sirbytor

hello everyone,

i recently came across Langan's paper on the ISCID site. while i'm skeptical, and i'm pretty good at detecting bullshit, i find some of the ideas interesting (primarily because i'm sympathetic toward Wheeler's speculations about the fundamental nature of information and the idea of the Universe as a self-caused system). one of the posters at a board i frequent referred me to this site for a critical analysis of Langan's work; but, unfortunately, the search engine doesn't appear to be functioning.

while I am skeptical about Intelligent Design, i recently discovered that a colleague of mine (for whom i have a tremendous respect) is a fellow of the ISCID...that in itself has motivated me to at least consider the idea in an attempt to understand what modern cosmology can and can't say on the question.

a bit of background on me. i'm a physicist, currently engaged in research in the area of plasma astrophysics at NASA/GSFC. before that, i was an astrophysicst at LANL. i was a grad student at the U of Iowa (where i met Fred Skiff, now a fellow of ISCID). i'm not an expert in cosmology, but i have a good working knowledge of the field.

is anyone willing to discuss Langan's work (or at least give a summary of the arguments people have made here)?

-S

NialScorva

You might want to ask in Evo/Cre. It was discussed there quite a bit a couple weeks ago. I believe that the general consensus was that Langin had Sokaled himself and the ID movement.

I don't remember many details of the paper, but I do know that I have yet to see a IDist who understands the first thing about information theory.

Jesse

The search engine seems to be working fine now--here are some science & skepticism threads it came up with:

Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe

Anyone here understands CTMU?

And here's an Evolution & Creation thread:

Langan Discussion on ARN worth Reading

There were a bunch of other threads that had the term "Langan" in them somewhere but most of them didn't seem to say much about his "CTMU" directly.

sirbytor

well...i can see there's been a fair amount of discussion already...i don't want to resurrect a vivisected horse. thanks for the info!

-S