Kreitsauce's Musings

Having established that the creation of the universe and subsequent formation of the galaxies are all but impossible to have occurred by chance, we now turn our attention to the formation of the planets themselves. It turns out that getting planets to form naturally isn’t very easy after all. There was a time when planets were supposed to have blasted out of the Sun as the result of another passing star, but anything blasted or sucked off of the Sun would have fallen back into the Sun as soon as the other star passed. That’s gravity again for you; always making a mess of things! So scientists turned to “cold accretion”, postulating that planets could form as dust from a forming solar system began to stick together, form dust bunnies, then “planetesimals”, then eventually establish their own gravity which began pulling more planetesimals together until eventually a whole planet was formed. This is supposedly how the inner planets of our solar system formed.

Oh, but there’s a problem here, and it’s a whopper! How do you get that much dust to stick together? How does that dust turn into the the rock and iron of modern planetesimals? Why don’t cosmic “dust bunnies” form in space today? The answer is that space dust doesn’t turn into dust bunnies, and planetesimals don’t play nice when they meet each other. These meteorites and their kin cruise around the solar system at a cool 100,000 miles per hour, and, when they hit each other, they either bounce off or shatter each other. No planets. No us.

But, one may argue, could not their speed relative to each other be much slower, such as the rubble that makes up the rings of Saturn? That’s a great question, but the rubble around Saturn is not collecting; the chunks of rock and dust around Saturn simply bounce off of each other.

Well, what of the gas giants and ice planets then? Surely we can come up with a way for them to work out? Not a chance. If dust has a hard time sticking together, how do you think gas molecules will handle things? Not very well, as you can most likely imagine, since gasses simply do not “stick” to anything. I know there have been simulations demonstrating the formation of gas giants, but those simulations begin with a “gravitational instability.” The simulation was designed to create planets, something evolutionists don’t believe in. The ice planets are supposed to have formed as ice crystals sticking together, but there’s not as much matter out there and no model can bring about their existence so quickly. Other models assume they formed closer to the sun and then moved further away, but you still run into that pesky problem of getting things to stick together. Back to the drawing board!

Tags: big bang, chance, cmbr, cosmology, galaxies, hartnett, inflation, star formation
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So we’ve already talked about the singularity pseudoscience. What happens after that? Well, I’m glad you asked that, because now the story gets even better! By the time we’re through talking about galaxy and star formation, stories about wolves eating grandmothers only to be killed by friendly woodsmen will seem tragically commonplace and dull. Now, where was I….. Oh,yes! The singularity had just finished causing the strangely uniform inflation to expand the universe and produce antimatter-free matter, when it turned to its next task: the creation of galaxies and stars….

The question is, once the gas particles in the universe begin expanding, how do you get them to start collapsing all over the universe without creating a bunch of black holes? In other words, assuming you can get the expansion to stop and the collapsing to start, how do you keep galaxies from collapsing completely? Galaxies won’t form naturally unless the matter begins to collect, and the only thing strong enough to collect the matter is gravity, which shouldn’t be able to work thanks to the supposedly uniform inflation I had mentioned in the last post.  Of course, once galaxies begin to form courtesy of gravity, they ought to just keep collapsing in on themselves. What has to step in to keep the galaxies from just shrinking into really big black holes? The plot thickens……

Steven Hawking, in his book The Universe in a Nutshell postulated that dark matter did it. Not just any dark matter, though. His very special brand of magical dark matter formed on a brane world parallel to our own. And I thought I had a big imagination! So far, brane worlds and dark matter (at least dark matter on the order Hawking is talking about) is purely theoretical. No science here so far!

Maybe that’s why Hawking has put galaxy formation on his list of unexplained mysteries in his books published in 1988, 2001, and 2002. J. Trefil wrote in his The Dark Side of the Universe: “There shouldn’t be galaxies out there at all, and even if there are galaxies, they shouldn’t be grouped together the way they are….It is one of the thorniest problems in cosmology.” Marcus Chown, in his article “Let there Be Light” (February 1998 edition of New Scientist) quoted NASA scientists as saying: “We have no direct evidence of how galaxies were formed or how galaxies evolved, whether they formed from aggregations of smaller units or from subdivisions of large ones.” Their problem is that, at best, the Big Bang theory gives us a mass of expanding gas, and that is all.

Of course, then there’s the formation of stars, where we have the same problem with gravity producing more black holes and homogenous gas not wanting to collapse at all. But wait! There’s more! Stars are supposed to have formed, at least in one theory, in hot gaseous clouds vaguely referred to as “star-forming regions.” The problem? Hot gas clouds are more likely to disperse than collapse, so I have a hard time believing that anything like what we see today is actually capable of producing stars. Sure, there are stars in those regions, but that doesn’t mean the stars formed there. They aren’t necessarily new stars. Who honestly cares if stars currently surrounded by vast gas and dust clouds are sucking those clouds in? Any star would suck gas and dust into itself because of gravity. For all we know the stars are old! Lada and Shu wrote and article for Science in 1990, saying: “We have not yet been able to unambiguously detect the collapse of a molecular cloud core or the infall of circumstellar material onto an embryonic star.” No proof there, guys.

This is the second part in a series on the Big Bang. Millions and billions of years have gone by in this little bedtime story, and yet I don’t see any reason for believing a word of it. There’s not one shred of proof, and the objections are virtually insurmountable. I’d rather believe that the cow jumped over the moon than believe this rot, because my “willful suspension of disbelief” has its limits. Just ask my wife about how I felt about “robot heaven” in Transformers 2.

Tags: big bang, chance, cmbr, cosmology, galaxies, hartnett, inflation, star formation
Posted in Science | | 8141 Comment »http://kreitsauce.renewingminds.com/2009/10/17/bedtime-stories-about-the-beginning/Bedtime+Stories+About+the+Beginning2009-10-17+07%3A00%3A52kreitsauce

In the beginning there was a singularity. Fortunately for all of us, it expanded (or exploded, depending on who you ask), and our universe is the result. Well, that’s how things would work if the evolutionists had their way. Oh, I know they prefer to use much more scientific terms, but I sometimes have to question why. The things they try so hard to prove using science actually have some very distinct scientific problems.

First of all, there’s the very existence of a singularity from which everything came from. Professor Steven Hawking writes the following in his work A Brief History of Time: “At the singularity, general relativity and all other physical laws would break down: one couldn’t predict what will come out of the singularity….This means that one might as well cut the big bang, and any events before it, out of the theory, because they can have no effect on what we observe.” Thanks, Doc. I’ll just set my bag o’ tools (the laws of physics) aside now because they won’t work in the Big Bang scenario. So what exactly makes this different from a miracle? Once one throws out physics, one is left with metaphysics, in which God is permitted.

The existence of a singularity isn’t the only miracle, however. There’s another great one that big bang cosmologists keep in their bag o’ tricks (since the bag o’ tools known as the “laws of physics” can’t help much here). There’s also inflation, which appears to have properties as varied and mysterious as pixie dust. You see, if inflation didn’t happen, the universe would have collapsed back into a singularity again thanks to a tool of ours known as gravitation. Fortunately, inflation was around to accelerate the expansion of the universe by a thousand billion billion billion times, all very smoothly of course. The Big Bang scenario also predicts the existence of magnetic monopoles, which have never been found, and a non-uniform cosmic microwave background radiation instead of the observed uniform CMBR we see today. Fortunately, we just sprinkle more of the pixie dust inflation and- presto!- the problem goes away. Well, sort of. Inflation is an ad hoc theory in that there is no evidence for its existence, and the inflation rate itself must have been very uniform and fine tuned in order for it to not have looked a lot like a really big, very destructive explosion. I wish I had that kind of faith, my evolutionary comrades.

Then there’s that pesky thing Einstein came up with, what was it? Oh, yeah. E=mc^{2 (which actually looks squared when I type it even though it just looks like a “2″ when I post)} . That’s mass-energy equivalence, meaning that matter and energy are interchangeable. Enough energy can produce matter, and matter can be converted into energy. When particles are created from energy, they are always created in matter/antimatter pairs. Electrons are created alongside anti-electrons (positrons), protons are created alongside anti-protons, neutrinos are created alongside anti-neutrinos, etc. Of course, when matter meets antimatter, the process is reversed. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other and you get a lot of energy. This means that if the Big Bang occurred, the matter formed from the energy of the Big Bang would have very quickly annihilated itself. No galaxies. No stars. No planets. No us. Fortunately, all observable matter in the universe is ordinary, boring ol’ matter. No antimatter galaxies, stars, planets, or people. Big Bang cosmologists try to get around this by saying that- by chance- a small amount (like the mass of the universe) of matter was still left over after the universe nearly annihilated itself, but that seems impossible based on everything we know. What mechanism was in place that skewed the laws of physics and gave existence a chance? None that we know of. It’s all based on assumptions and guesses.

I’d like to come back to the CMBR again. Predictions of the level of background radiation in the universe were way off. It was nearly uniformly 3 degrees kelvin, thanks to the constancy of starlight. I say it was nearly uniform because in 2003, WMAP discovered real variations in the CMBR. I say “real” here because its predecessor, COBE, discovered some years earlier that just turned out to be “white noise.” The problem is, the variations discovered work very nicely in a creationist cosmology, not a big bang cosmology. The Big Bang model predicts that the universe should be uniform, boundless, with no center. Instead, the variations indicated the existence of a cosmic “north and south pole”, and a cosmic “equator” of sorts. Creationists can easily explain this in a model involving the Milky Way positioned near the center of the universe, but such galactocentrism is unpleasant for evolutionists who assume that mankind is not special. Oops again!

Tags: big bang, chance, cmbr, cosmology, hartnett, inflation
Posted in Science | | 8092 Comments »http://kreitsauce.renewingminds.com/2009/10/09/of-singularities-and-pseudosciences/Of+Singularities+and+Pseudosciences2009-10-09+07%3A00%3A16kreitsauce

Perhaps the most abused factor in evolutionary theory is chance. It is invoked in nearly every aspect of big bang cosmology and Darwinian evolution, even though the average textbook doesn’t actually use the word. Oh, I know that they like to use phrases like “natural selection” and “genetic drift” when dealing with Darwinism, but there’s nothing else out there for the evolutionists to appeal to except for physics when it comes to Big Bang cosmology. It is necessary, of course, because there is no divine mover behind events, and everything that was, is, and will be is the result of Dawkins’ “Blind Watchmaker“. In the most extreme cases, evolutionists assert that anything is possible, even if “anything” is highly unlikely and may have had to occur or exist in one of the many universes they assume to exist. Since the universe (or multiverse) is so vast, everything has likely already occurred somewhere along the line. Hence, however unlikely it is that the universe we see came about on its own, it has obviously done so thanks to the wonders of sheer chance. To the minds of many, this is just one universe out of the infinite universes that are out there (wherever “there” is), and this may be just one iteration of an infinite progression of universes. We just happened to exist in a universe capable of supporting life. The scenario, however, is false. Anything and everything is not possible. Chance cannot, for instance, violate the laws of physics. That severely limits the potentialities of the wonderful world of chance. Therefore, evolutionists prefer to blend together chance and necessity. An object or process is determined to be necessary, and chance is used to fill in the gaps. How did life begin? Well, we know it exists, and we think we know how early earth would have looked, so just identify what is necessary for life to exist, throw in some “chance”, and add a dash of scientific jargon, and you’ve got yourself a working theory! Williams and Hartnett analyze this use of chance in their book Dismantling the Big Bang.

Williams and Hartnett point out that, for starters, chance is not a force. At all. Things may appear to happen randomly, but there are actually a complex set of forces at work. Anything above the quantum level moves according to Newtonian laws of motion. In a sense, “chance” and “necessity” are really describing the same thing: Physics. Necessity is limited to the certain results of the laws of physics. Chance refers to the possible results of the laws of physics. In this way, chance adds nothing to the party at all. One might question why anybody even invited it in the first place.

Secondly, Chance is dualistic in nature. Whenever you measure the probability something will occur, you must also measure the probability that it will not occur. I suppose there is technically a chance that the water vapor rising from my stove will concentrate into a point and burn a hole through my chest. However, there is a much, much greater chance that such an event will never occur. The chance it will not occur is so significant, no one is even concerned about this event taking place. So it ought to be when discussing chance and origins, because the numbers are no where near being in favor of evolution.

Thirdly, chance does not mean that every possibility is equally likely. Even if the universe is vast and has been around for billions of years, it is most certainly not truly infinite, else the Big Bang would be not necessary. Therefore, there are limits. All interaction in the real world will use up space and time. All interaction in the real world will use up energy. Actually, long periods of time going by will actually decrease the likelihood that anything will happen at all, thanks to our dear friend Entropy. It’s a gamble evolutionists try to take, but the odds always favor the house. Just as spending more money at a casino makes it more difficult to win, “spending” more energy early on in the game of existence makes it more difficult to bring our universe into the state it is in today. The universe would have to had scored an “early win”, which is again unlikely, even by evolutionist standards. Somehow, everything turned out just right for us, something skewed nature. And chance doesn’t really help us figure out what that something is.

Finally, Williams and Hartnett point out that chance can only be applied to events that can happen. Chance never makes things happen when they are physically impossible. Consider the “rogue gas” scenario above that burned a whole in my chest. It isn’t just unlikely. It’s impossible because gas molecules operate according to the aforementioned laws of motion. The actually probability of the event I described is therefore a whopping Zero. Chance cannot make impossible events possible.

Tags: big bang, chance, cosmology, hartnett
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