Toehammer, is the phrase "we are all dead stars" original? It's seriously brilliant.

That phrasing is original, but in grad school one of my fellow graduate students was an astronomer, and I asked him if it sounded logical that we (elements) all come from stars/nucleosynthesis, and he seemed to agree when I said that we must therefore be composed of dead stars.

unfortunately it seems I cannot claim "original" since I just did a google search and some song "we are all made of stars" comes up...

However, I think the idea that hydrogen has evolved to the point where it can think about itself is cooler :)

One way I get people interested in physics is tell them this (totally original):
There are 4 forces in the universe, 2 nuclear, gravity, and electrodynamic. We do not feel nuclear forces, we never really feel gravity. When you are standing on the ground you "feel" gravity because of the force imparted on your feet by the electromagnetic force. Now what is happening between your feet and the ground? Electrons in the outer shells of the "ground" atoms are coming in close proximity to the electrons in your feet. In the ultramicroscopic boundary between the two, virtual photons are passed back and forth constantly. When you stand on the ground, you are standing on light. Everything in the universe that we experience as humans: chemical reactions, water careening down our esophagus, warmth of the sun, are all really just super intense and localized light fields.

Hehe, in this way, nobody is really blind

did you even read any of it....

Its not talking about atlas carrying the world on his back, or egyptian gods carrying the sun across the sky in a canoe. /facepalm, it's actually talking about *science*

the 2 guys who discovered this most compelling proof yet that the big bang actually happened won a nobel (sp?) prize for their works. Please ACTUALLY read it before using mystical claims from the 6th century to shoot down my post. kk thx bye.

actually, THE guy who theoretically predicted the cosmic microwave background got SCREWED out of a Nobel when the two who saw the experimental evidence won it... pretty big controversy in the physics community

Science is just as accurate as are those claims made back then.

We are constantly in a state of trying to figure things out we had once taken for granted as absolute truth, or near to it.

Shit, if even as little a time ago as 100 years someone told you we're going to go to the moon, they'd fucking laugh at you.

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New studies are now being worked on that are suggesting that there was no big bang. Some of them sound legit, but there are a couple (one that theorizes that the universe expands, collapses and the re-expands like a cycle) that are far out there.

The announcer/show organizer didn't really capture what the scientists think. The whole big bang idea doesn't propose that collapse and subsequent secondary expansion cannot happen. In fact it is a quite logical extension of the theory. The big bang merely says that there was a maximum explosive mass divergence at some point in time, not that something comes from nothing. That's a common misconception. I think a cool theory that some people have suggested is multiple big bangs happening. However a single big bang?

I just thought of this... if we ever see the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation change significantly... like go up/down and then equilibrate... that might be definite proof that there are multiple universes/big bangs and we have "met up" and the CMB from our universes are mixing like particles in a box (basic stat mech!).

I once sat through a colloquium about the first 10^-34 seconds of the universe (inflation theory)... that is sorta new.

I like the direction this thread is turning.

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THIS is the guy I was talking about. He uses quantum mechanics to explain retraction of the universe at a certain threshold (but never gives the formula for the threshold). I find it highly unlikely that this would be the answer simply because of the fact that we have Dark matter and Energy. Dark Energy is quickly expanding the universe, and it is unlikely we can ever reach critical mass, therefore debunking this hypothesis.

lol at cricket nut shot

ITT: Chtulu posts youtube videos about concepts he can't understand, much less spell properly.