The First Picture Show
Jesse Walker | December 20, 2006, 9:57am
The oldest stuff you'll see today:
The Sydney Morning Herald explains:
It is, scientists said yesterday, the glow from the first things to form in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago. Snapped by NASA's Spitzer space telescope, the bizarre objects must have existed within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago....
"Whatever these objects are," said Alexander Kashlinsky, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, "they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today." The image was made by Spitzer shooting pictures of five areas of the sky. All light from stars and galaxies in the foreground was then removed, leaving only the ancient infrared glow.
"Imagine trying to see fireworks at night from across a crowded city," Dr Kashlinsky said. "If you could turn off the city lights, you might get a glimpse at the fireworks. We have shut down the lights of the universe to see the outlines of its first fireworks."
Or maybe there's just some smudges on the lens. Either way, it's quite an image.
henry | December 20, 2006, 5:56pm | #
bchurch,
Your tone is considerably more patience than mine, which is in your favor, no doubt. It is just that after decades of hearing the same claptrap, reconfigured when previous manifestations become unworkable, my already thin powers of patience have been rendered unworkable. It is true that science gets "recogfigured"--but never to some end which MUST be obtianed, unlike the toil of the religionists. We can have an "open" universe or a "closed" one--ultimately the science doesn't care (prejudices of some individual scientists notwithstanding). But Christianity (for example) HAS TO end up with Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and anything that appears to the contrary MUST be disregarded or discredited--which is essentially the agenda of evangelical crowd today. Science is undoubtedly corrosive of religious belief, at least fundamenatlist religious--hence the unceasing efforts of these types to "co-opt" science.
Strangely, one of the most ardent politcal critics of this trend has been John Derbyshire over at NRO (don't faint). He had a remarkable piece recently which included this bit:
"I can report that the Creationists are absolutely correct to hate and fear modern biology. Learning this stuff works against your faith. To take a single point at random: The idea that we are made in God’s image implies we are a finished product. We are not, though. It is now indisputable that natural selection
has been going on not just through human prehistory, but through recorded history too, and is still going on today, and will go on into the future, presumably to speciation, either natural or artificial. So which
human being was made in God’s image: the one of 100,000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? 1,000 years ago? The one of today? The species that will descend from us? All of those future post-human species, or just some of them? And so on. The genomes are all different. They are not the same creature. And if they are all made in God’s image somehow, then presumably so are all the other species, and there’s nothing
special about us at all"
So, Bible-thumpers: flee from our science, and we will sure as hell stay clear of your Bible.
Akira MacKenzie | December 20, 2006, 9:41pm | #
For those interested, here the real science to debunk NoStar's bullshit:
From: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE412.html
1. Gravitational time dilation, if it existed on such a large scale, should be easily observable. On the contrary, we observe (from the periods of Cepheid variable stars, from orbital rates of binary stars, from supernova extinction rates, from light frequencies, etc.) that such time dilation is minor. There is some time dilation corresponding with Hubble's law (i.e., further objects have greater red shifts), but this is due to the well-understood expansion of the universe, and it is not nearly extreme enough to fit more than ten billion years into less than 10,000.
2. Humphreys tried to use clocks in the earth's frame of reference. But the cosmos is much older than the earth. Judging from the heavy elements in the sun and the rest of the solar system, our sun is a second-generation star at least. Billions of years must have passed for the first stars to have formed, shone, and become novas, for the gasses from those novas to have gathered into new star systems, and for the earth to form and cool in one such system. The billions of years before the earth are not accounted for in Humphreys's model.
3. Humphreys's theory assumes that the earth is in a huge gravity well. The evidence contradicts this assumption. If the earth were in such a gravity well, light from distant galaxies should be blue-shifted. Instead, it is red-shifted.
4. See Conner and Page (1998) and Conner and Ross (1999) for several other technical objections.
5. There is a great deal of other independent evidence that the earth is very old.
6. If there were any substance to Humphreys's proposal, at least some competent cosmologists would build on it and share in the Nobel Prize. Instead, they dismiss it as worthless.
