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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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You're the one denying the contradiction in direct opposition to what the biblical text actually says.
Pure assumption and desperate rationlslisations are not sound arguments. The bible contradicts itself here, as it does elsewhere, by claiming repeatedly no one can look upon God and live, the elsewhere repeatedly claiming people have looked upon God and lived. That is hardly open to rational debate.
I've no idea why you're biting another Christian sect into this, as I'm an atheist. The link between the quotes is manifest, si "hopping about" is a pretty meaningless accusation. I didn't write the bible or cobble the bits together, I'm merely quoting various parts that demonstrate the contradiction, for the record that's called evidencing a claim.
Even very small units of energy and matter can be detected. If "God" does not exist as energy or matter, then it does not meaningfully exist.
catholicray: "But do you have the proper tool to identify it?"
Do you?
rmfr
@Catholicray: But do you have the proper tool to identify it?
Is the proper tool for identifying the supernatural an adolescent girl?
As science explains more and more of the natural world, Christians have started to claim that god is outside of nature and time and not susceptible to scientific detection. Yet the Catholic church has always given great credence to young girls who hear voices, like Jeanne d'Arc, or see visions of Mary, such as those at Fatima and Lourdes.
Are Jehovah, Jesus, Mary, and other members of the Catholic pantheon inside the world or out of it?
David Killens,
"The recent reveal of the first "picture" of a supermassive black hole 53 million light years away is truly one of the greatest scientific efforts and breakthroughs in modern times. Yet despite all the obstacles, over a period of ten years and fifty million dollars later, we have this spectacular success and breakthrough."
Why do you believe that the image is of an actual blackhole that is 53 million light years away when the very same people don't know how many planets there are in this solar system?
You might be making the very same mistake religious people make. They assume that what the "experts" (priests, prophets) tell them about their gods is the truth. But it is usually nothing but lies. It is impossible for anyone to verify the scientists claims about the blackhole so it is logical that they will le about it. Maybe it is real. But it could also be a major lie and we do know that people will lie if it suits their purpose.
They need to come up with things previously unknown but that other people can verify. At this point claiming that they took a picture of a blackhole 53 million light years away is probably 100% bullshit.
@Diotrephes: Why do you believe that the image is of an actual blackhole that is 53 million light years away
The observations were carried out using telescopes in several countries. The data is available for peer review. Why would they lie? How could they hope to get away with it? Cheating on this makes about as much sense as the Apollo Moon landing conspiracy theory.
Unlike religions, science is very cruel to cheats and liars. The Japanese scientist who faked stem cell results is likely to be starting a new career in the retail or food service industries.
Algebe,
"The observations were carried out using telescopes in several countries. The data is available for peer review. Why would they lie? How could they hope to get away with it? Cheating on this makes about as much sense as the Apollo Moon landing conspiracy theory."
People lie about everything all the time. They will even lie in groups if it will further their agenda. It could be legit but I doubt it.
Consider the area of the night sky. How long would it take to examine all of the area that you can see from your stationary view point? And then you would have to keep adjusting your focus for different distances. And how much crap is in the way of something that is 53 million light years distant from us?
I don't know if they are giving public tours of the telescopes so that Joe & Jane Citizen can see this cosmic wonder for themselves but I'll bet that they aren't. Post it if you have information to the contrary.
Diotrephes, I would be disappointed if you did not challenge my assertion.
But I have been following this project for almost a year, watched the presentation in it's entirely, and although I am definitely not a formally trained astrophysicist or programmer, know enough to comprehend the processes. First off, it was the co-ordination of eight radio telescopes, the biggest and best currently available. I should not have used "picture" in captions, because it was an image derived from reams of data that had to undergo a lot of analysis. Many programmers wrote a heck of a lot of algorithms to find what worked, tested their procedures, and then continued along to finally process the data. And even then, two different nations and institutes processed the data.
No one can never walk up to a telescope, peer through the eyepiece and see an image of a black hole. In fact, the black hole is still black, it was not directly observed. What was observed was the image of everything around the black hole. The theory predicted what the image should look like, and in the end, that is what happened.
This project encompassed over 200 scientists of different disciplines, involved 8 major radio telescopes in different nations, each owned and operated by different reputable institutes. Some institutes involved were Caltech, MIT, and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. In total 60 institutes in 18 nations were involved. So the oversight was massive. And of course, this will be peer-reviewed. It is such a huge potential breakthrough everything about this project will receive the highest level of scrutiny by the entire scientific community.
Here is a link to the Event Horizon Telescope, where, if you desire, can examine the process.
https://eventhorizontelescope.org/
In the case of good science, everything is open to scrutiny.
@David Killens
Thank you for sharing!
David Killens,
"Diotrephes, I would be disappointed if you did not challenge my assertion."
Maybe I was being nit-picky but words mean certain things. They put out an image and called it a "picture" of the black hole. In reality it is not a picture at all but just an elaborate imagination of something that might exist. The "picture" is just an unicorn. If you try to find it you won't because it doesn't exist as depicted.
Although a lot of people and organizations participated they all contributed to the lie by presenting their discovery as a conventional colored picture. That is completely misleading and is a fraud. They lied. So how can their claim be accepted as fact?
And the reality is that there is a heck of a lot of junk between us and an object 53 million light years distant. They would have had to know exactly where to look in order to find it and I doubt if it would be detectable from various locations around the world because of all of the clutter between the various locations and the target.
@Diotrephes
I presented evidence, and if you took the time to examine the web site, all the answers are in there.
If the difference between "picture" and "image" has your shorts in a knot, that is your problem, and you can rant and throw toys out of your pram all day. Your objections are dust in the wind.
The process, the methodology, the data, and final image are valid.
@ David Killens
He can even ask scientists who worked on the project. Somehow, when it comes to science, there is always a great conspiracy, but theist are always sincere...
"Why can we not observe God?"
Same reason we can't observe unicorns, mermaids, leprechauns, Griffins, and garden fairies I suspect.
Re: "Why can we not observe God?"
Because God is highly dedicated to maintaining the title of Supreme Universal Hide-n-Seek Champion. So far so good, it seems.
According to theists god has many attributes and leaves breadcrumbs in this known universe. They even claim to understand this god's reasoning and behavior. he sent his only son to die", he destroyed a city because he did not like their wicked ways", and so on. To a rational mind, this is a lot to go on, a detective usually has less information when processing a crime scene.
But when atheists like me ask, why not go further, why not use the data, investigative tools and techniques currently available, theists always replay that we should not do that. They invent all kinds of BS, that this god is not in this universe (falsified by the fact this god has interacted in this universe), it is outside of time (another BS contradiction and paradox), that our brains would explode if we were in the presence of god (also BS because on judgement day we are supposed to appear before him), that god does not want us to see him (sort of contradictory because this god REALLY wants us to worship him), yadda yadda yadda.
But the truth is that they have a very deep concern that proper investigation will come up with nothing, and more people would leave religion, that it will be even more exposed as the sham and con game it is.
They may as well respond to the question where god is by "in my left nut, the feeling I get when I watch midget porn". As comedic as that sounds, it makes more sense.
Kudos, for working midget porn into a cogent response.
Any objective evidence of anything biblical? No? That's why we can't observe god.
Tours are available for at least the following:
My guess is the only one you might not be able to get an (easy) tour of is the South Pole Telescope, for obvious reasons.
Nyarlathotep,
"I don't know if they are..."
Is it fake?
"We had telescopes and observers in Hawaii and Chile and Mexico and Spain, and they all had to have good weather at the same time, down to the picosecond [a trillionth of a second]. I observed from Mexico, 15,000 feet above sea level.
No telescope actually takes a picture. What happens is, the light from the black hole travels 55 million light years and then every dish collects a single stream of the light that it sees at the same time. "
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/katie-bouman-hardly-knew-what-a-bla...
The problem is that it when it is dark in Hawaii it is daylight in Madrid. So how can you see an object 55 million light years from you in the daylight? The article says that the data has to be synchronized within a picosecond.
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converted.html?p1=103&p2=137&p3=6...
Can anyone explain?
You need to not take what is said in the popular science press so seriously. For example, it isn't even meaningful to speak of two things happening at the same time in different locations. They are referring to know how long apart the events took place to a very precise value, not that they need to take place at the same time, as that is madness. I understand how that can be confusing as fuck; but if you are going to use that to start a conspiracy theory, I'm guessing you have started a bunch. Which seems to describe much of the material you have posted on AR.
Nyarlathotep,
"You need to not take what is said in the popular science press so seriously. For example, it isn't even meaningful to speak of two things happening at the same time in different locations. They are referring to know how long apart the events took place to a very precise value, not that they need to take place at the same time, as that is madness."
I'm just going by what I read. The author of the article said that she participated in the discovery and she explained the process. She said =
"We had telescopes and observers in Hawaii and Chile and Mexico and Spain, and they all had to have good weather at the same time, down to the picosecond [a trillionth of a second]. I observed from Mexico, 15,000 feet above sea level.
No telescope actually takes a picture. What happens is, the light from the black hole travels 55 million light years and then every dish collects a single stream of the light that it sees at the same time."
So if she is telling the truth they collected the light at the same picosecond. Since it is dark in Hawaii when it is light in Spain how did that happen? Vickey Stein wrote the article. I'm just asking a question about it. I know the answer but the way Vickey wrote the article is misleading.
Do you have a link to any sources that explain how their process worked? Vickey didn't say how they knew exactly where to look for the black hole. Maybe your article will include that information. I also question if the target can be seen at the same time by all of the locations because of the curvature of the Earth.
I just explained that such a statement is non-sense. If you don't believe me, that's fine; we could talk about it, or just disagree. What I don't understand is why you would just repeat the same thing.
----------------------------------------
I don't know who "Vickey" is, but I bet she is either not an astronomer, or she's dumbing it down for the layman (or both). That's practically guaranteed to manufacture contradictions. Keep taking popularization of science articles so seriously and you'll have conspiracy theories erupting from every orifice.
"Since it is dark in Hawaii when it is light in Spain how did that happen? "
I presume the light she was referring to wasn't from our own sun. Hence its position relative to the telescopes is entirely irrelevant.
They are gathering information at different times, in different locations, then presenting the information at a single point in time, at a single location (the photo). To do that they need to know extremely precisely when and where each piece of information was gathered in relation to each other.
Sheldon,
"I presume the light she was referring to wasn't from our own sun. Hence its position relative to the telescopes is entirely irrelevant."
The problem is the way the story was reported. The claim was that they took a picture of a black hole 55 million light years from us. The image was a color picture and they referenced telescopes. In reality the color picture does not exist and they didn't use visual telescopes. They used radio telescopes and they collected electronic data, there was no visual images involved. Then, over time , they analyzed the data using various algorithms (beyond my pay grade) until they got what they were looking for. They found the black hole by looking at the apparent center of the distant galaxy. They then created the picture from their imagination.
The story was not reported that way. Consequently people tend to put the information into terms that they know. For instance, a color picture means that it is an actual physical object that represents what you can see with your own eyes. The word telescope means an instrument that you look through with your eyes to see a distant object. Our frame of reference is based on the 20th Century and not on the 21st Century.
Now, since they used radio telescopes instead of visual telescopes they can collect data during the day as well as at night because daylight does not affect the performance of radio telescopes.
However, I do believe there is a real problem involving geography because of the distance between the radio telescopes in Hawaii and the ones in Spain and in the Alps. https://eventhorizontelescope.org/array If you have a globe you can see that the vectors from Hawaii and the Alps do not appear to line up due to the curvature of the Earth. Remember, the claim was that the data collection was synchronized to the pico-second.
So is the story about the black hole true? Maybe. Maybe not. If it's not true then who will ever say that it is a lie? Will they repeat the experiments with other galaxies? Remember, we have never been back to the moon although we are more technologically advanced now than we were when we supposedly went to the moon.
The system of telescopes used exist in a region spanning less than 128° latitude, and less than 153° longitude.
/e At a distance of over 50 million light years, more than 49.99% of the Earth's surface is in line of sight. So this isn't a problem: all the observatories used fit easily on "one side" of the Earth.
I know this thread is 6 weeks old, but curious, light bends, which is why we have more daylight then night time in a given year anywhere on the planet. I can only imagine light/radio waves from 50+ million light years is also subject to the same "light" bending that our own sun's light bends. Putting greater than 50% of the earth "in light of sight" ? Or is the light too "weak" to be bent and still be detectable even by giant radio telescopes?
@Diotrephes
"Since it is dark in Hawaii when it is light in Spain how did that happen?"
Madrid, Spain is located at 3.7492° W longitude. Honululu Hawaii is located at 155.5828° W. It is very close to the boundaries, but they are less than 180 degrees in separation. And that achieves the goal of long base interferometry, to have maximum separation of the receiver dishes.
"Vickey didn't say how they knew exactly where to look for the black hole."
There were positive indications from previous observations that M87 had a black hole in it's center. That placed it on the short list of candidates. Even our own black hole in the center of our Milky Way was on that list. But the final decision was based on achieving the highest resolution, and M87 was chosen.
The one-hour documentary, called "Black Hole Hunters," was aired on the Smithsonian Channel April 12 at 9 p.m. EDT and at 9 p.m. PDT. I watched it and those details were revealed in that documentary. I am sure it will be replayed or available somewhere.
David Killens,
"Madrid, Spain is located at 3.7492° W longitude. Honululu Hawaii is located at 155.5828° W. It is very close to the boundaries, but they are less than 180 degrees in separation. And that achieves the goal of long base interferometry, to have maximum separation of the receiver dishes."
This discussion about the black hole shows calm discussion can increase the knowledge base of everyone when people take the time to actually look at the issue and explain parts of it. We now have enough information to explain to an uniformed person how the black hole was detected, except for the logrithm part.
The same process can be used to increase our understanding of other topics under discussion if so desired.
I mean it might be true that God does exist and it might be true that god is a banana. Both can be possible if the existing of God is true.
Nobody can know that something doesn't exist we only know what exist.
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