Futurecraft's Philosophical Discussion Thread

[Archduke Daynel, PhD]

Also, the earth actually is the center of the universe.

But believing that just makes you an idiot.

No actually he's right, in the same way that any point on the surface of a football is the middle of said surface. As I said, everything everywhere is the center of the universe, including the Earth.

[CMA]

Do you really not understand that religions are not all equal?

Believing that makes you a bad person, for exactly the same reasons believing races aren't equal makes you a bad person.

Also, the earth actually is the center of the universe.

But believing that just makes you an idiot.

Look up the axis of evil in cosmology. It's in the Wikipedia article on Cosmic Background Radiation or whatever.

[Prototype]

Actually, I did genuinely hear Brian Cox say, on television, that every point in space is the centre of the universe. It's a little cheaty, but seeing as we can only define the universe as what we know, it's not that unreasonable to say the earth is the centre of it.

[CMA]

Actually, I did genuinely hear Brian Cox say, on television, that every point in space is the centre of the universe. It's a little cheaty, but seeing as we can only define the universe as what we know, it's not that unreasonable to say the earth is the centre of it.

>Brian *
I could see that though. Like a 4th dimensional extrapolation of what Daynel said. Like the tesseracts black hole scene in Interstellar.

[Error]

Earth is the center of the known universe.

Because all we know has been observed from Earth.

Earth is not the center of the entire universe (to our knowledge). The entire universe may not even have a center.

[҉]

Look up the axis of evil in cosmology. It's in the Wikipedia article on Cosmic Background Radiation or whatever.

That sends you to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_mic ... _anomalies
Now I'm gonna be a hundred percent honest with you: there are a bunch of words in that paragraph that don't make any sense to me. But I can't see anything there that suggests the Earth is the center of the universe. If that's a flaw in my understanding of the vocabulary, feel free to explain it.

Actually, I did genuinely hear Brian Cox say, on television, that every point in space is the centre of the universe. It's a little cheaty, but seeing as we can only define the universe as what we know, it's not that unreasonable to say the earth is the centre of it.

Every point in the universe is the center of its own 'observable universe', because although the concept of the observable universe is useful for astronomers that phrase doesn't really mean much in absolute terms, as ultimately the contents of the observable universe are simply those that light has had time to reach you from. Obviously that depends on where you are, so while it is true that every point is indeed the center of a sphere that represents the observable universe from that point, that isn't really very useful information and, in the context of a discussion about religion, I really don't think that's what we're talking about.

This is far off-topic.

[Tell]

What has my thread become?

[CMA]

Look up the axis of evil in cosmology. It's in the Wikipedia article on Cosmic Background Radiation or whatever.

That sends you to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_mic ... _anomalies
Now I'm gonna be a hundred percent honest with you: there are a bunch of words in that paragraph that don't make any sense to me. But I can't see anything there that suggests the Earth is the center of the universe. If that's a flaw in my understanding of the vocabulary, feel free to explain it. :tongue:

Actually, I did genuinely hear Brian Cox say, on television, that every point in space is the centre of the universe. It's a little cheaty, but seeing as we can only define the universe as what we know, it's not that unreasonable to say the earth is the centre of it.

Every point in the universe is the center of its own 'observable universe', because although the concept of the observable universe is useful for astronomers that phrase doesn't really mean much in absolute terms, as ultimately the contents of the observable universe are simply those that light has had time to reach you from. Obviously that depends on where you are, so while it is true that every point is indeed the center of a sphere that represents the observable universe from that point, that isn't really very useful information and, in the context of a discussion about religion, I really don't think that's what we're talking about.

This is far off-topic.

"Even in the COBE map, it was observed that the quadrupole (l = 2, spherical harmonic) has a low amplitude compared to the predictions of the Big Bang. In particular, the quadrupole and octupole (l = 3) modes appear to have an unexplained alignment with each other and with both the ecliptic plane and equinoxes,[118][119][120] an alignment sometimes referred to as the axis of evil."

The qaudropole and octopole are those bands of cooler radiation in the CMB map. The ecliptic is the orbital plane of the earth, the equinoxes referred to are also those of the earth. What it means is that earth isn't just a "small blue pebble in the sky," it has a special place in the universe. And sorry for typos and such, using my phone which has a cracked screen.

And it is off topic, but I don't think anyone here knows enough about shia and Sunni Islam to have a meaningful discussion on the topic.

[҉]

"Even in the COBE map, it was observed that the quadrupole (l = 2, spherical harmonic) has a low amplitude compared to the predictions of the Big Bang. In particular, the quadrupole and octupole (l = 3) modes appear to have an unexplained alignment with each other and with both the ecliptic plane and equinoxes,[118][119][120] an alignment sometimes referred to as the axis of evil."

The qaudropole and octopole are those bands of cooler radiation in the CMB map. The ecliptic is the orbital plane of the earth, the equinoxes referred to are also those of the earth. What it means is that earth isn't just a "small blue pebble in the sky," it has a special place in the universe. And sorry for typos and such, using my phone which has a cracked screen.

And it is off topic, but I don't think anyone here knows enough about shia and Sunni Islam to have a meaningful discussion on the topic.

"A number of groups have suggested that this could be the signature of new physics at the greatest observable scales; other groups suspect systematic errors in the data.[121][122][123] Ultimately, due to the foregrounds and the cosmic variance problem, the greatest modes will never be as well measured as the small angular scale modes. The analyses were performed on two maps that have had the foregrounds removed as far as possible: the "internal linear combination" map of the WMAP collaboration and a similar map prepared by Max Tegmark and others.[47][78][124] Later analyses have pointed out that these are the modes most susceptible to foreground contamination from synchrotron, dust, and Bremsstrahlung emission, and from experimental uncertainty in the monopole and dipole. A full Bayesian analysis of the WMAP power spectrum demonstrates that the quadrupole prediction of Lambda-CDM cosmology is consistent with the data at the 10% level and that the observed octupole is not remarkable.[125] Carefully accounting for the procedure used to remove the foregrounds from the full sky map further reduces the significance of the alignment by ~5%.[126][127][128][129]

Recent observations with the Planck telescope, which is very much more sensitive than WMAP and has a larger angular resolution, confirm the observation of the axis of evil. Since two different instruments recorded the same anomaly, instrumental error (but not foreground contamination) appears to be ruled out.[130] Coincidence is a possible explanation, chief scientist from WMAP, Charles L. Bennett suggested coincidence and human psychology were involved, "I do think there is a bit of a psychological effect; people want to find unusual things." [131]"
Literally the entire rest of the section is talking about how that hasn't been (and possibly can't be) confirmed.


Your edit has completely trashed this post somehow. Whole blocks of text seem to be appearing and disappearing.

[CMA]

"Even in the COBE map, it was observed that the quadrupole (l = 2, spherical harmonic) has a low amplitude compared to the predictions of the Big Bang. In particular, the quadrupole and octupole (l = 3) modes appear to have an unexplained alignment with each other and with both the ecliptic plane and equinoxes,[118][119][120] an alignment sometimes referred to as the axis of evil."

The qaudropole and octopole are those bands of cooler radiation in the CMB map. The ecliptic is the orbital plane of the earth, the equinoxes referred to are also those of the earth. What it means is that earth isn't just a "small blue pebble in the sky," it has a special place in the universe. And sorry for typos and such, using my phone which has a cracked screen.

And it is off topic, but I don't think anyone here knows enough about shia and Sunni Islam to have a meaningful discussion on the topic.

"A number of groups have suggested that this could be the signature of new physics at the greatest observable scales; other groups suspect systematic errors in the data.[121][122][123] Ultimately, due to the foregrounds and the cosmic variance problem, the greatest modes will never be as well measured as the small angular scale modes. The analyses were performed on two maps that have had the foregrounds removed as far as possible: the "internal linear combination" map of the WMAP collaboration and a similar map prepared by Max Tegmark and others.[47][78][124] Later analyses have pointed out that these are the modes most susceptible to foreground contamination from synchrotron, dust, and Bremsstrahlung emission, and from experimental uncertainty in the monopole and dipole. A full Bayesian analysis of the WMAP power spectrum demonstrates that the quadrupole prediction of Lambda-CDM cosmology is consistent with the data at the 10% level and that the observed octupole is not remarkable.[125] Carefully accounting for the procedure used to remove the foregrounds from the full sky map further reduces the significance of the alignment by ~5%.[126][127][128][129]

Recent observations with the Planck telescope, which is very much more sensitive than WMAP and has a larger angular resolution, confirm the observation of the axis of evil. Since two different instruments recorded the same anomaly, instrumental error (but not foreground contamination) appears to be ruled out.[130] Coincidence is a possible explanation, chief scientist from WMAP, Charles L. Bennett suggested coincidence and human psychology were involved, "I do think there is a bit of a psychological effect; people want to find unusual things." [131]"
Literally the entire rest of the section is talking about how that hasn't been (and possibly can't be) confirmed.


Your edit has completely trashed this post somehow. Whole blocks of text seem to be appearing and disappearing.

You posted the rest of the section, and the Planck sattelite confirmed it. Sure, it's a coincidence, just like light speed being 3E8 is a coincidence. And I'm not a mod, and I didn't edit anything.

[҉]

You posted the rest of the section, and the Planck sattelite confirmed it. Sure, it's a coincidence, just like light speed being 3E8 is a coincidence. And I'm not a mod, and I didn't edit anything.

And the sentence after that says that they can rule out neither contamination nor coincidence, and says that the guy in charge thinks it's probably coincidence. Nothing here has anything to do with religion.

You edited your post to add the line about us not knowing enough to have an informed discussion. I'm not certain what happened after that, but it took me several tries to get all the text in my post in the proper place.

[CMA]

Weird, sorry about that. And, from what I got from the quote, he was trying to downplay the religious implications (a huge structure thing is aligned with our tiny planet, that's near impossible to "just happen depending on how you interpret it. I don't really agree with that though) that this would cause. It's pretty clear that it is aligned with us, but that's all anyone knows.

[҉]

Weird, sorry about that. And, from what I got from the quote, he was trying to downplay the religious implications (a huge structure thing is aligned with our tiny planet, that's near impossible to "just happen depending on how you interpret it. I don't really agree with that though) that this would cause. It's pretty clear that it is aligned with us, but that's all anyone knows.

A better source, but basically it says we don't know anything about this and can't tell whether it's random or not. I dunno. I'm not seeing anything here that suggests anything about any religion, but it's certainly true that we know little enough about the Big Bang that if you really want to stick God in there there are plenty of holes to shove him in that we haven't figured out how to fill yet. That isn't an argument we can really have at this point; it'll work better in a couple of decades (optimistically) when we understand all that a bit better.