Cap'n Refsmmat

I don't think I can actually edit the help pages. However, if you hit the Help button in the post editor you'll get a list of every BBCode we support.

Sure. But temperature is an average value, and some particles in the system will inevitably have higher energies than others. Hence the uncertainty in energy, and hence my comment of "good luck constraining the kinetic energy of every particle in a large system".

Good luck trying to constrain and measure the kinetic energy of every particle in a large system that accurately.

Well, remember that proper Roman occupation only began shortly after Jesus' birth -- ancient Israel was a client kingdom rather than a province before then. (The change to Roman occupation is what causes the census as described in one of the Gospels.) Greek was the language of business in the region up until then. Sweet, thanks. I'll take a look.

Not in ancient Palestine; Aramaic was the common language and Greek was used for business, but not universal. I haven't heard any mentions of Latin in the context of 1st-century Palestine. Hebrew was also only known by the priestly class and a few other elites, so writing a Gospel in Hebrew as imatfaal suggested doesn't make sense -- who are you going to read it to? More in line with your idea, however, it is apparent that, the Gospel of Luke was written by a very literate and educated Greek speaker. Mark, on the other hand, was written in somewhat rough Greek which Matthew and Luke edited and clarified. Fair enough. However, some of the stories in the OT were written centuries after the fact, though supposedly written at the time of the event. (See the Book of Daniel, for example. There's also significant evidence that the NT was influenced by the non-canonical Book of Enoch, supposedly written by Noah's great-grandfather but actually written around 300BCE. Enoch is where the fall of Satan was first described.) I guess my point is that storytelling may have been important, but if you wait a few hundred years and let the stories spread over hundreds of miles, major discrepancies are bound to occur.

Ah. As ajb points out, there is no single hypothesis of the early universe. There are many hypotheses about specific conditions that are tested and re-tested by different astronomical observations. Once various difficult questions are answered, a complete theory of the Big Bang can be put together.

Well, very few people at the time wrote or spoke Hebrew, so Aramaic would be the likely choice. But the way it's taught in current courses on the New Testament (as in my courses) is that none of the names on the Gospels are original, and none of the names are accurate. (Now, the Revelation of John is a different matter, since it does not claim to be John the Apostle but just John a random dude who had some visions.)

Matthew was written around 80 or 85CE, some 50 years after Jesus' death; it's unlikely that the apostle Matthew would still be alive. Also, the titles of the Gospels were added much later -- it was not originally labeled "the Gospel according to Matthew," so you can't say they were meant to be the same person. Also, it's believed that Matthew was written by a very literate Greek (since the original text is Greek), so he was likely from outside of Palestine. Were he in Palestine and a follower of Jesus, he would have spoken Aramaic.

Many of the contradictory details I described are accounts of material events, not miraculous events. Various accounts of Jesus visiting different towns and making various speeches are rearranged chronologically or altered entirely in the different Gospels. None of the Gospel authors were first-hand witnesses anyway. Read the beginning of the Gospel of Luke. It purports to be a factually accurate historical account of Jesus' life, and continues in the same way in Acts. (Luke and Acts were written by the same author.) The epistles of Paul also purport to be real letters sent by Paul to real churches to address real problems they faced. We can learn a lot of valuable history from these, but we must be careful. Well, consider that many of the disciples were illiterate... But in any case, diverging narratives can develop either way. The reason for the divergent Gospel narratives is geographical and temporal disparity, since the Gospels were written by people collecting various oral traditions years after the events occurred. It's apparent that the various Gospel authors did not know of each other's work, apart from Luke and Matthew using Mark; each author collected the oral traditions that had appeared in his part of the world, then compiled them into a cohesive narrative. The disparity between Gospels clearly shows that the oral traditions can diverge rapidly. Also, the 50 or 60 years between Jesus' life and the Gospels' authorship present other problems. The oral tradition was the only record in those 50 years, and as it spread from Israel to Asia Minor it quite naturally changed significantly. Sure, the audience may notice if the story's different -- but they'll be dead in a few years, and the next storyteller can tell something somewhat different.

It doesn't "get" the energy from anywhere. It's just that the energy of the particle cannot be precisely determined, so it might just have enough energy to get out. And occasionally it does.

You forget quantum effects, which allow for some uncertainty in energy states. Particles without enough energy to escape some attractive force can still escape by uncertainty.

Not entirely true; even the Synoptic gospels have significant disagreements about the same story. The key point is that they were written over several decades in geographically disparate areas, so there was no guarantee of consistency. (Matthew and Luke had Mark to use as a source, but they worked independently, and both ended up altering the chronology and details of Mark's stories significantly. They also both added birth narratives and resurrection stories which contradict significantly. This does not seem to have caused problems in early churches.) New Testament stories in particular are very difficult because the documentary evidence of Jesus' existence apart from the New Testament can be summed up in about a page. Josephus (an ancient Jewish historian) agrees that he existed but gives little detail besides the existence of the movement and Jesus' execution. The specific narrative details in the New Testament can't be corroborated except with other books in the New Testament.

Presumably if it were an agreed-upon model, we wouldn't have the problem of multiple theories floating around. What is a "complete scientific hypothesis," in your mind?

I like how you cite a paper you wrote yourself as external evidence of your claims, along with an 18-year-old book. Cosmology evolves rapidly. I'm not sure what your problem is; the response you got from the IAU is perfectly right. The "Big Bang" is not one theory, but a broad descriptor. There are many agreed-upon details in cosmology, and many details needing further explanation. Hence there are multiple proposed models to account for these details. When a scientist writes a paper about new evidence for the Big Bang, he specifies which cosmological models he's using and what specific implications the evidence has. He does not handwave and say "and this proves the Big Bang." Your premise is flawed.

The ground state of electrons still has energy. You can't have them with zero energy at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_point_energy

A single atom at absolute 0 would imply that it has zero kinetic energy, not that all its electrons are at ground state.

Absolute zero can't be reached thermodynamically, so none of the atoms will hit 0K. You can, however, get arbitrarily close to 0, at which point there will be practically zero emissions.

The lowest possible energy state is 0K, which is not obtainable. If there's heat in it, an electron will change energy states at some point. It may take a while, but it'll happen.

Anything with heat will emit some amount of thermal radiation, though it may be incredibly small. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation

Fountain pens use water-based liquid ink. It's possible that if you flail the pen about, you'll get drops of ink thrown out of the nib and feed system. I've never actually had that problem with my pens, so it takes some violent motions to get it to happen. Fountain pens have some advantages for long writing tasks. I believe Neal Stephenson (author of some very, very large novels) has written several books solely with fountain pen and paper. Points: Because the feed works with capillary action instead of a ball on paper, there is no pressure required at all. If you're pushing the tip down on the paper, you're doing it wrong. You can let the nib glide over the paper. A decent fountain pen should last forever, provided you don't smash it accidentally, and won't require replacement like cheap Bics. There are roughly ten bajillion different available ink colors. I know of one ink company that makes at least four variations on black. Fountain pens look awesome, anyway. You don't get hand cramps, because you don't have to press down, and the thickness of the pen makes gripping it easier. You can get so-called "bulletproof" inks which are resistant to water, chemicals, heat, UV, lasers, and just about everything short of incineration. If you're writing checks or taking records in a lab notebook, these can be useful. If you happen to have a stainless steel nib, you can use it to stab attackers when you have no other defenses. Now, of course, there's a few disadvantages; the non-bulletproof ink, being water-based, will run off the paper when it gets wet, and you have to fill up the ink reservoir regularly, since the ink is used quickly. Chewing on an expensive fountain pen is inadvisable. Also, if someone decides to borrow your pen and has no idea how fountain pens work or what a screw-off cap is, they may well damage it. ("Why won't this cap come off?! Argh!" SNAP)

None of these provide evidence that the speed of light and the quanta of energy alter under any conditions. Gravitational lensing does not involve alterations to the speed of light. No. Indeed. Because a mathematical expression of how two factors relate is far easier to understand than poorly-written explanations.

Do you have experimental evidence of this? Then you should write up a coherent mathematical description of your theory (using mathematics as defined by mathematicians, not by making up your own) and get it published in a peer-reviewed journal.

You definitely can't roll a fountain pen tip around while writing. That's probably while you got friction. A good fountain pen will write very smoothly, since the ink lubricates the nib, but the tines of the nib must be lined up on the paper. It's easy to adjust to. Lamy Safaris actually design the grip so you can't hold it wrong at all.

The electrical signals are macroscopic and likely wouldn't show significant quantum effects. Molecules may act as waves, but their wavelength would be incredibly tiny due to their mass, so they'd have virtually no wavelike properties.

Get yourself a Lamy Safari or Al-Star. They're cheap for fountain pens ($30 or so), reliable, and they come with ink cartridges so you can get started without too much work. If you're serious about it you'll get a piston converter and use bottled ink, since it's cheap and comes in an insane number of color options. (Also, fountain pens are where you can get "bulletproof" ink, which is resistant to just about every method of removing it from the page, including lasers.)