Bachelor's degree in physics, Master's degree in theoretical physics. I don't want to go through 4 years of hell as a PhD, so now I'm teaching astronomy to kids and physics to College students.

I was reading an Astronomy book once and my Aunt asked me why I was reading it. When I told her it was for fun she looked at me like I was crazy. "You don't have a test on it?" she asked... I later made fun of her.

Yay DC! And Yay for the *astronomy channel!

Right?

deathcow: without a shadow of doubt you are one of the reasons I stopped being a lurker and became a member in the first place - you're truly one of the most hilarious motherfuckers I've ever had the pleasure of knowing, and your side-splitting one liner comments have long since officially become a defining *quality of the Sift (an yeah that's an awesome and an appropriate picture, rasch).

And that's not even going into how awesome your astronomy hobby is. You're a real role model, my Alaskan friend, and I envy dag for having had the pleasure of spending years in your company in meat-space. I tip my imaginary internet nerd hat to you, Mister Deathcow, for you are TEH AWSUM.

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>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
>> ^quantumushroom>
The exact same thing can be said about the theory of evolution, it is a comprehensive, well established and true explanation for an extremely wide range of facts and evidence collected from not only paleontology and genetics, but also geology, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, physics and even mathematics. If you'd want to defeat this theory with a silly, meaningless phrase like "intelligent design" ,you'd have to undo and outdo evolution's explanatory power in all of these disiplines.


IMO...

I don't disagree with evolution, which might be inferred by paleontology, genetics and geneology, but the other scientific disciplines are mearly tools to provide analytical techniques and nothing more. They know nothing about evolution but try to quantify (for us) how things work. Do not confuse the tool with the theory.

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Thanks, my Irish cousin! (We're all related, right?)

In reply to this comment by moodonia:
*promote the wonder of the universe!

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Junk.

The Earth is only 6'000 years old. I know, I heard it from a US Senator.
What does this "Bad Astronomer" know? Apparently, nothing but bad astronomy.

>> ^brain:
When it says that the "known universe" is 93 billion light years across, they're referring to the "observable universe". This is the part of the universe from which light has had time to reach us. Interestingly, it's possible the universe is much much larger than that. It's also possible that the universe is smaller!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
I have a hard time understanding how the universe has no center. Everything I can find says it has no center and explains how the expansion has no center. I understand how the expansion has no center, but I don't understand how we can say for sure that the universe itself has no center. Can anyone explain that?


I am not a qualified physicist, just a very interested amateur and i stand to be rediculed.

This is a piece of information i recall from "a brief history of time" and it was a while since i read it. And also, i must express that the maths involved is incredibly complex for any laymen including myself to fully 'understand' quite exactly what it means, and why it is realistic to use these analogies to give anyone who doesn't understand the maths (which is the only real way of PROVING this idea).

It's to do with how you consider the universe and therefore the expansion of it. The most famous example is drawing dots on a balloon and blowing air into the balloon - the dots get further away from each other and there is no centre. The difficulty is imagining that the baloon's surface is 2d and we're talking about 3d
You can then take 4d if you incorporate time, which would be the balloon inflating, so then you're talking about the 3d dimensions of the balloon as 4d. With the time dimension being shown by the radius of the balloon.

It's a trait of humans that we're limited in our view of things. Obviously, we imagine everything exactly how our eyes percieve it. We can see 3 dimensions, so that is our universe. Maths has given us understanding of a lot more dimensions and we can experiment and 'view' them in a mathematical way, but never beyond that. Like, we can't draw a tesseract (which is a 4d object), but we can draw the shadow of a tesseract.

That's because like out in the sun, our 3d objects throw a shadow and that shadow is 2d, so the 4d object's shadow becomes 3d.

I'm getting dragged further away from my point. I'll wrap it up with Hawking's explanation of time being like the surface of a planet. With the start of time being at the north pole and the end of time being at the south. If we imagine it in this way, we can see that there doesn't necessarily have to be something BEFORE time began (the big bang). Nor even something after time ends (big crunch?). Like Hawking has said before - there's no point asking what came before the big bang, it's a nonsensical question, "It's like asking what is north of the north pole?"

Also, these concepts have been shown to be true. All galaxies in space are moving away from each other.

Austrians are the most honest school out of the mess that is economics, Keynesianism is the pseudo-scientific nonsense that unfortunately is predominant, it's like as if astronomy were 90% astrology. Paul Krugman is a keynesian witch doctor, I couldn't care less what is the product of his intelectual dishonesty.

The Fed is a secretive entity with govt given powers but no govt oversight, there is a bill in Congress to audit the Federal Reserve for exactly that reason: Even the govt doesn't know what the Fed does!

So your argument is that if markets are so smart, why don't they adapt to this huge entity that has a monopoly on the currency and prosper anyway? Why aren't you asking the opposite of that: If the Fed is so predictably and correctly setting interest rates, why isn't most of the market making the right long-term decisions?

Booms and busts happen naturally in a market, but they have a much smaller scale and cause minimal destruction when central banks are not involved. When a considerable portion of the market makes wrong decisions and we get huge booms and busts, you can bet your mortgage that the govt/Fed is involved, a lot of people making very wrong decisions all at once can't be just an unfortunate coincidence.

Maybe if the market could create their own currencies, we'd have parallel competing currencies, and no one would be confined to the arbitrary rules of the unwarranted and unnecessary monopoly that is the Fed. The best money would naturally be chosen by the market itself. Ever thought of that?

Central banks are not creations of the market, they are only possible because of govt. They shouldn't coexist with capitalism.

astronomy *fail

The swirling water myth is interesting, Phil Plait writes about it in Bad Astronomy, and thoroughly debunks it of course, he mentions that there are places around the Equator where deliberate scammers show off on either side how the direction is different on the northern and southern hemisphere, but its all baloney. The swirl is subject to all sorts of other local forces before the spin of the earth has any effect at all, and even if it did, it never actually spins around the sinkhole, (unless the sink is directly on top of the north/south pole)

>> ^NobleOne:
In the context that you put it sketch, FSM could be as real as Zeus, Apollo, Mars, or itchy and scratchy..That they are all manifestations of men but God is much more then that existence that being it interconnects everything within the universe. i am sure this last sentence will come back to me but oh well...


Well, you are exactly right. We are all atheists where it comes to gods such as Zeus, etc. The problem with the idea of the interconnection of everything in the universe is that it's unsubstantiated, mystical, wishy-washy nonsense. People like to feel like they are connected to everything because it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but that doesn't make it real.

Personally, my problem with this kind of spirituality is that it keeps people from bothering to look into proper astronomy, geology, archeology and biology to learn for themselves how truly amazing and wondrous reality actually is. Of course we don't have ALL of the answers to life, the universe and everything, and no scientist will ever tell you that we do, but science strives to find real answers to real questions, while spirituality seems to make up questions that really don't need to be asked.