Vindicated
Well-Known Member
This essay is in response to the God and Evolution debates.
It all started back in 335 BC, when the Greek philosopher Aristotle stated that objects move due to the action of forces. It was also Aristotle who started the tradition of using logic to come to a conclusion. In addition, he believed there existed five forces:
Fire, which is hot and dry.
Earth, which is cold and dry.
Air, which is hot and wet.
Water, which is cold and wet.
Aether, which is the divine substance that makes up the heavenly spheres and heavenly bodies (stars and planets).
He also believed Women were colder then Men and therefore a lower form on life. So as brilliant as he was, he didn't get everything right.
In 580 BC, Pythagorus stated that planets orbit in perfect crystalline spheres.
In AD 150, Ptolemy suggested that planets move in epicycles and placed the Earth at the center of the universe.
In 1532 Copernicus completed his work on the manuscript of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, which placed the sun at the center of the universe -- which flew in the face of his predecessor Ptolemy. Despite urging by his closest friends, he resisted openly publishing his views. It wasn't until his death that his assistance published his work.
In 1609 Johannes Kepler came on the scene. He was a mystic that believed that the underlying structures of the universe was built from perfect geometric forms. Copernicus caused a stir when he suggested that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, which implied that humans were not the most important beings. Kepler even accepted Copernicus' model that planets orbit the sun, but added that they did so in perfect circular orbits.
In AD 1640 Galilee pointed a telescope to the sky and discovered that the largest planet Jupiter had a moon orbiting around it. This gave irrefutable proof that Ptolemy was wrong and Copernicus was on to something. The church put Galilee under house arrest, because they didn't want this dangerous idea to become mainstream.
In AD 1650, Isaac Newton helped to invent calculus, explained gravity and identified the constituents of colors of white light. His three laws of motion describe why a golf ball follows a curving path, why we are pressed against the side of a cornering car and why we feel the force through a baseball bat as it strikes the ball.
Newton's Laws of Motion:
First Law: bodies move in a straight line with a uniform speed, or remain stationary, unless a force acts to change their speed or direction.
Second Law: Forces produce accelerations that are in proportion to the mass of a body (F = ma).
Third Law: Every action of a force produces an equal and opposite reaction.
Using these laws, he then said, "Every object in the universe attracts every other object [...] proportional to each object's mass [...]"
In 1905 we get Einstein who publishes his Theory of Relativity in the early part of the 20th century. This is one of the most significant scientific advances of our time. Although the concept of relativity was not introduced by Einstein, his major contribution was the recognition that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant and an absolute physical boundary for motion. This does not have a major impact on a person's day-to-day life since we travel at speeds much slower than light speed. For objects travelling near light speed, however, the theory of relativity states that objects will move slower and shorten in length from the point of view of an observer on Earth. Einstein also derived the famous equation, E = mc2, which reveals the equivalence of mass and energy.
When Einstein applied his theory to gravitational fields, he derived the "curved space-time continuum" which depicts the dimensions of space and time as a two-dimensional surface where massive objects create valleys and dips in the surface. This aspect of relativity explained the phenomena of light bending around the sun, predicted black holes as well as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) -- a discovery rendering fundamental anomalies in the classic Steady-State hypothesis. For his work on relativity, the photoelectric effect and blackbody radiation, Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921.
Einsteins theories of both special and general relativity have been confirmed to be accurate to a very high degree over recent years, and the data has been shown to corroborate many key predictions; the most famous being the solar eclipse of 1919 bearing testimony that the light of stars is indeed deflected by the sun as the light passes near the sun on its way to earth. The total solar eclipse allowed astronomers to -- for the first time -- analyse starlight near the edge of the sun, which had been previously inaccessible to observers due to the intense brightness of the sun. It also predicted the rate at which two neutron stars orbiting one another will move toward each other. When this phenomenon was first documented, general relativity proved itself accurate to better than a trillionth of a percent precision, thus making it one of the best confirmed principles in all of physics.
Applying the principle of general relativity to our cosmos reveals that it is not static. Edwin Hubble in 1923 discovered that all very distant galaxies and clusters have an apparent velocity directly away from our vantage point: the farther away, the higher the apparent velocity. This leads us to conclude that if the distance between galaxy clusters is increasing today, everything must have been closer together in the past. While Edwin's work describes the evolution of the Universe since the moment of the big bang, it does not make any predictions as to what caused it.
Today we know that the expansion of the universe occurred some 13.7 billion years ago. Modern Physicist like Steven Hawkings, Brian Grene, Ashoke Sen, Chris Hull, Paul Townsend, Michael Duff, John Schwarz, and Edward Witten are working out the details of a new theory. The hope isn't to confirm the big bang (that's already been done), but to merge the theory of quantum mechanics and gravity together to form a new theory called "The Theory of Everything."
Maybe, just maybe, if we can work out single model that explains the known forces of nature we'll finally have the tools to work out the real question that has plagued us for over a millennia: Why Are We Here!?
It all started back in 335 BC, when the Greek philosopher Aristotle stated that objects move due to the action of forces. It was also Aristotle who started the tradition of using logic to come to a conclusion. In addition, he believed there existed five forces:
Fire, which is hot and dry.
Earth, which is cold and dry.
Air, which is hot and wet.
Water, which is cold and wet.
Aether, which is the divine substance that makes up the heavenly spheres and heavenly bodies (stars and planets).
He also believed Women were colder then Men and therefore a lower form on life. So as brilliant as he was, he didn't get everything right.
In 580 BC, Pythagorus stated that planets orbit in perfect crystalline spheres.
In AD 150, Ptolemy suggested that planets move in epicycles and placed the Earth at the center of the universe.
In 1532 Copernicus completed his work on the manuscript of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, which placed the sun at the center of the universe -- which flew in the face of his predecessor Ptolemy. Despite urging by his closest friends, he resisted openly publishing his views. It wasn't until his death that his assistance published his work.
In 1609 Johannes Kepler came on the scene. He was a mystic that believed that the underlying structures of the universe was built from perfect geometric forms. Copernicus caused a stir when he suggested that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, which implied that humans were not the most important beings. Kepler even accepted Copernicus' model that planets orbit the sun, but added that they did so in perfect circular orbits.
In AD 1640 Galilee pointed a telescope to the sky and discovered that the largest planet Jupiter had a moon orbiting around it. This gave irrefutable proof that Ptolemy was wrong and Copernicus was on to something. The church put Galilee under house arrest, because they didn't want this dangerous idea to become mainstream.
In AD 1650, Isaac Newton helped to invent calculus, explained gravity and identified the constituents of colors of white light. His three laws of motion describe why a golf ball follows a curving path, why we are pressed against the side of a cornering car and why we feel the force through a baseball bat as it strikes the ball.
Newton's Laws of Motion:
First Law: bodies move in a straight line with a uniform speed, or remain stationary, unless a force acts to change their speed or direction.
Second Law: Forces produce accelerations that are in proportion to the mass of a body (F = ma).
Third Law: Every action of a force produces an equal and opposite reaction.
Using these laws, he then said, "Every object in the universe attracts every other object [...] proportional to each object's mass [...]"
In 1905 we get Einstein who publishes his Theory of Relativity in the early part of the 20th century. This is one of the most significant scientific advances of our time. Although the concept of relativity was not introduced by Einstein, his major contribution was the recognition that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant and an absolute physical boundary for motion. This does not have a major impact on a person's day-to-day life since we travel at speeds much slower than light speed. For objects travelling near light speed, however, the theory of relativity states that objects will move slower and shorten in length from the point of view of an observer on Earth. Einstein also derived the famous equation, E = mc2, which reveals the equivalence of mass and energy.
When Einstein applied his theory to gravitational fields, he derived the "curved space-time continuum" which depicts the dimensions of space and time as a two-dimensional surface where massive objects create valleys and dips in the surface. This aspect of relativity explained the phenomena of light bending around the sun, predicted black holes as well as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) -- a discovery rendering fundamental anomalies in the classic Steady-State hypothesis. For his work on relativity, the photoelectric effect and blackbody radiation, Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921.
Einsteins theories of both special and general relativity have been confirmed to be accurate to a very high degree over recent years, and the data has been shown to corroborate many key predictions; the most famous being the solar eclipse of 1919 bearing testimony that the light of stars is indeed deflected by the sun as the light passes near the sun on its way to earth. The total solar eclipse allowed astronomers to -- for the first time -- analyse starlight near the edge of the sun, which had been previously inaccessible to observers due to the intense brightness of the sun. It also predicted the rate at which two neutron stars orbiting one another will move toward each other. When this phenomenon was first documented, general relativity proved itself accurate to better than a trillionth of a percent precision, thus making it one of the best confirmed principles in all of physics.
Applying the principle of general relativity to our cosmos reveals that it is not static. Edwin Hubble in 1923 discovered that all very distant galaxies and clusters have an apparent velocity directly away from our vantage point: the farther away, the higher the apparent velocity. This leads us to conclude that if the distance between galaxy clusters is increasing today, everything must have been closer together in the past. While Edwin's work describes the evolution of the Universe since the moment of the big bang, it does not make any predictions as to what caused it.
Today we know that the expansion of the universe occurred some 13.7 billion years ago. Modern Physicist like Steven Hawkings, Brian Grene, Ashoke Sen, Chris Hull, Paul Townsend, Michael Duff, John Schwarz, and Edward Witten are working out the details of a new theory. The hope isn't to confirm the big bang (that's already been done), but to merge the theory of quantum mechanics and gravity together to form a new theory called "The Theory of Everything."
Maybe, just maybe, if we can work out single model that explains the known forces of nature we'll finally have the tools to work out the real question that has plagued us for over a millennia: Why Are We Here!?
