth is the Big Bang, where everything came from nothing, in a single energetic burst of inexplicable creation. So, if we turn back the clock back 13.75 billion years, what would we see? My instinct would be to say "energy, the Universe was filled with pure, violent energy," but according to some mind-bending...

Modern cosmology theory holds that our universe may be just one in a vast collection of universes known as the multiverse. MIT physicist Alan Guth has suggested that new universes (known as “pocket universes”) are constantly being created, but they cannot be seen from our universe. In this view, “nature gets a lot of tries — the universe is an experiment that’s repeated over and over again, each time with slightly different physical laws, or even vastly different physical laws,” says Jaffe. Some of these universes would collapse instants after forming; in others, the forces between particles would be so...

Our Universe is an enormous place; that’s no secret. What is up for discussion, however, is just how enormous it is. And new research suggests it’s a whopper – over 250 times the size of our observable universe. Currently, cosmologists believe the Universe takes one of three possible shapes: It is flat, like a Euclidean plane, and spatially infinite.It is open, or curved like a saddle, and spatially infinite.It is closed, or curved like a sphere, and spatially finite. While most current data favors a flat universe, cosmologists have yet to come to a consensus. In a paper recently submitted...

Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at Harvard, made the claim that we are alone in the universe after an analysis of the 500 planets discovered so far showed all were hostile to life. Dr Smith said the extreme conditions found so far on planets discovered outside out Solar System are likely to be the norm, and that the hospitable conditions on Earth could be unique. “We have found that most other planets and solar systems are wildly different from our own. They are very hostile to life as we know it,” he said. He pointed to stars such as HD10180,...

Enjoy. I found this by reading down to the bottom of Greg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN.comClick on the source link then click play. Then push the blue square over to the left. Slowly drag to the right and let your mind take it all in. Try not to fall into a thought-induced catatonic state, especially if you are at work.

Best Art in the Universe? Hubble Space Telescope's Amazing Pics From 2010 (Dec. 15) -- You might think that taking highly detailed photographs of the darkest corners of the universe would be a purely scientific job. Turns out, there's an art to it. For the past 20 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been orbiting the planet and wowing earthlings with breathtaking images of outer space, from jaw-dropping pictures of clusters of newborn stars to fantastic photos of colliding galaxies. But it's not just Hubble's cutting-edge optics that are responsible for these stunning photographs. Behind each image is the hard...

Latest research deflates the idea that the Universe cycles for eternity.Our view of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles — and even triangles — but that doesn't mean we're seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background — the radiation left over from the Big Bang — might, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our Universe.

The night sky may be a lot starrier than we thought. A study suggests the universe could have triple the number of stars scientists previously calculated. The new estimate is 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's 300 sextillion. The study questions a key assumption that astronomers often use: that most galaxies have the same properties as our Milky Way. And that's creating a bit of a stink among astronomers who want a more orderly cosmos.

Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang? The current cosmological consensus is that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But a legendary physicist says he's found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos. The Big Bang model holds that everything that now comprises the universe was once concentrated in a single point of near-infinite density. Before this singularity exploded and the universe began, there was absolutely nothing - indeed, it's not clear whether one can even use the term "before" in reference to a pre-Big-Bang cosmos, as time itself may...

If you "lived inside" a hologram, you could tell by measuring the blurring. Fermilab is building a interferometer to test space time for holographic blurring. Possible consequence of holography Hypothesis: observable correlations are encoded on light sheets and limited by information capacity of a Planck wavelength carrier (“Planck information flux” limit) Predicts uncertainty in position at Planck diffraction scale

An attempt to show the scale of things from the tiniest to the galactic. Wow.

<p>The universe was in chaos after the Big Bang kick-started the cosmos, a new study suggests.</p> <p>While one might expect the explosion that began the universe to wreak some havoc, scientists mean something very specific when they refer to chaos. In a chaotic system, small changes can cause large-scale effects. A commonly cited example is the "butterfly effect" — the idea that a butterfly beating its wing in Brazil can bring about a tornado in Texas.</p>

Has physics done away with God? A newly release book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow says, “Yes.” What is a Jewish or Christian believer to make of this? Is the Creator now out of a job? The short answer is (unsurprisingly) no: the ideas propounded in Hawking’s book constitute no threat whatever to the Jewish and Christian doctrine of Creation. The idea that Hawking is now touting is not new—in fact, within the fast-moving world of modern physics it is fairly old. My first introduction to it was reading a very elegant theoretical paper entitled “Creation of Universes from...

Could the elusive Higgs boson finally be in sight? Earlier this summer, physicist Tommaso Dorigo of the University of Padua wrote about talk of a tentative hint of the Higgs at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result," wrote Dorigo. The blog post was low on detail but...

There's no denying that Stephen Hawking is intellectually bold as well as physically heroic. And in his latest book, the renowned physicist mounts an audacious challenge to the traditional religious belief in the divine creation of the universe. According to Hawking, the laws of physics, not the will of God, provide the real explanation as to how life on Earth came into being. The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws 'because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.' Unfortunately, while Hawking's argument is being hailed as...

God did not create the universe, world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book that aims to banish a divine creator from physics.Hawking says in his book "The Grand Design" that, given the existence of gravity, "the universe can and will create itself from nothing," according to an excerpt published Thursday in The Times of London."Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist," he writes in the excerpt."It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the universe going," he...

RICHARD FEYNMAN, Nobel laureate and physicist extraordinaire, called it a “magic number” and its value “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics”. The number he was referring to, which goes by the symbol alpha and the rather more long-winded name of the fine-structure constant, is magic indeed. If it were a mere 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars would not be able to sustain the nuclear reactions that synthesise carbon and oxygen atoms. One consequence would be that squishy, carbon-based life would not exist. Why alpha takes on the precise value it does, so delicately fine-tuned for...

A "galactic lens" has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever. Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos. Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe. Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding. It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say. The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa's...

In this publicity image released by Miss Universe Organization, the 2010 Miss Universe Contestants pose along with last year's winner for the official group photo at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2010. The Miss Universe 2010 competition that will air live from Mandalay Bay on the NBC Television Network at 9 PM ET, Aug. 23. (AP Photo/Miss Universe Organization LP, LLLP)

HD 209458b, shown in red in an artist's conception, is the first confirmed "cometary planet," experts say. Image courtesy G. Bacon, NASA/ESAAn alien planet orbits so close to its star that its atmosphere is being blasted away, forming a gaseous, comet-like tail, astronomers announced Thursday. (Related: "Odd Star Sheds Comet-like Tail.") About 153 light-years from Earth, planet HD 209458b hugs its star so tightly that the planet's atmosphere is likely a scorching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,093 degrees Celsius) an a year passes in just 3.5 days—making Mercury's 88-day orbit seem downright leisurely.That tight orbit also means this gas giant—meaning...

A radical reformulation of quantum mechanics suggests that the universe has a set destiny and its pre-existing fate reaches back in time to influence the past. It could explain the origin of life, dark energy and solve other cosmic conundrums.The universe has a destiny—and this set fate could be reaching backwards in time and combining with influences from the past to shape the present. It’s a mind-bending claim, but some cosmologists now believe that a radical reformulation of quantum mechanics in which the future can affect the past could solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including how life arose....

Physicists have long wondered why the universe exists when matter and anti-matter particles obliterate each other on contact. But new data from a particle accelerator in the United States suggests a reason. The tests showed that when anti-protons and protons collide, the resulting new particles show a one per cent skew toward matter over anti-matter. Over a long period of time, this characteristic of the universe could explain why matter has come to dominate over anti-matter. "Many of us felt goose bumps when we saw the result," said Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a physicist at the University of Manchester in the United...

According to my psychoanalyst, I have issues. She believes our nation's dichotomous political climate and divisive political dialogue is affecting my mental state and I'm beginning to show a "disconnect." It's disconcerting to confess that you're coming unhinged -- to admit you're losing touch with reality and are living in some loony parallel universe. Just this month, famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking expressed his belief that humans are capable of time travel. No kidding. Welcome to my world. My therapist says my anger issues are revealing, but it's not a personality disorder that's got me. It's not an addictive disorder because...

A supermassive black hole sits inside the galaxy Centaurus A, seen in an artist's conception. Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe.In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn't collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a "white hole"...

Scientists celebrated at the world's biggest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva on Tuesday as they started colliding particles at record energy levels mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang, opening a new era in the quest for the secrets of the universe. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had unleashed the unprecedented bursts of energy on the third attempt, as beams of protons thrust around the 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) accelerator collided at close to the speed of light. "This is physics in the making, the beginning of a new era, we...

You have probably heard about the multiverse--the idea that the universe is really a large number of universes. The multiverse helps to explain why our particular universe seems so special. Our universe seems to be a finely tuned machine and the evolution of life would require low probability events. Is our universe special? The multiverse helps to deflect such thinking. If there is a large number of universes, then perhaps each has a different set of natural laws. And perhaps intelligent life can only be supported by a very particular set of laws. So the only life forms that would...

GENEVA (Reuters) – Dark matter, which scientists believe makes up 25 percent of the universe but whose existence has never been proven, could be detected by the giant particle collider at CERN, the research center's head said Monday. Rolf-Dieter Heuer told a news conference some evidence for the matter may emerge even in the shorter term from mega-power particle collisions aimed at recreating conditions at the "Big Bang" birth of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. "We don't know what dark matter is," said Heuer, Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Swiss-French border near Geneva....

Atom smashers at a U.S. national lab have produced temperatures not seen since the Big Bang — 7.2 trillion degrees, or 250,000 times hotter than the sun's interior — in work re-creating the universe's first microseconds. The results come from the 2.4-mile-wide Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Department of Energy's Brookhaven (N.Y.) National Laboratory. Since 2000, scientists there have hurtled gold atoms together at nearly the speed of light. These smash-ups heat bubbles smaller than the center of an atom to about 40 times hotter than the center of an imploding supernova. Scientists say the results have given them...

When a Russian Cosmonaut returned from a space flight he said that he hadn’t seen God out there. An American Astronaut, one who was a Christian, was once asked if he had met God while in space. He answered with full confidence, “I would have, if I had taken off my space suit.” These are not just two contradictory answers to the same question. They are two totally different understandings of the word God and what is meant by it. The Russian Cosmonaut, an atheist, could not believe God existed unless he saw him with his own eyes. Whereas the...

WASHINGTON – NASA's new planet-hunting telescope has found two mystery objects that are too hot to be planets and too small to be stars. The Kepler Telescope, launched in March, discovered the two new heavenly bodies, each circling its own star. Telescope chief scientist Bill Borucki of NASA said the objects are thousands of degrees hotter than the stars they circle. That means they probably aren't planets. They are bigger and hotter than planets in our solar system, including dwarf planets. "The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think of in our imagination," said Jon Morse, head...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has reached back 13.2 billion years -- farther than ever before in time and space -- to reveal a "primordial population" of galaxies never seen before. "The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe," the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement released Tuesday. "This makes Hubble a powerful 'time machine' that allows astronomers to see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago -- just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang," the institute said...

"Everyone loves a good road movie, whether it's Hope and Crosby or Fonda and Hopper. But the scope of those films pales in comparison to the ground covered by the Hayden Planetarium's new video, The Known Universe. The video starts in Tibet and zooms out through time and space until it shows well, the entire known universe. The video, created for the new Rubin Art Museum exhibit Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, uses over a decade of data collected by researchers at the planetarium. Called the Digital Universe Atlas, the data encompasses the...

The typical Hollywood action hero skirts death for a living. Time and again, scores of bad guys shoot at him from multiple directions but miss by a hair. Cars explode just a fraction of a second too late for the fireball to catch him before he finds cover. And friends come to the rescue just before a villain’s knife slits his throat. If any one of those things happened just a little differently, the hero would be hasta la vista, baby. Yet even if we have not seen the movie before, something tells us that he will make it to...

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...