Recent content by Paul Thatcher

Thanks. Wow, I think this was the question I needed to be asked. Time to think - which will, given my hotheadedness, contribute a little extra to the entropy...

All is cool, friction overcome, pleased to be part of the debate.

Very true - I see goodness knows how many examples of misleading explanations and theories (actually, I'm being polite - they're totally wrong) in the equivalent of popular science in my own field (language and linguistics), namely coursebooks and textbooks...

I imagine that, like me, C_Nordquist came here to clarify things see and heard in popular science documentaries - and in any case, doesn't the need to be well-informed in a topic before one starts to look at it imply a break with causality?:wink:

Thanky you, sophiecentaur, for your replies. Scratched by falling bricks, but not wounded to the quick.

Excuse me, but I was replying to the line that appears under sophiecentaur's posts. My mistake, I'm sure, if that wasn't clear - possibly I clicked in the wrong place. I'm an atheist, so hardly inclined to bring God into it at all, but I don't think I am to blame if I reply to a post containing...

"If God had intended us to use analogies, he would not have released Mathematics for our use." This may have been a light-hearted quip, but reflect on its effect: I'm a linguist and writer. For one reason or another, I did not learn higher mathematics. Should I therefore not think about physics...

Yes, true. Since writing, another perspective has occurred to me. If physics as it stands can only deal with the universe after the Big Bang, ie with a dynamic universe, in which space-time itself does not remain constant, so it is not possible to speak of maximum entropy at the 'beginning' -...

One key piece of evidence for the Big Bang, the microwave background radiation, indicates that in the beginning matter was in thermal equilibrium, ie a state of maximum entropy. And yet since then, with the expansion of the universe, entropy has been increasing. 'Hang on', we might say, 'How can...

It probably is that everything is shrinking, actually - after all, the nature of reality is often the opposite of what we intuit, right? Is the apple falling, or is the Earth rushing up to meet it? How to distinguish experimentally between the two? Hmmm, here we are, a lovely spring evening, an...

Cosmic inflation appears to break the light-speed limit, but remember: inflation is not the movement of mass-energy through space-time; it is the expansion of space-time itself, and therefore not limited by the speed of light. How did this happen? Why did it stop, giving us the expansion...