Friday, January 13, 2012

Secular humanism

“We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. “If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We’re completely irrelevant.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11dark.t.html?pagewanted=print

5 comments:

  1. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, don't it?

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  2. "If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same."

    I don't follow. If there were no more stars, galaxies, planets, and "everybody," what else is left besides space? And how is that "largely the same" as it was before?

    I realize that's not really Dr. Krauss's point--he means to characterize the universe as material and mechanistic and indifferent to us pitiful humans--but that's not what he said.

    Of course, since he's just as irrelevant as the rest of us, the rest of us can ignore him and carry on as we like.

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  3. Ken Abbott said:

    I don't follow. If there were no more stars, galaxies, planets, and "everybody," what else is left besides space? And how is that "largely the same" as it was before?

    Perhaps he's referring to the astronomical distinction between dark matter/energy and visible ("normal") matter. Since the amount of visible matter (the kind that makes up stars, planets, etc.) is tiny in proportion to the amount of dark matter, his statement would still hold true.

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  4. Can anyone provide a layman's follow-up article that's fairly recent as a follow-up to this 2007 article?

    It's an immensely fascinating topic.

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  5. Lmao, his little rant is irrelevant! It's like arguing over nomenclature, and definitions. He considers the Universe to be the infrastructure and not the substance, while others might argue that the Universe is both... Utterly pointless and offers nothing substantive to the conversation.

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