zrocks, you aren't in JM + the HA are you? If so we've probably met through Bill B.

Anyway, the reason I took exception to your question the first time is that I think you're implying people here only get upset at the religious right in this country, when they should be getting upset at the outrages commited by Muslim extremists (which are much worse). Am I off-base? I for one am not consumed by hatred, by the way, or at least last time I checked I wasn't.

The thermodynamic direction of time has to do with entropy, which is the second law of thermodynamics: things move from order to disorder, not the other way around. If you knock over a cup, the coffee falls out - the coffee doesn't go into the cup like a movie run backwards.

On the other hand, if you're trying to imagine what the pre-universe was like, time is different: it has no border. Yes there was a big bang 15 billion years ago, but before that it "just was" - in fact there was no time "before that."

That's what Stephen Hawking says, and as I posted a couple of weeks ago, you have to read him if you want to try and understand it any better than that. I read his paragraphs over and over, and I still have a hard time grasping a lot of it.

I misspoke. The point was that the Judeo - Christian view was unique.

Nick - regarding time without border - that's in "Brief History of Time"? I'm going to have to pull that out. My understanding is that time and space are inseparably linked (the principle of equivalence). Thus you cannot describe time before the big bang.

This is not limited to just fanatics. Any person who is devoted to their religion puts a limit on their point of view. This is why organized religion promotes division among people. As the world gets smaller through technology and population growth, eventually (maybe in 100 years, maybe in 1000) everyone will have to adhere to the same worldview, and it ain't gonna be Christianity, Muslim, Judaism or any of today's religions (unless one dominates through genocide, and we know that ain't happening). You may be reading this with a bit of confusion if you know that a large part of my living comes from producing Christian music. The fact is, I'm not a religious person myself. I get paid to produce good music and I happen to live in a very Catholic town.

I am not implying, I am observing. Hopi has it right. But the first order of business is to stop the violence and terror. When the religious right strap schrapnel filled bombs to their bodies to kill innocent people, it is time for immediate action. Rudolph spent several years in hillbilly country - squealing like a pig - and was finally caught. Fundamentalists who hide in foreign countries for protection are going to be tougher to catch.

Now you are back to the topic. Doesn't entropy contradict evolution?

This idea and the concept of infinity hurt my brain. One of the arms of string theory predicts a complete universe exists within a Planck's distance. When this universe collapses, it falls into that distance and the other expands out in a big bang.

So far the maesurements taken have shown that the present expansion is increasing rather than slowing. This gives rise to the speculation that there must be undiscovered forces repeling the larger object's gravity attraction. I wonder if it isn't similiar to the weak and strong forces seen at the atomic level.

Why would time have to flow in only one direction? In almost every case, there is always a counter to a known. Electron, positron - and the neutral neutron. 3 quarks, in fact 3 family of quarks. As long as time exists, then it follows that it could have 3 states (directions as it were) forward, backward and neutral.

I don't know what any of that is. I am just a dumb redneck from the Bible belt who moved to Minnesota to marry my High School sweetheart.

Who cares what Hawikings says, if it is wrong? Who cares if Ianstien was wrong about E=Mc Sq.

Is there a smaller than one beat per second? How about one beat per year?

If there was nothing before the big bang, what banged? Nothing? How did we know that then?

An aquantance of mines dad invented the carbon dating system we now use. Many argue that time effects the dating and the arguments about leaving a dead duck on the beach affecting the dating is an argument that can and should be looked into further, but it does give us an idea of what we look at with it.

A wall in or at the lake in Pereu (tittycocka) sp., (but you knew that, right?), has a carbon date of 22,000 years, is it wrong, could be, does it matter, maybe, does it give us an indication of where we came from, no. Does it help in figuring out where and why we are here, maybe. Did Ienstein realize that when the ballon was dropping that it also got taller, no, did that effect the outcome of his famous equasion, yes because he thought it only got longer.

I am a fanatic about music and consider myself as an audio biggot. I only want to do it my way and don't care if someone else does it any other way it could be done. Is that wrong, bad or OK? Fine, well what about other beliefs? Should I be punnished for not moving from what I believe is the right way to do it? I haven't killed anyone over my beliefs, maybe effected thier lives with my fanatic beliefs and came up with a good sounding recording, did that justify the means? The lead singer is crying in the corner and the guitar player is thinking of quiting because he dosn't understand the process. Who cares, they walk out with what they need to go on thier merry way with a great recording and a nightmare recollection of a recording session. If there metal is strong and it tested good under fire will it be a good experiance?

We are still cought up in the symptoms of a war to controll all of humanity, but no one is looking at the problem because we naturly drift to the emotional issues that make up the real problem, diversity and controll. Without diversity we have sheep willing to follow the leader, or a leader. That is controll.... Should we bring up a bunch of fanatic kids that have been breed to destroy the Islamic population? Should we pay our tax to the Islamic groups only to be killed later? The dead sea scrools mention Mohamid so they were around then, just with a differant slant on the whole creation thing and they took over the holy places in thier neck of the woods while they morfed into thier holy places, I'm talking Meca here. It was a cristian holy place before it turned black.

I know I ramboling, but this thread is long and a little off corse. anyone who believes there is a beginning is more than a little off course, in my book. I will only accept that there is a start to the story and that is not the beginning.

What if you looked at it this way:
Were humans designed to fly around in airplanes? On any given day human beings can fall out of the sky from an altitude of 40,000 feet. Tell that to somebody 100 years ago. We can get in a car and zip around with zero effort, and potentially smash into something at a speed of 70 miles an hour. We have ten thousand man made satellites orbiting the earth, most of which is garbage. There are countless man made radio signals emitting from our atmosphere. Mankind has the potential of eliminating himself and virtually all life on the planet with nuclear weapons. We are already doing it slowly with pollution and greenhouse gases. In 100 years, oil will be gone, which took nature tens of millions of years to produce. All of these things seem entropic to me.

Buttrumpet, is this really a fact? If it is a guess, I would guess the opposite: that there is LESS Christianity right now (at least in the U.S.). I could be wrong, though.

While it is interesting to see how Christianity (especially the Catholic church) has tracked alongside politics during the last several centuries, it isn't really fair to imply that "Christianity" as a belief is somehow responsible for the bad behavior of all of these people. People are still responsible for their own behavior as individuals, whether or not they subscribe to a particular religion or ideology. Just because you call yourself a great guitarist or an environmentalist doesn't make it so. It still comes down to how you behave--there are BAD Christians as there are bad muslims and bad democrats. So you cannot assign blame to an ideology or religion, I'm afraid.

zrocks, I sprained my ankle. Your answer: "9/11." Our government is developing "usable" nuclear weapons against all logic. "9/11." The FCC sucks. "9/11."The religious right is using sanctimony to justify imposing their values on other people and take away their rights. "9/11; and furthmore, you're filled with hatred."

No. It takes more energy to produce things than they end up with, so the extra energy dissipates and contributes to the entropy of the universe.

Dorkus, I believe it's in "A Brief History of Time," and I know it's in "The Illustrated Theory of Everything."

JM + HA = Jack Mack and the Heart Attack. They were playing at the Olympics in Atlanta when the bomb went off.