The cosmos has a border

 

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Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.

 Joel Kontinen

“Black holes may not destroy all information about what they were originally made of, according to a new set of quantum calculations, which would solve a major physics paradox first described by Stephen Hawking

One of the biggest paradoxes in astrophysics may finally be solved. The question of what happens to information when it falls into a black hole has vexed physicists for decades, and now a group of researchers claims to have figured it out”.

When Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes should slowly evaporate by emitting radiation – now called Hawking radiation – he also created a problem.

In the 1984 Russell Humpreys wrote the book Starlhght and Time in which he postulation that by using white holes and that the Earth could only be 6000 years old. He has also made many  creaionist assumptiions such as the Mercury'sgravitational field.

His theory  relies on Albert Einstein's thoughts, but his idea of white holes is his own. 

Source:

Crane,Leah . 2022. Stephen Hawking's black hole paradox may finally have a solution New Science. 21 March.

Elon Musk Warns of an Immortal AI Dictator

As an idea, AI is not a recent invention. Image courtesy of Sybil Tawse, from Stories of Gods and Heroes (1920) by Thomas Bulfinch. Public Domain.




Joel Kontinen

Elon Musk used to team up with Stephen Hawking to warn of the dangers of artificial intelligence that might turn into a disaster for humans.

Not so long ago he said that AI was a bigger threat than North Korea.

Musk shares his fears in a new AI documentary called Do You Trust This Computer?

He is afraid that in contrast to human dictators – who will eventually die – it would be practically impossible to get rid of an AI dictator:

"At least when there's an evil dictator, that human is going to die,” Live Science quotes Musk as saying, "But for an AI there would be no death. It would live forever, and then you'd have an immortal dictator, from which we could never escape."

However, the second law of thermodynamics practically guarantees that nothing we make will last forever, but it will break down – sooner or later.

The only thing that remains is the Bible, the Word of God. And it definitely rules out an immortal AI dictator.

Source:

Specktor, Brandon. 2018. Elon Musk Worries That AI Research Will Create an 'Immortal Dictator'. Live Science (8 April).

Elon Musk: AL Is a Bigger Threat to Us than North Korea

Image courtesy of Gnsin, CC BY-SA 3.0.




Joel Kontinen

Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence?

"If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea," Elon Musk tweeted on 11 August.

The billionaire businessman has previously suggested that
humans are living in a computer simulation.

Now, however, he has begun to echo Stephen Hawking, who has previously warned us of the very same danger.

The threat is more sci.fi that anything else. Machines can only do what they are programmed to do.

Could this fear stem from the naturalistic worldview in which mind is assumed to have arisen from matter?

In real life, it doesn’t.

Source:

Chow, Denise. 2017. Elon Musk: AI Poses Bigger Threat to Humanity Than North Korea. Live Science (16 August).

Stephen Hawking: Earth Could Become a Hothouse Planet Like Venus

Earth’s future according to Stephen Hawking? Image courtesy of NASA.





Joel Kontinen

Stephen Hawking likes being in the news. But often his speciality is news that could hardly be described as good or even pleasant.

He has kept on drumming that our time on planet Earth is about to end and we should search for a new planet.

Prof. Hawking has also warned of big bad aliens on at least two occasions.

And he sees artificial intelligence (AI) as a major threat to mankind.

Now, he has joined the global warning bandwagon. He warns that if we “don't curb irreversible climate change,” Earth could turn into a hot planet like Venus.

However, even Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the Pennsylvania State University, does not agree with Hawking.

Mann sent Live Science an email, saying:

"Hawking is taking some rhetorical license here Earth is further away from the sun than Venus and likely cannot experience a runaway greenhouse effect in the same sense as Venus — i.e. a literal boiling away of the oceans.”

Speculations nearly always get noticed, regardless of how little facts (if any) there are to give substance to them.

Source:

Ghose, Tia. 2017. Stephen Hawking: Earth Could Turn Into Hothouse Planet Like Venus. Live Science (5 July).

Stephen Hawking and Other Astronomers at Loggerheads Over Cosmic Inflation

This scenario is a source of naturalistic contention. Image courtesy of Yinweichen, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

The Big Bang model has several serious problems. It does not work without cosmic inflation that New Scientist recently called a totally bonkers idea.

No one knows what caused it or why it slowed at the time it did.

It is a naturalistic dogma that should not be contested.

However, recently physicists Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt and Abraham Loeb published an article in Scientific American in which they examined “the latest measurements from the European Space Agency relating to cosmic microwave background (CMB)” and suggested that the data did not support the inflation theory.

An article in Newsweek points out some fatal flaws in the theory:

– No one has found primordial gravitational waves, or ripples in spacetime created by the Big Bang.
– Inflation requires the existence of “inflationary energy,” for which there is no direct evidence.

Ijjas and colleagues think that the idea of a “big bounce”, i.e. periods of expansion and contraction, fits the data better.

However, Stephen Hawking and 32 other astronomers replied with an angry letter, stating that they believe that the Big Bang and its concomitant cosmic inflation is the more credible explanation for the origin of the cosmos.

There are other serious problems with the Big Bang as well: the mystery of quantum fluctuation, missing dark matter and the likewise elusive dark energy and antimatter.

In addition, the earliest galaxies formed too quickly.

“He [God] made the stars also,” Genesis tells us. That is by far the best explanation for the existence of the universe.

Source:

Osborne, Hannah. 2017. Big Bang or Big Bounce? Stephen Hawking and Others Pen Angry Letter About How the Universe Began. Newsweek (12 May).

Stephen Hawking Warns of Bad Aliens - Again

Prof. Hawking is in a warning mood.




Joel Kontinen

Professor Stephen Hawking keeps on seeing threats here and there. Recently he again warned us of the danger of trying to contact aliens.

He thinks there might be life on Gliese 832c, an exoplanet that orbits a red dwarf star some 16 light years from us. It is five times as big as Earth and has a year (i.e., the length of one orbit) that lasts a mere 36 days.

Image courtesy of PHL @ UPR Arecibo, NASA Hubble, Stellarium.

Last year, Professor Hawking launched the $100 million Breakthrough Listen initiative with Russian tycoon Yuri Milner with the aim of finding extraterrestrial life:

“The Breakthrough Listen project will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, but I know just the place to start looking. One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back,” The Independent quotes him as saying.

He is afraid that the little green men might kill us off.

This is not the first time he warns us of bad aliens.

In his naturalistic /materialistic world, the universe should be teeming with life, some of which might be far more intelligent than we are.

And since the only model he knows of is our fallen world, he obviously thinks aliens must also be bad.

He believes that the universe made itself through natural laws. He has everything popping out of nothing.

But quantum fluctuations cannot salvage lazy thinking.

By ignoring the supernatural dimension, Prof. Hawkins is in effect endorsing the flatland view of reality.

He has previously warned humanity of the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI), so seeing threats all over the place seems to be second nature to him.

Source:

Griffin, Andrew. 2016. Stephen Hawking warns that humanity should not respond to aliens in case they kill us all. The Independent (23 September).

Stephen Hawking and the Threat of AI

Stephen Hawking. Image courtesy of NASA.



Joel Kontinen

Like some other advocates of a purely naturalistic /materialistic worldview, for instance, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking has not actually been averse to making statements that go way beyond his expertise.

A few years ago, he warned us of the threat posed by big bad aliens. He also claimed that the universe could create itself through the use of natural laws.

In the meanwhile he has also dabbled in foreign politics by boycotting a scientific conference held in Israel, the very opposite of the Je Suis Juif (I am a Jew) idea popularised after the recent attack on a Jewish supermarket in Paris.

More recently, he once again warned us of a threat lurking to make an end of us. This time it has to do with artificial intelligence. He is especially worried about AI (artificial intelligence) that could “take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.”

Prof. Hawking thinks that this would be a disaster, since in his view, “humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded.”

What he fails to notice is that computers, robots and “smart” devices can only do what they have been programmed to do. They do not – and cannot – think. They are not conscious creatures that could usurp man’s place in the order of things.

The real threat does not come from AI but from confusion, crime and terrorism, which spring from man’s refusal to abide by the laws set by the Lawmaker, who created everything in the universe, including Stephen Hawking.

We can put our trust in God instead of speculating about improbable, incredible and impossible threats that go against natural laws.

After all, life only comes from life. The same applies to consciousness and intelligence.

In contrast, robots can never be alive.


Source:

Cellan-Jones, Rory. 2014. Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind. BBC news (2 December).

Stephen Hawking Boycotts Israel

Stephen Hawking boycotts Israel. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Science is not the only thing that scientists do. Professor Stephen Hawking was supposed to attend a scientific conference in Israel but he cancelled his coming at the last moment. Initially, the University of Cambridge issued a statement, explaining that he was not well enough to travel. However, he later admitted that his real reason was a desire to boycott Israel.

Professor Hawking is not the only scientist who has used his scientific credentials to dabble with politics or other non-scientific issues. Richard Dawkins has hardly spent any time in a laboratory in decades but has focused on spreading the gospel of atheism. Recently, PZ Myers has defended abortion.

The Hawking case shows that anti-Semitism has definitely not fallen into a black hole.

Source:

Plosker, Simon. 2013. Stephen Hawking’s Media Mess. The Times of Israel. (9 May).

Genesis: Still a Huge Problem for Naturalistic Origins Theories

Gustave Doré (1832–1883): Creation of Light. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen


Recently, the titles of two articles in New Scientist magazine illustrated the current state of origins theories: The Genesis problem and Why physicists can't avoid a creation event.

“How do you get a universe, complete with the laws of physics, out of nothing?” the magazine asks. The text is surprisingly honest:

“YOU could call them the worst birthday presents ever. At the meeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday - loftily titled 'State of the Universe' - two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.”

These proposals state that the universe must have had a beginning, when it came into being out of nothing. While they equate this creation event with the Big Bang, the Genesis 1:1 description – “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" – is an even more credible explanation of the origin of everything.


Sources:

Grossman, Lisa. 2012. Why physicists can't avoid a creation event. New Scientist 2847, 6-7.

The Genesis problem. New Scientist 2847, 3. (13 January 2012).

Scientific American’s Columnist: Scientists Should Not Study Worlds That Only Exist In Their Imagination

Our universe is not the only one in multiverse thinking. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

John Horgan, who writes a weekly online column for Scientific American magazine, recently read Brian Greene’s new book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos and was obviously not very pleased with it.

Multiverse is not a new idea. Astronomers have speculated about the existence of other universes for some years and even Scientific American has toyed with the idea.

Recently, Stephen Hawking, for instance, said that he takes the idea of multiple universes seriously.

There is a major problem with this thinking, however. There is not a shred of evidence for the existence of any other universe. As Horgan says:

“These multiverse theories all share the same fundamental defect: They can be neither confirmed nor falsified. Hence, they don't deserve to be called scientific, according to the well-known criterion proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper. Some defenders of multiverses and strings mock skeptics who raise the issue of falsification as ‘Popperazis’—which is cute but not a counterargument. Multiverse theories aren't theories—they're science fictions, theologies, works of the imagination unconstrained by evidence.”

Horgan might have added that when man shuts God outside his thinking, he begins to speculate. At times, this can lead to rather weird ideas.

Source:

Horgan, John. 2011. Is speculation in multiverses as immoral as speculation in subprime mortgages? Scientific American (2 February).

Stephen Hawking, skeptics and two-dimensional reality

Joel Kontinen

In 1884 the British author Edwin Abbott Abbott introduced the concept of a two- dimensional world with his novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Flatland was a satire of the English society of the Victorian era.

The inhabitants of Flatland only know two dimensions, length and breadth. Professor A. E. Wilder-Smith (1915–1995) used this idea to illustrate people who deny the existence of the supernatural dimension.




Wilder-Smith had three earned science doctorates. His many books, especially The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution, probably caused some skeptics to suffer from a bout of hypertension.

Some years ago Creation magazine published an article that used the concept of Flatland to illustrate the difference between a naturalistic understanding of reality and the biblical view in which God intervenes in human affairs by entering our world.

According to the Bible, God is transcendent. He is beyond time and space. Stephen Hawking and other skeptics, who only believe in naturalistic causes, have to infer that physical laws created the entire universe since they are not sure whether there is anyone or anything beyond the cosmos. They are like the inhabitants of Flatland who only see that what is happening in the two dimensions of their tiny world.

Source:

Grigg, Russell. 1999. The gospel in time and space. Creation 21(2):50–53.

Stephen Hawking makes headlines with his views on non-theistic creation

Stephen Hawking. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

Professor Stephen Hawking has been making headlines with his recent statements. He believes that thanks to natural laws, such as the law of gravity, ”the universe can and will create itself from nothing” and God was not needed in the creation business.

Hawking is obviously using the media to get attention for his soon-to-be-released book The Grand Design, co-written by US physicist Leonard Mlodinow.

Stephen Hawking brings up the existence of exoplanets or extrasolar planets as an argument against the supernatural creation of the universe. The idea is interesting since exoplanets basically falsify all known naturalistic theories of planet formation. Moreover, in many cases hot Jupiters orbit surprisingly near their sun. Some Earth-like planets orbit their sun nearer than Mercury our Sun.

The conditions on these worlds would be somewhat inhospitable. Exoplanets speak of the uniqueness of the planet we call Earth.

The idea of multiverses or multiple universes, though popular among some non-theists, is not based on sound science. There is no real evidence to support it.

A major problem in invoking the laws of physics in creation is that although they explain how things work, they do not say anything about how things were originally made.

The idea that everything could come from natural laws that after all do not take a physical form defies logic. In her recently published book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power (Encounter Books, New York, 2010) British journalist Melanie Phillips suggests that the idea of the spontaneous formation of the universe amounts to magic.


Sources:

Lopez, Kathryn Jean. 2010. Melanie Phillips on a World Gone Mad. National Review Online (20 May).

Statham, Dominic. 2010. A revealing insight into European and world politics. A review of The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power by Melanie Phillips. Creation.com. (31 August).

Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe.
BBC news 2 September 2010.

Stephen Hawking: Beware of big bad aliens!

Stephen Hawking. Image courtesy of NASA.



Joel Kontinen

Sending messages to outer space might not be a good idea. Greedy aliens, who have run out of green pastures on their home planet, might arrive with their giant spaceships and treat us like the early European conquerors treated the American Indians.

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking disclosed this while advertising a series he made for Discovery Channel. Hawking says that the sheer size of the universe almost guarantees that we are not alone.

Hawking’s logic is based on the assumption that since (as he believes) life originated randomly on Earth (or, as he suggests, an asteroid brought the building blocks of life from elsewhere), it must also have originated randomly elsewhere in the universe.

However, if we believe that God has created all life, we might forget speculations about greedy aliens.