– Eliza, DISCOVER online news editor

Ask a scientist to tell you where the center of the universe is. No center? Hmmm. They’ll tell you that’s like asking what’s outside the universe. The “edge” is always 14 billion light years away no matter where you’re at in the universe – live with it. Sort of like the speed of light where, even as you approach light speed, photons are still moving away at 186,000 miles per second. So if a photon is a wavesicle with zero mass, then what’s a photon? Yeah, I know; don’t ask.

Can’t imagine what ‘sparked the spark’ causing an infinite (?) universe to suddenly arise from a point of “zero size” – give or take a Planck length – and “infinite density”? Don’t ask a scientist; they don’t know either. Concerned about the fact that scientists tell you that time and space didn’t exist before the BB because the math becomes meaningless at a singularity? Don’t worry, just ignore it – they do. Keep this up and next you’ll be wanting to know what triggered inflation! It just was!! Besides, it’s needed in order to explain away all the objections to the big bang and silence the dissenters.

I give the big bang twenty years at best. Hey, it’s a changing universe. Quantum physics would seem to indicate that there may be an underlying implicate order and that “time” doesn’t exist – at least at the level where particles (our building blocks?) seemingly pop in and out of the universe and apparently don’t even exist without conscious awareness.

Younger scientists are already talking about the “big bounce”. And if scientists weren’t so totally brainwashed in our universities (try finding a job if you don’t regurgitate the party line), they would be able to give you perhaps a dozen logical reasons (none containing the word “Doppler”) why photons exhibit an apparent red shift over vast distances.

Can’t explain something? Invent it. Why don’t galaxies fly apart? Must be dark matter. (Is that like ether?) Can’t explain why every force, mass, temperature, etc. is exactly at the precise value for life? Must be a multiverse because the only other choice is God and that’s verbotten.

Based upon the totally strange and proven weirdness of quantum physics, anything appears possible in this universe (and others) so don’t be so quick to jump to conclusions about what “you KNOW” – and don’t. In truth, we simply don’t know jack and I’d love to come back in the year 3,000. Come to think about it, maybe I will -wherever, whenever, and whatever “back” is…

I have nothing against creationists and religious people, I do however have something against ignorance. Thats all.

JohnMol: It takes a person of profound faith to be able to consider the biblical accounts and science hand in hand the way that you do and I have respect for that, however I never suggested that an exact age to the universe should be evident in the bible, only that, if creationists have the mind to criticize these findings, that they must be doing so based on the grounds that their source to this subject (safe assumption being the Bible) offers an alternative. Evidently, it does not. Perhaps, also, I chose the wrong sentence structure but, never did I say scientists know what came before the big bang. There are answers to those questions, theories based on something solid. However, nothing is definitive and probably never will be. What I believe is that the above people should not be so ignorant and naive about these theories when they themselves cannot offer a constructive alternative.

I can see that you are both open to possible explanations, but clearly there are many who aren’t, and the beauty of science is to be open to extreme possibilities… If one cannot do that, then why enter so boldly into a debate or discussion on a subject one has little or no understanding of and/or has no real intention of engaging any interest in?

If the guy who thought up Genesis 1 had written a scientific study, you would never have seen it, because nobody would have thought in the last 3000 years that it made any sense, so they would have ignored it. Instead, he composed literature that both made sense and carried the essence of the truth.

Besides, I doubt if the number 13.7 billion could even have been written at that time, because such numbers had never been thought of yet. So, given all that, don’t you find it amazing that somebody so long ago could have thought that everything we see around us could be crafted from a burst of light (A pretty good literary image for the prodigiously high energy of the Big Bang, wouldn’t you say?)? Modern cosmology appears to me to agree with the broad outlines described in Genesis 1.

Please rein in your prejudice!

As for Seroska who claims that “we scientists” know what happened before the Big Bang, I think there’s a Nobel Prize in it for you when you write it up for Science.

Your claims and reasoning resemble those of the wondering mind of a young child and set the intellectual evolution of the human race back, at least, 500 years. Many iconic people have made great achievements in all areas of science, and they did not do it by sitting around thinking up elementary ideas, based on simple childish logic, believing they could pass them off as “intelligent”. They studied for many years, followed by many more years of research…. What qualification do you have again? The 2000 yr old text based on hearsay interpretations of historical events, The Bible, that MOST Christians have not even read nor understand, is not classified as a qualification… nor does it qualify you to argue matters of which you have little, or no, understanding.

So now I ask you, creationists…(and I’m pure of heart as I say this, because I would honestly like to know, because no religious person has ever been able to answer me this question) What is the VERSE and CHAPTER of the passage in the Bible where God says, definitively, how old our universe is, and where does God mention what came before the universe He created? As scientists, we have answers for these questions… As far as I know, you creationists do not. In the sentiments of “fatkid” Creationists have no place in a science debate unless they actually have something constructive to contribute.

1. Does light slow down over these vast distances, and, if so, could this explain the large red shift values ?

2. As the Hubble telescope is the “Model T” of such instruments, will the next generation of this genre of telescopes see even beyond 13.1 billion light years ?

The more we see, the less we know. (I am a creationist too!)

ha. take that big-bang’ers !