tonights the final? Where what? <runs to check the guide>

So what's the name of the friggin' show?

I watched parts of the show. When he started talking about "dark energy" is what makes the universe expand, it started to sound awfully like religious or highly speculative mumbo-jumbo. What is "dark energy", isn't that just a phrase to replace "God"?

For example, religious folk will say "God makes the universe expand".
The astrophysics will say "dark energy makes the universe expand".

Same thing. It's a mysterious force being described but with a change of words.

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Jun 15^th, 2011 at 10:37am:


Nothing LIKE  religious  or speculative mumbo-jumbo.  He did say earlier in the program that given the infinite information to be grasped, it may be possible , in the future, that scientists actually discover the unknown power which generated the Universe  -  called GOD by those who live in those terms. (MY WORDS).
Dark energy is what exists where galaxies etc don't, and appeared at the same time as the other forms of energy released at the start of the Universe.

Without it the universe would condense down to a black hole (collapse in on itself)  - it is the space betweens the stars. What we call a vacuum, but in fact it contains all of the energy not already used or being used in the formation of or dissolution of stars and galaxies. Because the Universe is in constant motion and flux.

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Jun 15^th, 2011 at 5:24pm:


That's hogwash Time. There is and may always be a question mark regarding 'first cause'. The arseholes who start religions exploit this for their own 'power and glory' by filling the void with made up stuff. God/s are a particularly useful trope because it carries the mysticism and authority from previous incarnations even as the story line gets updated; but there is no underlying reality. It's naming an abstraction like 'tinkerbell' in Peter Pan.

Science only names real things, like 'electricity'. 'Dark energy' (or matter) is no more an abstraction  than 'Table'. We need to know more about it and it'll probably be deconstructed in time into constituent parts; but it got named because a name was needed for a thing.

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Jun 15^th, 2011 at 10:37am:



What the bugger?

An astrophysists will go about designing various experiments to prove or disprove the 'dark matter hypothosis, the religious folk will break out a hymn and wait for death to take them to heaven.

So not the same, not even close. 

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Jul 7^th, 2011 at 4:13pm:


Once upon a time, humans did not know what Atoms were, but they named them as such anyway. It was reasoning with current knowledge that caused humans to determine that there must be a thing that is the smallest constituent of the universe and of which we were all made. They called this an Atom.

A couple of thousand years latter, we found that Atom and equally found that the atom was made of even smaller constituent parts.

I'll come back to this latter. But essentially, we reason that dark matter and energy exist because Einstein's Relativity theory does not ensure enough matter or energy in the universe to justify the expanding universe.

More on that after dinner.

... wrote on Jul 7^th, 2011 at 4:29pm:



No they're not, one group accepts their information based purely on faith the other does not and conducts experiments based on scientific principles to verify their beliefs (hypothoses).

Science and religion are nothing alike in how they interpret and base their beliefs.

BigOl64 wrote on Jul 7^th, 2011 at 4:41pm:



That is correct in most cases, but in this case they still don't really know what dark matter is - hence its positing as a "mysterious force".

It seems the religious folk had the jump on the scientists here.