[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by oleg:
if you want to protest to the modern science ideas and conclusions - insert your Christian/Muslim belives here - you should also give up on internet and the very fact I can communicate to you thanks to these Boards that only exist due to the indifatigable progress of physics and mathematics you apparently question. (sorry if I misunderstood you - not for the first time )

That would depend on what ideas and conclusions you are protesting - e.g.: if you don't believe electronics work, you are being silly; If you don't believe in modern Big Bang theory, you can be quite cognizant on it.

For example, If all the mass in the current universe was once pressed into a ball smaller than the black hole thought to be at the center of our galaxy, then the universe shouldn't have ever gone bang - the escape velocity from a black hole (by definition) is in excess of c, which is currently thought to be the speed limit. Any such theory would need to propose one of a number of things to get around this:
1) Modern physical law (or some portion thereof) did not apply at the time
- in which case, the theory needs to also explain where modern physical law came from, why we can't seem to change it, et cetera; besides, such altering of the laws of the universe isn't exactly something that has been observed by what the scientific community would recognize as a reliable source; it requires much speculation based on assumptions - a leap of faith.
2) An as-yet unrecognized force to overpower the super-gravity at such an event, such as "dark energy"
- "dark energy" is a cop-out; it's an unobserved something (reason for the "dark" in the name) thrown in as a correction factor to fix the problem; it's only thought to exist because the universe hasn't collapsed in on itself over the timeframe the universe is thought to have been around. This energy is unobserved; it is required to make certain models work, so it is assumed. Few suggest that there may be a more fundamental flaw in the model. Such a force is also an act of faith.
3) Hesienburg uncertainty allowed things to pop out
- while hypothetically possible, modern QM theory suggests that the probability of at least one particle jumping out of a black hole in a given timeframe is inversly proportional to some power (4, I think it was - I don't recall) of the black hole's mass; more massive -> lower probability. In order to get most the particles in the universe to jump out of the black hole at roughly the same time requires an event of truly negligible probability (if they don't come out at about the same time, all one would get is a bunch of flying particles spread out over zillions of years, too far apart to have a meaningful probability of interacting - no bang, no galaxies, no stars, not even hydrogen). Again, this requires a considerable leap of faith.
4) reserved for future expansion - I'm not all knowing, as far as I know.

There are other severe difficulties with Big Bang theories - current models predict equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, which would quickly annhiliate each other; yet we seem to be made of matter, our galaxy seems to be made of matter, and astronomers can't seem to find any evidence of any anti-matter galaxies to balance us out, to name one.

Of course, now someone is likely to make a faith statment about science, which is likely to go something like "give them time, they will answer all objections" or some such.