Category: Uncategorized

First let’s look at Tipler’s new Omega Point Theory (OPT) as modified since the discovery of cosmic acceleration ,(probably) caused by a cosmological constant, in 1998. A cosmological constant (dubbed “dark energy” in the media) in its simplest form is constant forever and drives the constituents of the Universe apart – eventually our Local Group of Galaxies would be all the mass left this side of the cosmic horizon. This result destroyed the original OPT which required a closed universe, so Tipler at first questioned the cosmic acceleration data, but then had an insight – what is happening to the Higgs field as mass is being converted into energy by intelligence in the cosmos? Perhaps the acceleration is caused by the Higgs field not being in its ground state – which the Standard Model of particle physics seemed to require? And just how does intelligence manage to turn mass into energy?

There’s such a process available known as reverse baryogenesis which can turn protons and neutrons into energy – a process that liberates more than 100 times the energy released by nuclear fusion. Tipler suggests that this is how Christ’s body was turned into a “spiritual body” – he turned it into a burst of nearly massless neutrinos, then reformed it again to appear to the disciples, as recorded in the Gospel of Luke.

But why the elaborate use of high energy physics by God? Tipler believes that God, as Jesus, has demonstrated baryogenesis so we (or our computer descendents) know it exists in an accessible form, so we (or they) will one day use it to convert enough mass-into-energy to cause the Higgs field to achieve its ground state. That’s necessary for the Universe to then collapse into the Omega Point – which Tipler identifies with God.

Why do the laws of physics require the Omega Point? According to Tipler, left to itself the Universe will end badly. How so? When very massive stars die they explode by their cores imploding, and some imploding cores become black holes. A Black hole is actually a rather simple object because all the many and varied particles that were once a star are crushed into a singularity that wipes out their individuality – a kind of super-particle forms. The singularity is trapped behind an Event Horizon (what we see as a “Black Hole”) and nothing escapes it – except there’s a catch. Energy can leak from the Event Horizon and so the Black Hole slowly decays away, ultimately erasing all memory of what fell into it. This leaves the development over time of all those particles incomplete – a property of all matter and energy, called unitarity, is violated. This might not sound like much but it actually means in practice that, for example, particles of light (photons) could end up with ridiculously large energies in such trivial situations as turning on a microwave oven. Since the Earth doesn’t melt down unitarity must be preserved somehow.

If our Universe were to expand forever and all the information of particles and their unitarity was lost down black holes, then the laws of physics will eventually breakdown and the world will end… badly. But what if black holes never decay away? To do so, and to never form information destroying event horizons and singularities, then the future development of the entire Universe has to be directed in a certain way – and that’s what the OPT is all about. By guiding how mass becomes energy and how the Universe then collapses into the Final Singularity – which doesn’t violate unitarity because it is the End of Time and all information is preserved by it – then Life has a very big cosmic role. And to fulfill that role, according to Tipler, Life must become Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent i.e. it must end in God, the Omega Point.

As I’ve already said Tipler believes that God, the Omega Point, has sent information to us via Jesus Christ, but just how? According to Tipler’s mathematics of our Universe there are three Singularities – the Beginning of Time, the End of Time, and the All Time Singularity which joins the Beginning and End. Or, in Christian terms, the Spirit, the Father and the Son, respectively. Thus the Son – the All Time Singularity which parallels and bounds all moments in all Unvierses of the Multiverse – is joined to the Future and the Past, and thus shares in their knowledge, and provides the means to guide the Universe(s) from the Past to the Future. And one such piece of knowledge is how to reverse baryogenesis.

And how has Jesus given us this knowledge? As well as resurrecting his old body into a new one there may well be physical evidence of that event. Tipler believes that traces of the Resurrection might still be present on the Shroud of Turin, itself a controversial relic. There’s a lot of historical evidence for the Shroud’s authenticity and good physical reasons to doubt the 1988 radiocarbon dating was actually of the original material and not a Medieval patch. So Tipler’s endorsement of the Shroud isn’t an irrational lapse, as some have claimed, but a reasonable proposal – if the Shroud really does preserve traces of Jesus’ blood and evidence of a macroscopic sphaleron causing reverse baryogenesis, then it’s an incredibly important historical artifact.

On the other hand Jesus also makes possible ethical use of the awesome power of mass-energy conversion, through his teachings and moral example – sacrificial living and dying for other people. A world armed with total mass-energy conversion is a very dangerous place indeed, unless we can achieve a higher ethical civilisation. The real possibility of such power might just need the direct intervention of Jesus himself. Or so Tipler believes.

Hi All

Kevin Randle is a long time UFO investigator and has just posted a really interesting discussion of how a witness’ description of a sighting evolved over time, apparently filling in extra details that never happened except in her memory.

He quotes a quite famous study on how students reacted to the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster of 1986, and their recollections of the event some 3 years later. I’ll quote that segment directly…

What happened to Erenberger [UFO witness] is not all that uncommon, even with events that are considered “traumatic”, and therefore, fixed in memory. Ulric Neisser, who was teaching at Emory University when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, realized that he had a perfect opportunity to study these sorts of “flashbulb” memories. The day after the disaster, he gave the students in his freshmen psychology class a short questionnaire about the events. He asked them where they were when they heard and how they had heard and other such questions. He then filed the questionnaires for three years.

The students, when they were seniors, were given the same questionnaire about Challenger. He added an additional question, which was about the accuracy of their memories. According to the results provided by Neisser and graduate assistant Nicole Harsh, a quarter of the students didn’t have a single memory that was accurate. In one case, a student said that he had been at home, with his parents, when he heard, though the questionnaire, prepared the day after the explosion, revealed that he had been in class when he learned of the disaster.

More important, however, was the reaction of the students to the proof that their memories were inaccurate. None disputed the accuracy of the statements they had made the day after the event, but one student, when confronted by the discrepancy between what she had written just hours after the explosion and with what she remembered three years later, said, “I still remember everything happening the way I told you. I can’t help it.” She was defending the memories that were clearly an invention in her own mind.

(my parentheses)

Human memory can be incredibly creative, though – importantly – some of the students had perfect recall. But others, as described, had invented memories that seemed utterly real and couldn’t shake the feeling of reality. But remember there was also a triggering event which created the base memory that was subsequently modified – something real happened (Challenger exploding, bright lights in the sky) and generated an intense emotional reaction, but the vagaries of memory created even more details, that never happened.

So how is this relevent to the Empty Tomb, the cornerstone event of the Christian faith?

A key finding of New Testament scholarship is what’s called The Priority of Mark, that the Gospel of Mark was used by both Matthew and Luke as their primary narrative source for Jesus’s life and teachings. But, interestingly, both added a lot more details to the final act of Jesus’s life, his “Passion”, or Arrest, Trial, Crucifixion, Burial, Empty Tomb, and After. But not the same details, and that’s the puzzle.

Why are they so different? The standard excuse by Inerrantists (people who believe the Bible is 100% accurate) is that the Gospels were written from different points of view, like eye-witnesses to some event see it from different angles. There’s a lot that’s wrong with such a simplistic hand-waving explanation, but as we have seen memory can be quite creative. Mark is usually believed to be first of the three and it also tells us the least about after the Empty Tomb – just a brief vision of angels and a command to go to Galilee as Jesus had told the disciples to before his arrest.

So, by analogy with Challenger and the UFO, the Empty Tomb might have been the trigger, utterly inexplicable, and emotionally loaded.

Matthew tells us that not only did the women see angels, but they also saw Jesus, who reiterated the command. The disciples faithfully went to Galilee and saw Jesus from a mountain top, though some wondered/doubted. That sounds like the kind of embellishment that could follow from a misremembered event.

Luke admits he wasn’t an eye-witness and is only gathering other people’s reports, trying to put the whole affair in order. So whose vague memories is he passing on to us? He knows nothing of appearances in Galilee and speaks of new appearances in Jerusalem itself, as well as on the road.

Then there’s John, who has both a Jerusalem appearance (though no Emmaus Road encounter) and a Galilee appearance (which is oddly like a natural miracle, or two, in Mark.) And John is the only Gospel that claims to be from an eye-witness.

Finally there’s a terse summary of appearances in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians but they don’t fit in too well with the Synoptics either.

So what triggered all these reports of appearances of a Risen Jesus? And why could no one agree on what they remembered?

Study looms and blogging is eating into my assignment writing time, so expect very sporadic writings for a few months.

One thing before I go is a topic Paul Gilster from Centauri Dreams mentioned – the hazards for an interstellar high-speed fly-by from interplanetary dust. Daedalus, for example, was to fly through Barnard’s Star’s system at 12.2 % of lightspeed, which gives a massive energy punch to any dust impacts. So I quantified the hazard – in the Sun’s Inner System interplanetary dust masses about 10^16 kg. If every bit was 1 mm cubes, density ~ 2, then the dust masses 2 x 10^-6 kg each, making for about 5 x 10^21 specks of dust. Sounds like a lot, but the volume of the inner 2 AU of the Solar System is 4/3*pi*(3.0E+11 m)^3 = 1.13 x 10^35 cubic metres – 22.6 trillion cubic metres per speck. That’s a cube 28.3 km on a side per speck.

If Daedalus is 50 metres wide (that’s its dust-shield) then it punches a 2 AU long, 50 m wide hole through the dust and encounters about 26 dust specks – each one packing a punch of 1.33 gigajoules (a few kilos of TNT) which isn’t fun, but blown into plasma by the precursor shielding cloud it’s a survivable dose of energy, heating the beryllium shield to about 1000 K. The Daedalus sub-probes are much smaller and probably have a 50/50 chance of an encounter, but they have precursor shield systems too.

For interest sake I also looked at some figures on mass in the Oort Cloud which Robert Zubrin uses in “Entering Space” – his results are seriously in error. He describes the Oort as containing 100 km cometoids about 10 AU apart – sounds spacious, but the Oort is 100,000 AU in radius, thus he’s describing 10^12 cometoids at 100 km in size. Then 1000 times more (i.e. 10^15) 10 km cometoids 1 AU apart each, then 1000 times that number of 1 km comets just 0.1 AU apart… and so on down to 10 cm chunks just 1,500 km apart. 7 orders of magnitude, giving a total mass of 7 x 10^30 kg (3.5 solar masses!) for comets of 500 kg/m^3 density.

That’s ridiculous! Long period comet orbits wouldn’t be anything like stable, or long period with that much mass out there. In actual fact the total mass is usually quoted as 40 – 30 Earth masses – about 30,000 times less than Zubrin’s wild figures. Fortunately for us, or else we’d have a sky full of comets all the time and mass extinctions every ~ 3,000 years. The real Oort Cloud is very wide open spaces…

Ok. Bye for now!

Well the Tomb has sunk like a lead balloon and leading the charge has been other archaeologists – basically the people involved in the Jesus Tomb have overstated the case for its contents as the mortal remains of JC and kin. Fair enough. Do a Web-search and you’ll find plenty of arguments about the Tomb, which is interesting by itself. I think the most telling argument is the recent revelation that the James Ossuary was photographed in 1976 before the Talpiot Tomb itself was discovered in 1980. So it can’t be the putative missing ossuary, thus knocking one support out from under Jacobovici and Cameron’s case. Another problem is that the name identified as “Yeshua” could equally be “Hanun” as the inscription is hard to read. This kind of militates against their central claim, that it’s Jesus’s family – Marys and Josephs are a dime a dozen in First Century Jewish family plots.

Oh well. It was a nice prospect while it lasted – archaeological proof of a mortal Jesus. Now we’re left with two competing faith claims – that dead people don’t rise, and that God raised Jesus on the Third Day. The latter seems more an act of faith than the former, but it’s hard to refute the claim that JC was reported to have left his tomb empty by his closest friends and followers. All the textual evidence tells us that the tomb discovery was followed by apparitions of the Risen Christ – though the nature, number and location varies from Gospel to Gospel.

I’ve already said that I think the tomb was found emptied, but it took time for the Risen Christ to be believed – Mark and Matthew make this pretty clear, since both locate the apparitions squarely in Galilee. Luke and John are more problematic for my view, but both are rather at odds with the first two Gospels. Why the disparity? And why does John feature a major appearance to Peter, and his old business partners, in the Sea of Galilee when Luke doesn’t if they’re drawing on the same source events?

Yet having said that I have my doubts about the skeptical case for a dead Christ too. Chief amongst my “doubts” is the enigma that is the Shroud of Turin – which recently has been proven somewhat older than the 1988 radiocarbon dating first implied. Apparently the samples for the dating had all been taken from a Medieval patch – the rest of the cloth itself is much older, as measured, albeit roughly, by a biochemical clock related to the aging of the fabric.

The Shroud itself proves that a dead man was in it, but why it became associated with JC is because of the unique wounds the Shroud Man bears – multiple lacerations to the forehead (i.e. Crown of Thorns) and the bleeding wound in his side. Plenty of other people had been crucified and scourged by the Romans – also seen on the Shroud Man – but the extra abuse of the victim is surely unique. But if the Shroud Man is JC then why isn’t the Shroud mentioned as an amazing sign in the Gospels?

Isn’t it?

And of course the Discovery Channel is airing the documentary. There’s some good support material provided online, so check it out. A problem for future investigation is that any bones found with the ossuaries have been reburied due to the Israeli religious laws on such issues, so a lot of data is probably gone.

The Family Tomb of Jesus

…but there was another tomb nearby, currently unexplored. What surprises will it hold?

So is it a Jewish conspiracy to trash the One True Faith (TM) or is it a statistical goof being flogged to the world for the sake of publicity?

About 1980 a bunch of archaeologists stumbled across a tomb with a bunch of old bone boxes, all with names familiar to anyone who read the New Testament – a Mary, a Joseph, and Matthew, etc etc. The find has kind of mouldered, waiting for some serious research. In recent years several have re-examined the find, and now Guerilla archaeologist Simcha Jacobovici and James Cameron ( of Terminator fame etc) have gone even further to confirm the remains are all one family, and make a documentary claiming it’s the family of Jesus, plus the remains of his son (the grandson of G_d?)

Bones of Jesus

The Jesus Family Tomb

y-Net News on the claims

Official Webpage… just a placekeeper for now

Now the find itself is over 27 years old, but when it was first exposed there was no decent forensic techniques for testing for familial relationship between bones. Now with DNA testing that’s straight-forward and someone has confirmed what could’ve been guessed from the start – the individuals are related. But how seriously can we take the main claim – that it’s the family tomb of Jesus? Imagine the problems this will cause for all those atheists who believe JC was just a myth and never existed. “Wrong! We have his bones… damn!”

Clearly it’s a problem for people who believe in a flesh-and-blood resurrection. But not every Xian does. The parent group of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is still in existence and they don’t believe he rose physically. Plenty of liberal Xians believe he rotted in some grave… but who cares what they believe anyway? The Jews might be happy with the outcome, but then again who wants to tell the Xians the bad news? On one of the News Magazines on Aussie TV this week there’s a report from Zanzibar about how thousands of Xians are converting to Judaism (!!!) This finding might only tip the balance for even more teetering believers, who’ll dump a failed Messiah for hope in a more triumphant one.

Yet, as others have already noted, the names were pretty common in Judea at that time, so the odds are that plenty of tombs had a similar bunch of names on the boxes.

Michael Prescott’s blog on the find

…that last blog-site also discusses a new book which looks at the Gospels as eye-witness material. There’s some evidence in favour of the idea, at least for “Mark” and “John”, but it by no means proves the Gospels were 100% inerrant either. Stylistic reasons influenced ancient writers as much as wanting to report facts, thus all the thinly veiled allusions to Old Testament parallels in the Gospels. Another issue is that the Gospellers were trying to fit JC into OT prophecies – with varying degrees of success. What didn’t fit probably got left out. The whole of the Passion Narrative can be related to Old Testament prophecies which has led more than one scholar to state the obvious – the whole sequence was written as if the prophecies were fulfilled. In reality JC might’ve been executed like any other anonymous agitator – but he was important enough to rate a mention by Josephus, so who knows? Maybe he did chat to Pontius Pilate – but try getting the Gospels to agree about the details.

Anyway food for thought.

When the first molecular clock studies were performed on the apes what surprised everyone was just how recently the human line had split from the apes – prior to that first study in the 1970s everyone had thought the human line went back 20 million years. Then the first result shattered that old view by dating the split to just 4.5 million years ago. In the 30 years since the dating has gradually risen to somewhere between 5 – 7 million years ago, about the same age as the oldest “definite” (in some minds, at least) human ancestors.

A new study has thrown a monkey-wrench into the works. The Open Access Journal, the Public Library of Science – Genetics, has just published this paper:

Article:

Genomic Relationships and Speciation Times of Human, Chimpanzee, and Gorilla Inferred from a Coalescent Hidden Markov Model Hobolth A, Christensen OF, Mailund T, Schierup MH PLoS Genetics Vol. 3, No. 2, e7 doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030007

…a hidden Markov model tries to account for all the different ways a particular gene lineage can differ from a species lineage. Through the vagaries of inheritance two members of the same species can have genes with lineages that date back before the species split from its sister species. You and I could have genes that diverged before our ancestors became bipedal apes, if not further back. Because the genome of a species is represented by at least thousands of individuals there’s a finite chance this can happen. Only if the original population crashes to just a handful of members can gene lineages be forced into a single common time of origin – and this leaves a distinctive genetic signature in the population. Cheetahs, for example, show signs of being reduced to a single litter at a point about 13,000 years ago. As a population their genetic variation is very, very low.

Humans are more varied, but less so than chimps, so we’ve come closer to extinction than they have at some point in the past. The eruption of the super-volcano, Toba, about 72,000 years ago is considered a likely suspect in causing that population bottle-neck, and just possibly causing our species to have its current genetic make-up. Our ancestors might have come from a group of about 10,000 at that point, preserving some old gene lines and eliminating many others.

Once all the weird and wonderful genetic trails have been accounted for the new study indicates that chimps and humans diverged a mere 4 million years ago (mya). If so then all the Australopithecine species before 4 mya are actually possible ancestors of both chimps and humans. The recent tool use – hammer stones and now spears for hunting monkeys – seen in chimps could mean our common ancestors had similar capabilities.

That very late date for the human-chimp split means chimps once walked upright like humans, then became specialised knuckle-walkers. Knuckle-walking is as odd as bipedalism, and isn’t seen in any apes other than gorillas and chimps. Could gorillas have come from an upright ancestor too? The dates might be just right, especially if Ororrin (6 mya) and Sahelanthropus (6-7 mya) are both confirmed as bipedal. Interestingly one specialist who examined Sahelanthropus was of the opinion that that hominid was most like a young gorilla.

So could Ardipithecus, Australopithecus anamensis and the other hominids just mentioned really be ancestors to both chimps and humans?

Finally I’m here. But what to post? Been very busy staying at home with the baby who has spots across his torso including his arms. My GP was puzzled enough to call in her senior at the practice to have a look. Possibly what’s called the fourth disease which is a viral rash that is so mild it hardly rates as a disease.