Pope ~ *God was behind Big Bang*

[Exotix]

... rut roh ...



God was behind Big Bang, pope says.
'The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe'

Today

God was behind Big Bang, pope says - Technology & science - Science - msnbc.com


VATICAN CITY — God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said Thursday.

"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict said on the day Christians mark the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.

"Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God," he said in a sermon to some 10,000 people in St. Peter's Basilica on the feast day.

While the pope has spoken before about evolution, he has rarely delved back in time to discuss specific concepts such as the Big Bang, which scientists believe led to the formation of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

Researchers at CERN, the nuclear research center in Geneva, have been smashing protons together at near the speed of light to simulate conditions that they believe brought into existence the primordial universe from which stars, planets and life on earth — and perhaps elsewhere — eventually emerged.




Proof God doesn't exist ?

Some atheists say science can prove that God does not exist, but Benedict said that some scientific theories were "mind limiting" because "they only arrive at a certain point ... and do not manage to explain the ultimate sense of reality."

He said scientific theories on the origin and development of the universe and humans, while not in conflict with faith, left many questions unanswered.

"In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality ... we can only let ourselves be guided toward God, creator of heaven and earth," he said.

Benedict and his predecessor John Paul have been trying to shed the Church's image of being anti-science, a label that stuck when it condemned Galileo for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, challenging the words of the Bible.

Galileo was rehabilitated and the Church now also accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.




The Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism ...

... the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible — and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way God created the world.

But it objects to using evolution to back an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation.

It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.




Pope Benedict XVI delivers his blessing during an Epiphany Mass inside St. Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, Thursday.

[Peter Pan]

Holiday sales fall short of rosy expectations - MarketWatch

Holiday sales fall short of rosy expectationsExplore related topics
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Yahoo! Buzz MySpace del.icio.us Reddit LinkedIn Fark StumbleUpon Newsvine |Recommend (1) PrintEmail AlertBy Andria Cheng, MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Against high expectations for a brighter holiday season, more retailers are reporting shortfalls than upside surprises in December sales so far Thursday.

Results from a variety of retailers — discounter Family Dollar Stores Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!fdo/quotes/nls/fdo (FDO 44.58, -0.41, -0.91%) , drugstore chain Walgreen Co. /quotes/comstock/13*!wag/quotes/nls/wag (WAG 40.38, +0.18, +0.45%) , warehouse clubs Costco Wholesale Corp. /quotes/comstock/15*!cost/quotes/nls/cost (COST 71.09, +0.10, +0.14%) and BJ’s Wholesale Club Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!bj/quotes/nls/bj (BJ 46.00, +0.04, +0.09%) and teen retailers Wet Seal Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!wtsl.a/quotes/nls/wtsla (WTSLA 3.39, -0.52, -13.30%) and Zumiez Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!zumz/quotes/nls/zumz (ZUMZ 23.53, -3.14, -11.77%) — missed Wall Street expectations. See related story on Family Dollar.

Wet Seal also validated Wall Street’s concerns that increased promotions heading into Christmas could eat into retailers’ bottom line. The retailer said its fourth-quarter profit would be at or near the low end of its previous projection after December sales unexpectedly declined 2.1% and the company was forced to implement more discounts.


M&S may benefit from bad weatherMarks & Spencer could be a major beneficiary of the bad weather that hit the U.K. and elsewhere, and there could be some short-term upside, according to brokerage houses.
“In response to an extremely promotional competitive environment throughout the month, we promoted more aggressively than our initial plans,” said Ed Thomas, interim president and chief executive, in a statement.

Among retailers that have reported, slightly more than half of them missed analysts’ mark, while more than a third topped estimates, according to Thomson Reuters.

Bright spots included Victoria’s Secret parent Limited Brands Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!ltd/quotes/nls/ltd (LTD 28.96, -0.62, -2.08%) , which reported a 5% increase in sales.

With shoppers feeling more at ease and loosening their purse strings this holiday season, expectations rose for U.S. retailers to continue their upbeat November momentum and post their best same-store sales for December, their biggest sales month of the year, in four years.

Trade groups and other firms, including the National Retail Federation, the International Council of Shopping Centers and traffic-tracking firm ShopperTrak, had all raised their holiday-season forecasts during December.

Meanwhile, sales estimates and data from firms such as MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse and comScore Inc. have highlighted continued holiday momentum both at stores and online.

U.S. retail sales at stores open at least a year are expected to grow 3.4% in December, which would be the best performance for the month since 2006, according to research firm Retail Metrics.

Still, analysts trimmed estimates in recent days on concerns about the impact of snowstorms that hit the East Coast around and after Christmas. BJ’s said Wednesday that snowstorms hurt its sales in markets including New York. Meanwhile, flooding in California likely dampened monthly results at retailers such as Costco, which has a heavier concentration of stores in that state, analysts said.

“Santa was omnipresent in November,” said Wall Street Strategies analyst Brian Sozzi. “December was a different ball game: selective buying once a budget was met or selective buying if the promotion was not there or eye-catching. Traffic was soft in the first part of the month and retailers blinked, offering promotions that were a bit off plan in the days preceding and post the Christmas holiday.”
Andria Cheng is a MarketWatch reporter based in New York.

[ChasC5]

Not my fault, I spent money on Christmas, how about you?

[Exotix]

Energy and matter and how it relates to our understanding of the theory as a function of symmetry breaking as well as the aspect of time.


Cosmologists have been able to reconstruct the history of the early universe to reveal how energy and matter interacted as the universe began.

When we look at this history we must remember that the Big Bang did not occur in a specific place.
The BB filled the entire volume of the universe from the first moment.
The Big Bang happened here, there, everywhere.
Thus, there is no center to the universe.
Do not think of the Big Bang as a grenade exploding into a previously unoccupied room.
Think of it as the room being contained within the grenade, and the room was created in the explosion.



We cannot look at the BB from time zero because we do not understand the physics of matter and energy under such extreme conditions, but we can come close.

If we could look at the universe when it was extremely young, perhaps at only 10 millionths of a second old, we would find it filled with high-energy photons that had a temperature of well over 1 trillion (10^12) K and a density greater than 5 x 10^13 g/cm^3, nearly the density of an atomic nucleus.

When we say that photons had a given temperature, we mean that the photons were the same as black body radiation emitted by an object of that temperature.

Thus, the photons in the early universe were gamma rays of very short wavelength and therefore very high energy.
When we say that the radiation had a certain density, we refer to Einstein's equation E = mc^2.
We can express a given amount of energy in the form of radiation as if it were matter of a given density.

If a photon has enough energy, it can decay and convert its energy into a pair of particles--a particle of normal matter and a particle of antimatter.

When an antimatter particle meets its matching particle of normal matter (when an antiproton meets a normal proton) the two particles will annihilate each other and convert their mass into energy in the form of gamma rays.

In the early universe, the photons had enough energy to produce proton-antiproton pairs; but when the particles collided they converted their mass back into energy.
Thus, the early universe was a dynamic soup of energy flickering from photons into particles and back again.

While all of this went on, the universe was expanding and the wavelengths of the photons were lengthened by the expansion.
This lowered the energy of the gamma rays (red shifting them) and the universe cooled.

By the time the universe was 0.0001 second old, its temperature had dropped to 10^12 K.
By this time, the average energy of the gamma rays had fallen below the energy equivalent to the mass of a proton or neutron, so the gamma rays could no longer produce such particles.
Despite the lower energy levels, the particles continued to pair with their antiparticles and quickly converted most of the mass back into photons.



This is when the Quantum symmetry broke.

It would seem that all the protons and neutrons should have annihilated with their antiparticles, but for Quantum-mechanical reasons a small excess of normal particles existed. For every billion protons destroyed, one remained.

Thus, we live in a world of normal matter, and antimatter is quite rare.

As the expansion continued to cool the universe (stretch the EM radiation), the gamma rays could no longer produce positrons nor neutrons, however, this radiation was still above the energy of an electron, so electrons and positrons continued to be formed and thus annihilated.

Again, the break in symmetry that already occurred allowed more electrons than positrons to be created.
This continued for about the first four seconds of the universe, thus, all the matter we call Baryonic matter (normal matter) was created within the first four seconds after the Big Bang.

According to this theory, time was also created and expanded with the universe.
Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity shows that time is directly proportional to velocity.
Thus, in the early universe, time was created and destroyed along with all matter.

Time did not appear as a dimension of space until the symmetry broke.

There is no way to know what occurred before the symmetry was broken, thus, time may well have existed as another dimension in another "universe" prior to the Big Bang.

For further understanding of this, you must turn to other theories ... String Theorys as they are re-modeled, Superstring Theory, the Ekpyrotic model, and the Pyrotechnic model.

[ChasC5]

Just more denial by the fearful