Physics thread!

A friend of mine's daughter is really getting into physics, so I recommended my top five favorite physics YouTube channels to her. I figured y'all would probably enjoy these, too.

Feel free to recommend your own fave physics channels if you've got any.

#1 Fermilab

This is the channel for Fermilab, the accelerator lab in Chicago. The host of many of their videos is theoretical physicist Don Lincoln. I love his style. He's chill, down-to-earth, and explains things in a very easy-to-understand way. The videos are all pretty short, so if you're looking to dip your toes into physics topics, this is your channel.

#2 Sabine Hossenfelder

Sabine is a theoretical physicist who explains difficult physics concepts in a way almost anyone can understand. She always chooses interesting topics, and has lately been branching out from physics to cover all kinds of other scientific topics. I appreciate her rational, balanced approach to contentious issues.

We have an apparatus to investigate the natural world, called science.

If there's another realm to reality, separate but interacting with the natural world, science is not equipped to investigate it as it does the natural world.

You can't demand that it needs to. Here's why. Let's use an analogy. Astronomers use filters to observe the universe at different wavelengths (colors) of light. If I put a blue or green filter on a telescope, blue or green light is all it can see. You can get a lot of useful data that way, like in this image.

Existence is far more strange and fascinating than you realize.

Modern life is almost designed to beat our innate sense of wonder out of us.

Take a moment to appreciate just how odd and wonderful it is that the world can be described by mathematics. As physicist Eugene Wigner points out, there's no reason this must be. He wrote a paper called "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," and I urge you all to read it.

maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/pape…

Disagree.

First, it's stupid just on the face of it.

Second, if you read Michael Heiser, you see that the Bible acknowledges a whole pantheon of other gods. I believe these other gods exist. But they are lesser, contingent beings, not deserving of our worship or obedience.

https://twitter.com/ThinkingAtheist/status/1608946250665103360

Did you ever wonder why Exodus 20:3 says, "You shall have no other gods before me" and not "There are no other gods"?

See Heiser's scholarly dive into e.g. Psalm 82 explaining that the "divine council" undoubtedly refers to other gods (elohim).

drmsh.com/divine-council/

Everyone has a "god" – something that sits on the throne of their heart.

If it's God, it will go well for you.

If it's not, it will eat you alive.

Your "god" could be money, fame, looks, work, politics, even something ostensibly wholesome, like fitness or helping people. But no matter how important, how "good" you think your god is, if it's not God – the ground of existence, the wellspring of life, goodness, and love – you're serving something lesser, and it will consume you.

Science doesn't disprove God. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

There is nothing in established, well-supported science that contradicts the existence of God. Nothing.

There isn't even anything in speculative "science" that contradicts God. The best speculations that anti-theists come up with merely make God redundant, but those usually involve infinite regress or static eternal models, both of which have serious problems. It's very difficult to come up with plausible scenarios that don't have an ultimate cause.

Years ago, I had a convo about beliefs with a fellow scientist at a conference. She talked about her Christian brother, and how they'd argued about evolution. When she tried to defend the theory of evolution, she told me she realized she didn't know why she believed it. [Note: I'm neither defending nor attacking evolution here. Just demonstrating how beliefs work even amongst scientists. Back to the thread...]

She'd never studied evolution, didn't know its core premises or predictions, and didn't know the evidence that supported it.

Sociologists call this "speaking in restricted code."

It's an academic way of saying that even intelligent and educated people can behave like hicks when it comes to certain topics, with a limited vocabulary based on shorthand stereotypes.

https://twitter.com/JoeOnisick/status/1485649242915893248

Sociologist Elaine Ecklund talks about this in her book, "Science vs. Religion."

She surveyed hundreds of scientists at elite institutions, and expected them all to be broadly articulate, that is, to be able to speak intelligently about a lot of different topics.

The vast majority of the key scientists of the Scientific Revolution were Christian.

It's such an odd atheist cope to say, well, yeah, cuz everyone was Christian back then.

For those who don't get why this is a dopey response, lemme explain. A. If you're gonna say that everyone was Christian back then, and they still managed to produce modern science when no one else had, then you can't simultaneously claim that Christianity is detrimental to science.

A few critics assumed I was making a God of the gaps argument here.

I wasn't making any argument at all.

I simply find it fascinating that Genesis singled out these three events as special thousands of years before modern science existed to investigate them.

https://twitter.com/sarahsalviander/status/1466085951139192842

No Bronze Age person could've possibly known that these events would eventually prove to be resistant to a form of investigation that wouldn't exist for thousands of years.

Why were they singled out with special language?

It's amazing to me that even we believers keep doing the same things and expecting different results through prayer.

I'm 1000% pro-prayer.

However, that does not replace our obligation to do what we can.

If you feel unmotivated, depressed, mildly sick all the time... ...keep praying, but meanwhile

CHANGE YOUR BEHAVIOR AND YOUR THINKING.

1. Put a smile on your face. Seriously. Try to have a "resting smile face," no matter how you feel. Whenever you feel it slipping, just put that smile back on there.

You will feel better within two days.

I am the perfect atheist experiment.

Unlike many atheists, who rejected the faith in which they were raised, I was raised atheist. My parents rejected the Catholic faith of their families early on, and raised me and my brother without faith, in a progressive, secular country. We never set foot in a Christian church until were adults. We never read a word of scripture. My father introduced us to Objectivism, an explicitly atheist philosophy, when we were teenagers. By the time we entered university, we came to despise religion.

Do you struggle to understand how miracles fit into a scientific view of the universe?

There are two different ways to look at miracles and nature.

1. Miracles are a TOTAL transgression of the natural laws.

2. Miracles are a transgression of the USUAL course of things. If #1 is true, then God, as the creator and the ultimate force behind the universe, can suspend the laws at will to achieve an outcome. This doesn't contradict the laws of nature. The laws of nature have nothing to say about the supernatural or its intervention w/ the natural.

Top twenty tips for turning Christian children into atheist adults

(An excerpt from my book.*)

There is a special type of atheist that deserves your attention. These atheists were raised in Christian families, and walked away from their faith almost as soon as they left their… …homes. Many of them are quite bitter about it. In speaking with these atheists, I noticed certain patterns popping up again and again. Things their parents said or didn’t say, things their Sunday school teachers told them, things their families modeled for them, issues their…

The intractable fact is, imperfect man cannot save imperfect man. In all the thousands of years of evolving approaches to problem-solving, it has never happened. It hasn't even progressed. We're still struggling with exactly the same problems we struggled with millennia ago.

https://twitter.com/Prof_Yakob/status/1344315601326632960

We can't look to man for an *objective* philosophy of science, because no one can even agree on what defines the limits of science. The problem is, we have as many different worldviews as we do people, because we're perpetually hamstrung by four basic human limitations.

There are many good arguments and evidences for Christianity. Being exposed to those is why I'm now a believer after being raised atheist in a secular country.

What I often hear in response to these arguments and evidences is reasons why they're maybe, possibly not true. They're all well-supported, and I know my belief is justified. But, as with any human knowledge, they're not 100.0% proven. There's room for a little doubt. Therefore, some people feel justified in rejecting them. That's why would-be apologists often get stuck debating stuff...

The black hole epic shows that people have an especially difficult time with anything that is vast, strange, and invisible. It's normal to want the emotional comfort of dealing with what is touchable, visible, familiar, and safe. But this need leads to an attitude that is a significant part of atheistic thinking and has caused science a lot of trouble: "If I can't see it or touch it, it doesn't exist, and I don't have to think about it."

If you think Genesis 1 belongs in the panoply of other creation stories, or that it copied some of them, I challenge you to actually read those other creation stories and compare them with Genesis 1. The differences are striking. These stories are not even in the same category. Elements of pagan creation stories:

- chaotic pre-existing cosmos
- first god emerges from the chaos
- produces lots of other gods
- personal drama, warring between gods
- the world and humans made from the corpse of a dead god
- objects like the Sun and Moon personified by gods

I keep seeing this silly atheist claim that if Christians read their Bibles, they'll stop believing. As if God's Word can testify against God. It's the exact opposite. The more I study scripture, the more my questions are answered, the stronger my faith, the greater my peace. I experienced something similar in physics. As a freshman, I'd been swayed by alternative physics that flew in the face of conventional science. Agitated, I asked one of these renegade scientists how I could proceed in my university studies if what I was being taught was wrong.

Modern physics is sometimes used to claim there's no such thing as objective truth. Is that a valid thing to do? Let's think this through.

We don't know for certain that objective truth exists. We have to assume it. And for certain worldviews, such as Christianity... ...there's a firm basis from which to make the claim that objective truth exists.

So, let's go ahead and assume it does. The question is, does our knowledge of modern physics—the subjectivity of relativity and the probabilistic fuzziness of quantum mechanics—disprove it?

I have no idea how anyone who's read Genesis and knows anything about the history and development of the Earth can say this. It's so utterly, nakedly false that I can only surmise that people repeat it because they assume or want it to be true.

So, a thread about Genesis.

https://twitter.com/KissMyHitchens/status/1313469183208943617

Here are some of the scientifically-verifiable claims made by Genesis:

The universe was created (Gen 1:1) ✔️
Earth initially did not exist (Gen 1:2) ✔️
Continents appeared first (Gen 1:9) ✔️
Then oceans formed (Gen 1:10) ✔️
First life was plant life (Gen 1:11) ✔️