“Lemaitre always emphasised that it was scientific reasoning not his religion that let to his proposing an expanding universe.” I agree – but you cannot deny that he was a theologian too, who just happened to come up with the answer. If you apply reason in science then you apply reason in theology.

“…but “creation out of nothing” is a fairly simple concept to understand”. But sadly Einstein didn’t get it, and neither did Hoyle. Was it so simple to understand?

Lemaitre always emphasised that it was scientific reasoning not his religion that let to his proposing an expanding universe. When asked where in science one might find evidence for God, he thought about it for some time and finally replied “psychology”.

It seems to me that Lemaitre was a good mathematical relativist who followed relativity theory where it leads. Perhaps Everett taking QM seriously is similar in that sense.

You may have other examples, but “creation out of nothing” is a fairly simple concept to understand. I don’t see anything complicated in the answers provided by religion. Its very language, across all religions, is simple and aims to convince the largest audience possible. See Vatican’s bank account or televized preachers in the USA to confirm this.

The debate here is highly scientific – I didn’t want to divert from this, only trying to see if you guys agree on the limits of our imagination and brains, and thus conclude to the possibility that the search for truth may be pointless because our tools are biased.

August Comte was a positivist like too much French are, “In God they do not trust”, so it is difficult to be a scientist in the field of quantum mechanics in this country for some reasons which are well explained by Heisenberg, see :

http://eternal-cartesian.blogspot.com/2009/08/heisenberg-and-god.html

Perfect victory for Templeton Foundation.

Just on the religion since I’m not into pseudoscience either – I doubt very much whether the many many scientists who were/are religious would agree with this statement. Religion takes a great deal of understanding. Just by way of one example where it ‘beat’ science – creation out of nothing.

I don’t think it was any coincidence that it was Lemaitre – a Catholic priest – who helped to put cosmology back on track by proposing an expanding universe. His search was fruitful precisely because he was looking in the right place – a place already proposed by the Church.

But to use ‘beat’ would be wrong too – science and theology are friends. Examine both and you will see that they have a lot to say to each other, always have done, always will.

I’d love to know if you agree that this scenario is a possibility, the fact stated above, and if yes, to what level it is probable. If you do, does it change anything in your research, and aren’t you lacking a lot of modesty and wisdom trying to figure out something that is most probably impossible for your limited brains to deduce, or worse, to understand even if it was all handed out to you?

Or maybe lack of modesty is an essential quality for people who try to answer questions that men have been asking themselves since the dawn of time?

About pseudoscience or religion: it explains everything, like a poster said above, and that’s precisely why it’s garbage, because our imagination is able to grasp everything they describe. This is also why so many men on Earth love religion and pseudoscience: it requires little effort to understand. On the contrary, General Relativity, Special Relativity, Quantum Physics or String Theory are all much harder to grasp. They are often counter-intuitive and thus, defy the limits of our imagination. It was said of Relativity that only two men understood it on the planet many years after it was published. Quantum Physics still cannot explain scientifically observable phenomenons such as the EPR paradox, to give just one example. Even though our human brain was able to produce such gems, my point still stands: whatever our imagination and our brains produce in terms of an explanation is bound to be limited by the design of our brains.

I wonder if any scientist has ever come to the same conclusion, committing suicide shortly after.

** If I made scientific errors in this post, please excuse my lack of knowledge and please do point them out to me.

It’s like an itch that we can’t scratch and that won’t go away. The problem is, many of us have a nagging feeling that its probably true in some sense.

Sometimes, the places that physics leads you, you just have to sigh and roll with it. Like the discovery of the Muon..