Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Mankind shortening the universe's life

What a rather stupid headline for this article. If you take the time to read it, mankind has not affected the universe but instead a group of scientists have raised questions about how we have previously measured aspects of it. Things like its age, size and weight. It is quite a leap from questioning if we got our measurements right to saying that because we observed it, we affected it which is a principle of quantum mechanics. And even that is not entirely true. It is actually that quantum particles can exist in a number of states and that there is a probability of the particle being in any of those states and all states are possible until that particle is observed in which case its actual state is now known and so the probability of it being in the other states is reduced to zero. Quite a stretch to go from that to saying because we observed the universe, we locked it into a quick decay model. If it is in a quick decay model, it was always there, we just did not know it.

This is about on par with man-made global warming. The Earth is getting warmer, well so is Mars and so is the Sun. Which is more likely? That man is affecting not only the Earth, Mars and the Sun too or that maybe, just maybe the Sun is going through a warming cycle and as a result is heating up Mars and the Earth? To say that man is driving this increase instead of attributing it to the Sun is going back to the middle-ages and putting man at the center of the universe.

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