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Oldest galaxy yet found
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Jun 28, 2012 01:03:46   #
PNagy Loc: Missouri City, Texas
 
ngc1514 wrote:
PNagy wrote:

It also wouldn't sell, because the faithful base their beliefs on not reasoning, whatsoever, yet love to declare that reason leads them to the only possible conclusion: God had to be behind it all.Their basic reasoning is a popularized version of Thomas Aquinas' ontological argument. Everything had to have a cause, but causes cannot regress to infinity, because that is absurd, therefore there had to be an ultimate cause: God.

Never mind that the argument falls apart logically, because it exempts God from the very first premise. Never mind that postulating the absurdity of infinity is a judgement without sound foundation. They will cling to it nevertheless, only the ordinary faithful, being unaware of Thomas Aquinas, merely state that things are too complex not to have been planned by an intelligent Being. The intelligent Being, of course, being the greatest complexity of all, somehow does not need a cause. Now that is absurdity.
br It also wouldn't sell, because the faithful ba... (show quote)

The claim that everything has a cause remains an unsupported assertion based only on an argument from ignorance. It boils down to "gosh, I can't imagine anything coming into existence without a cause so, obviously, everything MUST have a cause." Argument from ignorance.

It also ignores the fact that the whole concept of causality was thrown out the window when quantum theory came through the door. Quantum mechanics shows that things happen - radioactive decay of an atom, the creation of virtual particle pairs and the whole concept of non-locality - without a cause. The old deterministic idea of causality has been replaced by a probabilistic one. A will not definitely cause B, but there is some probability it might.

What caused god? A fluctuation in the quantum vacuum. The same thing that might have popped our entire universe into existence.
quote=PNagy br It also wouldn't sell, because th... (show quote)


I think our universe might be nothing more than a white hole on the opposite end of a black hole in an antimatter universe.

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Jun 28, 2012 18:45:10   #
ngc1514 Loc: Atlanta, Ga., Lancaster, Oh. and Stuart, Fl.
 
Interesting idea, but not one that has been seriously proposed. A black hole only has three independent physical properties: mass, charge and momentum. Not sure how you'd turn antimatter into our matter.

It was thought for awhile, back in the early days of high energy astrophysics (the 1960s), that quasars might be the other end of a wormhole from a black hole. Unfortunately, quasars have been identified as active galactic nuclei and not the outflow from a black hole.

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Jun 30, 2012 23:11:09   #
ngc1514 Loc: Atlanta, Ga., Lancaster, Oh. and Stuart, Fl.
 
Artsmith wrote:
Serious question, how is it possible to determine the age of these galaxies just by seeing them in a telescope?

Artsmith wrote:
Serious question, how is it possible to determine the age of these galaxies just by seeing them in a telescope?

I promised you an answer to your question and finally got back home from 2 weeks in Florida (which was a LOT cooler than Atlanta or Grayson!) - driving up I-75 between Valdosta and Macon the car's thermometer got up to 116 degrees while I was driving at 75MPH. That's HOT!

It's not an easy question to answer, but I would be happy to give it a shot if you are still interested.

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