The universe – stranger than we could imagine
The more we learn about our universe, and the forces and particles that form it, the more weird it seems.
thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
The more we learn about our universe, and the forces and particles that form it, the more weird it seems.
An old Sean Carroll video asks whether God is a good scientific theory. The video is persuasive, but most of the arguments fall down on analysis.
Sherlock Holmes said: “when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” How does this apply to the universe?
Cosmologist Luke Barnes, an expert on the scientific evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe, has published an argument for the existence of God.
How do we explain the universe? Are there reasons to believe God made it, or it appeared out of nothing? Or should we give up on finding an explanation and say it just is (a “brute fact”)?
People tend to take a lot for granted. The sun keeps shining, the earth is full of useful minerals and gravity keeps us from flying off into space. We don’t think about it much, but what if things were different? What if gravity repulsed rather than attracted? What if we couldn’t sit on a chair […]
When thinking about possible evidence for the existence of God, it seems logical to start with the big picture, and work our way down to the more personal. So we start by considering the universe and the explanation of its existence. What is the universe? This may sound like the dumbest of questions, for we […]
I suppose it is quite natural to look at the night sky, especially away from city lights, and be in awe. When we learn that the universe apparently contains something like 100 billion galaxies, each with about 100 billion stars, our amazement and awe increase. It is also natural to ask where it all came […]
Stereoscopic vision is a useful and subtle aspect of how we, and some animals, see. Because our two eyes both face the front (unlike some animals and insects whose eyes face more left and right), they both see similar but subtly different views. For example, if two objects are in line, one behind the other, […]
Contact with aliens is a popular theme in science fiction stories. Some people even think they have seen, or been contacted by, aliens. But so far, despite more than 30 years of a scientific Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), no evidence has been found that there is any intelligent life “out there”. But some new […]