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What Materialist Science Still Can’t Figure Out

Darwin called the origin of flowering plants an “abominable mystery,” but it is not the only one.  The scientific materialism that strives to explain all reality by “natural” causes without resource to a designing intelligence has a long way to go.  Occasionally, major gaps in cosmic evolution and biological evolution become evident in scientific papers […]

SETI: Physics Conspires to Keep the Aliens Isolated

Where are the aliens?  They’re too far away to get to know.  Don’t look for galactic federations to join any time soon, said SETI Institute Director Seth Shostak at Space.com.  The harsh realities of the speed of light make fellowship, both in person and via radio signals, too remote to be feasible.     Shostak […]

MIT Cosmologists Take Our Advice

After getting a snubbing in our 02/21/2005 commentary, which advocated he and his MIT colleague Alan Guth take up truck driving, David Kaiser, took our advice – with a thinly veiled smirk: Well, at least someone is still reading Science with a passion.  As for the rest of us in the cosmic-evolution business, we’ll just […]

Myths from Hell

Many speak of God’s green earth and rejoice in its beauty, but James Trefil tells us it was born from hell.  In his article in Astronomy (Dec 2007), entitled, “Earth’s Fiery Start” he spoke with eyewitness confidence: Earth hasn’t always been a green and pleasant place.  In fact, our planet’s infancy was a violent, chaotic […]

Book: Intelligent Design Argument Turns Leading Atheist to God

“There is a God,” announces a former leading atheist on the cover of his new book.  Antony Flew changed his mind a few years ago partly because of the design argument: the fine-tuning of the universe, according to the blurb on Amazon.com.  New arguments by philosophical theists like Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne also played […]

One Special Universe: Take It or Leave It

If you think this universe is odd, to what would you compare it?  Adrian Cho asked this and other basic questions in a whimsical review of cosmology since WMAP in Science.1  Closer analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), as revealed in detail by WMAP (03/06/2003, 05/02/2003, 09/20/2004, 03/20/2006), has uncovered features so surprising (e.g., […]

Astronomy Columnist Tackles Naturalism vs. Intelligence

Bob Berman is an unusual columnist for a science magazine.  He’s independent-thinking, unafraid to tackle big questions and criticize powerful institutions, but all the while able to keep a sense of humor.  In his monthly column “Bob Berman’s Strange Universe” in the November issue of Astronomy (p. 10), he took a moment from munching on […]

Dark Matter Sheds Light on Invisible Stars: Come Again?

Can one unknown shed light on another unknown?  That’s what some UK astronomers seem to be saying.  Before describing their model, consider this conundrum with which they ended a story in the BBC News: “We don’t know what the dark matter is, we don’t know what the first stars are.  If we bring these two […]

Is the Universe Hole-y?

Cosmologists are trying to avoid a void.  Since astronomers at U of Minnesota announced a gaping hole in a distant part of the universe, representing a region of space devoid of matter a billion light-years across, others are scrambling to discern what it means.  The issue was discussed on EurekAlert, BBC News, Science Now, and […]

“We have no idea why these galaxies grew so large so soon”

Five full-sized galaxies have been detected at the edge of the visible universe, reported Science Now.  This continues a trend over the last few years where astronomers have been detecting old objects at young ages (e.g., 07/25/2007, 09/24/2006, 08/18/2006, 03/31/2006).   “The galaxies, which are forming stars very rapidly, are big for their age, meaning […]

Stars Found Almost as Old as Universe

A new record was set by a Caltech team using the Keck telescopes on Hawaii: they detected a galaxy nearly as old as the universe.  The consensus age for the universe is 13.6 billion years.  The light from this galaxy, they claim, is over 13 billion years old – “a mere 500 million years after […]

Cosmologists in Search of Dark Ghosts

Dark matter and dark energy: do they exist?  Cosmologists and physicists are spending large amounts of money building huge and expensive detectors to find them, but so far have found nothing.  This raises profound questions about the limits of science, the interaction of observation with theory, the presuppositions behind scientific models, and the sociology of […]

Nature Celebrates Bizarre “Many-Worlds” Cosmology

The cover of Nature this week (July 7) looks like a comic book.  And well it might: it celebrates the 50th anniversary of one of the weirdest beliefs ever submitted by a physicist: Hugh Everett’s “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics.  The bottom line is that every time you observe a coin toss or any other […]

Cosmic Star Formation: When Elegant Theories Are Wrong

An astronomer wrote about “cosmic train wrecks” in Science recently.1  Paolo Coppi (Yale) was speaking about galactic mergers, but he could have just as well been talking about current cosmological models.  Things once thought to be understood are coming in for new scrutiny, now that more powerful telescopes can peer deeper into the veiled hearts […]

Think Fast: News Briefs

Of the many news items that cross the CEH desk, many are noteworthy but go unreported due to lack of time.  Here are a few that deserve honorable mention lest they pass into oblivion. Cosmology: Dark future – Several sources like Science Now and Space.com commented on the dark future of the universe if cosmic acceleration […]
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