Einstein Theory Passes Strict Test....

[Shadow]

Einstein Theory Passes Strict Test In Unique Stellar Laboratory

This double pulsar PSR J0737-3039A/B is the only known pulsar-pulsar system, that is, two neutron stars orbiting each other and both visible as radio pulsars. Credit: NRAO
by Staff Writers
Washington DC (SPX) Jul 07, 2008
Taking advantage of a unique cosmic configuration, astronomers have measured an effect predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity in the extremely strong gravity of a pair of superdense neutron stars. Essentially, the famed physicist's 93-year-old theory passed yet another test.
Scientists at McGill University used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to do a four-year study of a double-star system unlike any other known in the Universe. The system is a pair of neutron stars, both of which are seen as pulsars that emit lighthouse-like beams of radio waves.

"Of about 1700 known pulsars, this is the only case in which two pulsars orbit around each other," said Rene Breton, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In addition, the stars' orbital plane is aligned nearly perfectly with their line of sight to the Earth. This causes the signal of one to be blocked, or eclipsed, as it circles the other.

"Those eclipses are the key to making a measurement that could never be done before," Breton said.

Einstein's 1915 theory predicted that in a close system of two very massive objects, such as neutron stars, one object's gravitational tug, along with an effect of its spinning around its axis, should cause the spin axis of the other to wobble, or precess.

Studies of other pulsars in binary systems had indicated that such wobbling occurred, but could not produce precise measurements of the amount of wobbling.

"Measuring the amount of wobbling is what tests the details of Einstein's theory and gives a benchmark that any alternative gravitational theories must meet," said Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

The eclipses allowed the astronomers to pin down the geometry of the double-pulsar system and track changes in the orientation of the spin axis of one of them. As one pulsar's spin axis slowly moved, the pattern of signal blockages as the other passed behind it also changed. The signal from the pulsar in back is absorbed by the ionized gas in the other's magnetosphere.

Pulsars, first discovered in 1967, are the "corpses" of massive stars that have exploded as supernovae. What is left after the explosion is a superdense neutron star that packs more than the mass of our Sun into the size of an average city. Beams of radio waves stream outward from the poles of the star's intense magnetic field and sweep around as the star rotates, as often as hundreds of times a second.


continued here:

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Einstein_Theory_Passes_Strict_Test_In_Unique_Stell ar_Laboratory_999.html

[JackAussie]

Thanks, very interesting and at the same time, Mind Boggling, amazing what they can measure these days.
Imagine what it will be like in a Hundred years from now.

[bay]

God is sitting in Heaven when a scientist says to Him, "Lord, we don't need you anymore. Science has finally figured out a way to create life out of nothing. In other words, we can now do what you did in the 'beginning'.

"Oh, is that so? Tell me..." replies God.

"Well", says the scientist, "we can take dirt and form it into the likeness of you and breathe life into it, thus creating man.

"Well, that's interesting. Show Me."

So the scientist bends down to the earth and starts to mold the soil.

"Oh no, no, no..." interrupts God,

"Get your own dirt!"

[Shadow]

Good one !!! bay. :)



on a serious side: I keep thinking that "nothing comes from nothing". Therefore , there was never a time when there was "nothing". (even if it were just "time".) Makes one think about these things.~~ and speculate.;)

[JackAussie]

Tell me... who made God? Where does he originate from?

All we know is, what has been written, has been written by man, many centuries ago, and those scripts have been rewritten, time and time again. many years apart, translated and altered to suit each religion, so, what we started out with is nothing like what we have to day.

To my way of thinking is the only thing worth using from the Bible are the Ten Rules of Life, that we, as humans, never follow anyway. Lest of all the leader of the Church.

I understand what fairy stories are but when I grew up I realised that fairy stories are just that, Fairies stories.

I was always told by the Church that one had to believe in a God to be saved and I asked Why and from what?
Never did get a valid answer.

[Thoba]

ATHEISM

The faithful belief that there was nothing, and then nothing happened to nothing and then nothing randomly exploded, for no reason creating everything, and then a bunch of everything accidentally rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self replicating bits that turned into dinosaurs.

Makes perfect sense...

[Shadow]

ATHEISM

The faithful belief that there was nothing, and then nothing happened to nothing and then nothing randomly exploded, for no reason creating everything, and then a bunch of everything accidentally rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self replicating bits that turned into dinosaurs.

Makes perfect sense...

Hi Thoba. Did you make that up??? Good job. :)

[Thoba]

Tell me... who made God? Where does he originate from?


Who says It is male? I think they're perhaps misleading your conception of It. Anyway, anything that has no beginning requires no cause. Cleary the universe did have a beginning, and therefore requires One.

[Shadow]

What existed before "big bang"?


did a quick search and found this.........

What Happened Before the Big Bang?
Paul Davies
Well, what did happen before the big bang?
Few schoolchildren have failed to frustrate their parents with questions of this sort. It often starts with puzzlement over whether space "goes on forever," or where humans came from, or how the planet Earth formed. In the end, the line of questioning always seems to get back to the ultimate origin of things: the big bang. "But what caused that?"




Children grow up with an intuitive sense of cause and effect. Events in the physical world aren't supposed to "just happen." Something makes them happen. Even when the rabbit appears convincingly from the hat, trickery is suspected. So could the entire universe simply pop into existence, magically, for no actual reason at all?


This simple, schoolchild query has exercised the intellects of generations of philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Many have avoided it as an impenetrable mystery. Others have tried to define it away. Most have got themselves into an awful tangle just thinking about it.
The problem, at rock bottom, is this: If nothing happens without a cause, then something must have caused the universe to appear. But then we are faced with the inevitable question of what caused that something. And so on in an infinite regress. Some people simply proclaim that God created the universe, but children always want to know who created God, and that line of questioning gets uncomfortably difficult.


One evasive tactic is to claim that the universe didn't have a beginning, that it has existed for all eternity. Unfortunately, there are many scientific reasons why this obvious idea is unsound. For starters, given an infinite amount of time, anything that can happen will already have happened, for if a physical process is likely to occur with a certain nonzero probability-however small-then given an infinite amount of time the process must occur, with probability one. By now, the universe should have reached some sort of final state in which all possible physical processes have run their course. Furthermore, you don't explain the existence of the universe by asserting that it has always existed. That is rather like saying that nobody wrote the Bible: it was. just copied from earlier versions. Quite apart from all this, there is very good evidence that the universe did come into existence in a big bang, about fifteen billion years ago. The effects of that primeval explosion are clearly detectable today-in the fact that the universe is still expanding, and is filled with an afterglow of radiant heat.


So we are faced with the problem of what happened beforehand to trigger the big bang. Journalists love to taunt scientists with this question when they complain about the money being spent on science. Actually, the answer (in my opinion) was spotted a long time ago, by one Augustine of Hippo, a Christian saint who lived in the fifth century. In those days before science, cosmology was a branch of theology, and the taunt came not from journalists, but from pagans: "What was God doing before he made the universe?" they asked. "Busy creating Hell for the likes of you!" was the standard reply.


But Augustine was more subtle. The world, he claimed, was made "not in time, but simultaneously with time." In other words, the origin of the universe-what we now call the big bang-was not simply the sudden appearance of matter in an eternally preexisting void, but the coming into being of time itself. Time began with the cosmic origin. There was no "before," no endless ocean of time for a god, or a physical process, to wear itself out in infinite preparation.


Remarkably, modern science has arrived at more or less the same conclusion as Augustine, based on what we now know about the nature of space, time, and gravitation. It was Albert Einstein who taught us that time and space are not merely an immutable arena in which the great cosmic drama is acted out, but are part of the cast-part of the physical universe. As physical entities, time and space can change- suffer distortions-as a result of gravitational processes. Gravitational theory predicts that under the extreme conditions that prevailed in the early universe, space and time may have been so distorted that there existed a boundary, or "singularity," at which the distortion of space-time was infinite, and therefore through which space and time cannot have continued. Thus, physics predicts that time was indeed bounded in the past as Augustine claimed. It did not stretch back for all eternity.


If the big bang was the beginning of time itself, then any discussion about what happened before the big bang, or what caused it-in the usual sense of physical causation-is simply meaningless. Unfortunately, many children, and adults, too, regard this answer as disingenuous. There must be more to it than that, they object.


Indeed there is. After all, why should time suddenly "switch on"? What explanation can be given for such a singular event? Until recently, it seemed that any explanation of the initial "singularity" that marked the origin of time would have to lie beyond the scope of science. However, it all depends on what is meant by "explanation." As I remarked, all children have a good idea of the notion of cause and effect, and usually an explanation of an event entails finding something that caused it. It turns out, however, that there are physical events which do not have well-defined causes in the manner of the everyday world. These events belong to a weird branch of scientific inquiry called quantum physics.


Mostly, quantum events occur at the atomic level; we don't experience them in daily life. On the scale of atoms and molecules, the usual commonsense rules of cause and effect are suspended. The rule of law is replaced by a sort of anarchy or chaos, and things happen spontaneously-for no particular reason. Particles of matter may simply pop into existence without warning, and then equally abruptly disappear again. Or a particle in one place may suddenly materialize in another place, or reverse its direction of motion. Again, these are real effects occurring on an atomic scale, and they can be demonstrated experimentally.


A typical quantum process is the decay of a radioactive nucleus. If you ask why a given nucleus decayed at one particular moment rather than some other, there is no answer. The event "just happened" at that moment, that's all. You cannot predict these occurrences. All you can do is give the probability-there is a fifty-fifty chance that a given nucleus will decay in, say, one hour. This uncertainty is not simply a result of our ignorance of all the little forces and influences that try to make the nucleus decay; it is inherent in nature itself, a basic part of quantum reality.


The lesson of quantum physics is this: Something that "just happens" need not actually violate the laws of physics. The abrupt and uncaused appearance of something can occur within the scope of scientific law, once quantum laws have been taken into account. Nature apparently has the capacity for genuine spontaneity.
It is, of course, a big step from the spontaneous and uncaused appearance of a subatomic particle-something that is routinely observed in particle accelerators-to the spontaneous and uncaused appearance of the universe. But the loophole is there. If, as astronomers believe, the primeval universe was compressed to a very small size, then quantum effects must have once been important on a cosmic scale. Even if we don't have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific. In short, it need not have been a supernatural event.


Inevitably, scientists will not be content to leave it at that. We would like to flesh out the details of this profound concept. There is even a subject devoted to it, called quantum cosmology. Two famous quantum cosmologists, James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, came up with a clever idea that goes back to Einstein. Einstein not only found that space and time are part of the physical universe; he also found that they are linked in a very intimate way. In fact, space on its own and time on its own are no longer properly valid concepts. Instead, we must deal with a unified "space-time" continuum. Space has three dimensions, and time has one, so space-time is a four-dimensional continuum.


In spite of the space-time linkage, however, space is space and time is time under almost all circumstances. Whatever space-time distortions gravitation may produce, they never turn space into time or time into space. An exception arises, though, when quantum effects are taken into account. That all-important intrinsic uncertainty that afflicts quantum systems can be applied to space-time, too. In this case, the uncertainty can, under special circumstances, affect the identities of space and time. For a very, very brief duration, it is possible for time and space to merge in identity, for time to become, so to speak, spacelike-just another dimension of space.


The spatialization of time is not something abrupt; it is a continuous process. Viewed in reverse as the temporalization of (one dimension of) space, it implies that time can emerge out of space in a continuous process. (By continuous, I mean that the timelike quality of a dimension, as opposed to its spacelike quality, is not an all-or-nothing affair; there are shades in between. This vague statement can be made quite precise mathematically.)


The essence of the Hartle-Hawking idea is that the big bang was not the abrupt switching on of time at some singular first moment, but the emergence of time from space in an ultrarapid but nevertheless continuous manner. On a human time scale, the big bang was very much a sudden, explosive origin of space, time, and matter. But look very, very closely at that first tiny fraction of a second and you find that there was no precise and sudden beginning at all. So here we have a theory of the origin of the universe that seems to say two contradictory things: First, time did not always exist; and second, there was no first moment of time. Such are the oddities of quantum physics.




Source

http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/big-bang.html

discussion???

[Thoba]

Hi Thoba. Did you make that up??? Good job. :)

Thanks Shadow, but I'm not really responsible for anything I do or say, all glory has to go elsewhere :)

[Thoba]

What existed before "big bang"?

First Cause a.k.a. God. There was never a time when It did not exist because before the 'big bang' there was no time.

[JackAussie]

ATHEISM

The faithful belief that there was nothing, and then nothing happened to nothing and then nothing randomly exploded, for no reason creating everything, and then a bunch of everything accidentally rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self replicating bits that turned into dinosaurs.

Makes perfect sense...

But it still does not explain "who made God? Where does he originate from?" I think that humans have developed the brain beyond it's own capacity to accept that we are just a phenomenon and so have to have a reason as to why we are here. Any reason.

So, from the time we climbed out of the trees and walked upright the brain became aware of "self" and started to wonder where we came from.

That is where the first conmen came into being, and so the myths were started, the gullible fell into line, because to them, it was easy to just believe than think.

Not much different today really save we know a heck of a lot more about the origin of man than those that preach a myth.Only the truly Gullible can still believe in a God.

Right now, here in Sydney Australia, we have a Church sect that has dragged a corpse halfway around the globe as a part of their rituals. We witness Idolatry, Ritual Crucifixion, that is forbidden in the book they read and tell us they follow.

We hear them tell us that we should not make noises about the sexual assaults on people by their priests.
They live in a world that is beyond the realm of any fantasy.

[Thoba]

But it still does not explain "who made God? Where does he originate from?"


It isn't male I don't think, that seems like pure anthropomorphism. God is without beginning, unlike the universe It did not originate. Only created things, existing in time and space, have an origin.

As for your other points I'm not able to defend any of the Theistic religions and certainly not Christianity and the Catholic Church. As for the conmen they only came into their own after agriculture and writing had been developed.

[JackAussie]

It isn't male I don't think, that seems like pure anthropomorphism. God is without beginning, unlike the universe It did not originate. Only created things, existing in time and space, have an origin.

Made by man to justify our existence.
Then, to believe in nothing, as God would seem to be, it also makes sense to assume and accept that we started from a lot of nothingness, coming together, exploding, so creating the universe.

Make sense to me.;)

[Shadow]

before the 'big bang' there was no time


and you KNOW this, how??? thx.

[Thoba]

and you KNOW this, how??? thx.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/astro/imgast/bbtim.gif

[Shadow]

THanks, Thoba. Now , That IS interesting. Shall do more research on it as it has peaked the curiosity ....:)