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Quote:
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Quote by: Voluntary "Much later, when I was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder of his life". -- George Gamow, My World Line, 1970 |
It gets even more interesting (some of you have heard me tell this story)...
It eventually became accepted that the Universe, as Einstein had predicted, was expanding. The assumption was that the expansion would slow to a stop, due to the gravity of all the matter in the universe, and then begin contracting, to eventually collapse into a reverse Big Bang.
For renowned cosmologist and physicist Steven Hawking, this became his proof for
Intelligent Design. His reasoning... the statistical probability of the Universe expanding at exactly the rate to make life on Earth possible was so incredibly minute -- billions to one -- as to be basically impossible as a random event. Had the Big Bang been a micro-nano percent stronger, the Universe would long since have expanded beyond what's compatable with life. Had it been a micro-nono percent weaker, it would have long since collapsed back on itself.
Nah, the odds were so outrageous that it could only have happened by design. In fact, the only POSSIBLE way that the Big Bang could have expanded to a point of making life on Earth possible within an acceptable range of random probability would be if the Universe were not only expanding, but ACCELERATING in that expansion.
At the time Hawking wrote this in his
"A Brief History of Time", in 1988, no one was suggesting such a thing.
Well, guess what...! "Given that the vast amounts of rationally explained scientific knowledge we now possess were all once unexplainable phenomena which we attributed to the workings of gods, the best bet is that those things we still don't know also have rational, scientific explanations that do not include gods. We just don't know what they are yet." -- Daniel's Wager
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