I attacked him because he always, always, states theory as fact if it has proof to back it up. "The assumption that the universe will be around forever is of course wrong, though" wasn't an opinion, he was saying it couldn't possibly be so. How does the saying go? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence? The universe can only be guessed of. Somewhere around 90% of science is theory. And since the universe is so strange, it is not unlikely that the eventual end (if there is one) will be something we never imagined.
What do you even mean, '90% of science is theory'?? That has no meaning at all. What do you think theory means? You don't understand science. Saying something is a 'theory' does not negate it. A theory is a very well established scientific truth. It's as certain as one can possibly be about anything outside of the domain of mathematics. Newton's theory of gravitation is as sure a thing as the fact that shooting yourself in the foot hurts, but I very much doubt you would do the latter due to it being 'just a theory'. Scientific truth is as true as something can practically be so considering alternatives as if they are realistic is simply not constructive to anything.
What I said was a simple consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which has been observed in millions of experiments in thousands of different circumstances and has never been observed not to happen. Discounting the consequences is as pointless as discounting that the effect of dropping a heavy object causes it to fall towards the ground.
And no, Xei, it is NOT certain that we will keep expanding. Granted, "contradicting yourself" was something (mostly) that only applied to that specific comment. I meant to refer to the fact that you always exaggerate everything into 100% certainties, and discount any evidence otherwise.
What? If you read what I said you'll find I stated what observations the certainty was dependent on. Your criticisms are patently not even true.
You discount everything in r/s that isn't taught in text books, yet whatever you say must be true.
I discount things that people can't give any evidence or rational argument for. Is there something wrong with this? :l
And when I referred to "your theory" I was talking about the theory that the universe will keep expanding and just fizzle out. That is not the "Big Bang" theory, because yours predicts the end, not the beginning.
No you weren't, I hadn't mentioned it at that time.
And a couple ending comments to Xei: Yes, the Steady State theory was a widely accepted fact. In fact, had the big bang theory not come along, there's a HUGE chance you'd be in here preaching the Steady State theory as absolute fact, like you are the big bang theory (or rather, the fizzling out theory, or whatever it's called).
No I wouldn't, because I wouldn't have any empirical evidence for it, nor would I have any logical reason to assert that the universe was static rather than expanding.
It's not even true what you keep asserting. Steady state, which posited a continuous creation of matter throughout the universe, and the Big Bang, which posited a single creation event, were both equally recognised hypotheses. It was only when they found some empirical evidence that they discounted Steady state and accepted the Big Bang.
They had no reason to think there were smaller parts of an atom. So just think about the theories you preach as likely, not certain. Because there may be a much bigger piece of information that we're missing.
There was no evidence either way to suggest that atoms had or didn't have substructure. Until some empirical consequences were observed, discussing the possibility was therefore a non-issue. Absence of evidence was indeed not evidence of absence. Trying to apply this to the fizzle theory though is just confused, because in this case there is evidence and hence evidence against the contrary.
That's anticlimactic. Is the expansion at least decelerating? Or is it decelerating at a rate that's approaching some constant rate of expansion that's lower than our current rate of expansion but greater than zero expansion?
It's not really certain at the moment, I don't think. Most likely the expansion will slow to some constant rate, as you say.
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