RufusAtticus

Tricia,

It appears you are asking questions about cosomology. I study evolution not theoretical physics, so I can't provide an answer. Maybe one of the others expressing interest can help you with these questions. You might consider posting the same questions in the Science & Skepticism forum.

Do you have any questions about biology?

-RvFvS

hezekiah jones

Uranus, Venus, and Pluto, I believe. Also several planetary satellites behave in the same manner. Might as well add them into the mix.

And Hovind must be pretty clever to figure that out, because when Voyager II flew past Uranus in 1986, its south pole was pointed almost directly at the sun. So how did Hovind know it was spinning "backwards"?

And does Hovind actually think that astronomers and cosmologists haven't taken the retrograde motions of planets and moons into consideration?

Those are the questions I would ask your teacher.

Coragyps

Ah, drdino!
First, the Big Bang was about 9,000,000,000 years, and several generations of stars, before the Solar System even formed. No cause-and-effect of spin there.
Second, the three planets that spin "backwards" are Venus, Uranus, and Pluto. Some recent news release that I can't find at the moment simulated Venus starting out spinning quickly and the "right" way, and slowing, and finally reversing, due to tides in its extremely thick atmosphere. It now turns very slowly. Uranus is only said to be spinning "retrograde" because its axis is tilted nearly to the plane of its orbit: the theory is that U. had a huge collision with another early planet long ago. Pluto I don't know about, except the Disney character was a fairly backwards sort of cartoon dog.
Several moons are in retrograde orbits, but all are small, and I believe that they're all thought to be captured asteroids, not moons that grew in place around their parent planets.

edit to add: Oh, hi, Hez!

[ April 25, 2002: Message edited by: Coragyps ]</p>

KeithHarwood

Hovind is confused here and a long way behind the times. The Big Bang happened about 15,000,000,000 years ago. Earth formed less than 5,000,000,000 years ago.

The whole universe is expanding from a point as if there were a big explosion. However, the gravity of all the pieces is trying to pull it back together again, so the expansion should be slowing down. Have you done potential and kinetic energy at school yet? Potential energy is, roughly speaking, the energy an object has due to its position in a gravitational field. Kinetic energy is the energy it has because it is moving. If you hold something in your hand it has a certain amount of potential energy. If you let it drop some of that potential energy is converted into kinetic energy and it is moving quite fast when it hits the floor.

As the galaxies in the universe get further and further apart their potential energy with respect to all the other galaxies is increasing. Energy is always conserved so their kinetic energy is decreasing, that is, they are slowing down. The big question is, will they ever come to a stop. If they do, they will turn round and fall back inwards, with all the potential energy being converted back to kinetic so they all come together in a Big Crunch. It has been speculated (and it's no more than speculation) that after the crunch the universe will rebound in another Big Bang.

It all depends on the amount of kinetic energy the galaxies have. If they have too little, they will come back to the crunch, if they have more than enough they will keep expanding forever, just getting slower and slower but never stopping.

Now fifty years ago our measurements of the motions of the galaxies weren't good enough to decide the matter and I suspect that the 80 to 100 billion years comes from the lower limit of the measurements.

Today the best measurements say there is just enough to keep the universe going forever, but it's a close call and the fact that it is so close is something that a good theory of the universe has to explain.

(I read in the paper that new studies of the oldest stars show the universe was about 14,000,000,000 years old, not 15,000,000,000. I haven't pursued the details of this yet.)

</strong>

He's made up the bit about dirt. Yes, it was a tiny dot, but it was a dot of incredibly bright light. See my post on you being made of stardust.

</strong>

You are getting into some seriously deep physics here. I'll try to explain my understanding as best as I can but take it with more than the usual shovel-ful of salt.

You probably think of the Big Bang as a tiny dot exploding in empty space and expanding to fill more of that space. It's not actually like that. The insides of that dot are all the space there is. There isn't an outside, that's why we call the inside the universe, it is everything. So, as the universe expands the amount of space increases.
(What's more, there isn't an edge to the universe, everywhere in it looks, on the whole, like everywhere else.)

It was discovered, about seventy years ago, that empty space has energy. Particles like electrons and their anti-particles called positrons come into existence for a very short time then annihilate each other again. (Matter is made of elementary particles. Elementary particles all come with anti-particles. A bit of energy can create a particle-antiparticle pair. When they come back together they vanish and give the energy back.)

Now we are starting to get to the hard bit, the bit where I really need help.

The energy in empty space is negative energy. If you take two flat metal plates and put them very close together there is a tiny force pulling them closer. It's called the Casimir (sp?) effect. If you pull them apart you have to provide energy. So the energy of the empty space you have created between the plates is negative.

Now, where did the energy of the universe come from? Well, there isn't any. The positive kinetic and potential energy of the observable universe is equal to the negative energy of the extra space that is being created by the expansion. Put the two together and the nett energy is zero. The matter in the universe is a bit left over from the days when the universe was so hot that it could create matter.

OK Guys, I'm floundering here. Anyone know where there's decent explanation of this suitable for Tricia?

</strong>

Hovind is seriously confused here, but he's not alone, a lot of journalists have the same problem. He has confused the creation of the universe with the creation of the solar system. There's ten billion years difference.

Our sun and our solar system started off as a big cloud of dust and gas. It was swirling about in all directions, but all the swirls didn't exactly cancel out. As it shrank under its own gravitational pull the bit that didn't cancel was magnified, like you see when water goes down a drain. (It's conservation of angular momentum. The very slow rotation at a large radius becomes a very fast rotation at a small radius.) So, at about the time that the sun started to shine by its own light, rather than the heat of the gravitational infall, it had a disk of dust and gas around it all rotating in the one direction. After a while the disk started to clump together under its gravity and the clumps started to bump into each other and sometimes they stuck and sometimes they splattered. The clumps got bigger and bigger and the collisions became more violent. At sometime late in this process the Earth was hit by a planet roughly the size of Mars. The collision destroyed the other planet, badly damaged the Earth, but some of the debris remained and collected together to form our moon. Eventually most of stuff collected together as the planets we know today and the space in between was more or less empty. (Although the Earth collected a lot of extra stuff in what is called the Late Bombardment about 3,800,000,000 years ago.)

The point about all this is that the conditions were pretty chaotic when the planets were forming. The direction of rotation they ended up with depended on the direction that the last few big lumps came together at. Mostly they hit in the direction everyone else was going, so most of the planets rotate in the same direction as they revolve around the sun, but Venus was hit almost head on, so it hardly rotates at all, and that bit is backwards, and Uranus was knocked over so that it rolls along sideways.

By the way, Hovind is seriously mistaken about rotational motion in general. He thinks that if you swing something around on the end of a piece of string and then let go, that it will continue in a curved path. He tells the story of a `professor' he met on a plane and in the conversation trots this up. If the professor (if there ever was a professor) had ever taught physics or mechanical engineering he would have picked this up straight away, because it is a common mistake that students make (the students who never really understood Newton's Laws).

Are you sure this is a good idea? Try it out on a few friends behind the toilets, or whereever it is you go to talk about things you don't want your teachers to hear. If things go well, then try it in class. (This is what the theatrical profession calls a tryout in the sticks.) The point is that this could be the sort of thing that your teachers don't want you to know and you could get into trouble by sharing it with your class.

And don't take my word for any of it, particularly the negative energy bit. Try to confirm it from other sources.

BTW, if you are to the north of the solar system looking down on it, it rotates anti-clockwise.

Edited to correct a typo and also to add:

OK, Tricia, you now have two theories as to why Venus is rotating slowly and retrograde (that's the fancy term for backwards). Don't ask which one to believe. Ask what observations we need to decide between them.

[ April 25, 2002: Message edited by: KeithHarwood ]

Edited again to get the formating right and to add:

Hm. It looks like someone has just reinvented the oscillating universe. I hope they've done a better job than last time.

[ April 26, 2002: Message edited by: KeithHarwood ]</p>

KeithHarwood

*Bump*

We don't want to lose you, Tricia.

Tricia

My bad.

Tomorrow I should have some more questions, but I understand what you said. I am also printing out your answers to show to the class tomorrow. I don't really think my teacher will have a problem with it, because it would only make her look bad.

~Tricia

Brian63

I'm not sure what you mean Tricia. If it would make her look bad, it would seem that she would have a problem with it.

Obviously, you know your teacher and your classmates better than any of us here do, so you are more qualified to make the decision of whether you should be announcing this stuff in class. If I were you though, I'd ask the teacher first if it was okay to read some material that conflicts with what you are being taught in class. I'm concerned that you may get in trouble if you are going to be catching everyone by surprise by the stuff you plan on saying.

Brian

Tricia

Well, I plan on talking to my Bible teacher first, because I've been talking to her for awhile about evolution and I'm sure she'd be interested to know what evolutionists think.

Thanks for your concern, though.

~Tricia

[ May 01, 2002: Message edited by: Tricia ]</p>

Lizard

Tricia,

I think this link will tell you all you need to know about "Dr. Dino" to determine if he is reliable or not.

<a href="http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Temple/9917/hovind/wild_hovind.html" target="_blank">The Wild, Wild World of Kent Hovind.</a>

Enjoy!

Tricia

All right, I have some more questions on the other post, but I’ll do these first.

In biology class yesterday, our class watched a movie that was by Dr. Jobe Martin instead of your favorite speaker, Kent Hovind. HE talked about several different animals that disproves evolution. Here are they, and my questions about each:

The giraffe - just a brief description, the giraffe has a very strong pump for a heart because it has to go up his long neck. When he takes a drink of water, if all the blood still went to his head it would explode, so there is a sponge-like thing that collects the blood. This “sponge” gives the blood back to the head when he gets up to prevent lack of oxygen to the brain. My question is, if mutations only take place if it is absolutely necessary, how would the giraffe survived without dying out?

the woodpecker - Because he bangs his head on the tree, he has a layer of cartilage protecting his head. How would that have evolved? And he is the only bird with a tongue 10-11 inches long, and if all birds came from the same bird, why is that? He has a tongue that has a “glue” on it to catch bugs, but also a gland that secretes a dissolvent agent to counteract he “glue” so that he doesn’t swallow his tongue and therefore kill himself. How did he not die out before it was realized that he needed that dissolvent agent?

the beaver - he knows exactly where he is going and has a little calculator in his head that tells him at what angle to swim with a log of a certain weight. How did that evolve?

the gecko - He has little suction cups on the tiny hairs on his feet. If he had flat feet, he would’ve died because of the power of those suction cups. How did he evolve? And the chuckwalla lizard eats foods so rich in salt that he sneezes pure salt. How did he evolve?

the garden spider - she makes 7 different kinds of webs. Why is she the only spider to make so many different webs? And she has to dust her eggs so that they don’t stick together, how did she realize that?

chicken egg if the baby chick doesn’t crack a hole in the egg to get the wastes out, he’ll die by drowning. If it evolved, why didn’t he die?

Yeah, I know. And to think it was only a 45 minute video.

~Tricia