Have you see KONY 2012? You’ll need a spare half hour. When you have it, click here.
Dr. Lawrence Krauss is a leader in the fields of theoretical physics, science advocacy in public policy and education, and scientific skepticism. We are honored to have Dr. Krauss join Atheists Talk this Sunday to discuss his recently published book, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.
A Universe From Nothing tackles ideas of thrilling complexity and importance. After all, in this book we are not merely gathering facts and formulae about the physics of our universe. We are also exploring those questions that keep us mortal dreamers awake at night: Where did we come from? Did God start it all? Where are we going to end up?
Lawrence Krauss tells a story that weaves together the history of the fields of cosmology and astrophysics with the newest discoveries of the day, and by the end of the book we come to understand that never has nothing been so fascinating.
Skeptically Speaking‘s #153 Mathtastic! Part One and #154 Mathtastic! Part Two are podcasts that you can download and stuff.
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or Paperback
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I’d question the link to KONY 2012. At least read some of the counter-views here:
http://projectdiaspora.org/2012/03/08/respect-my-agency-2012
or
http://innovateafrica.tumblr.com/post/18897981642/you-dont-have-my-vote
or
http://siena-anstis.com/2012/03/07/on-invisible-childrens-kony-2012-campaign/
The first link is from a Ugandan. Who of course no more speaks on behalf of all Ugandans than I do all Brits but Ugandan voices are sadly lacking both from the film and much of the reaction in the US/UK
I’m very suspicious of both the reaction and the reaction to the reaction.
I think the intent of KONY 2012 is clear: persuade the West, whether guilt ridden or not, to take an active interest in events that take place in Uganda. If enough people (in the West) care about an issue and show active support for an issue, then our democratically elected governments are obliged to act. Social networking is a novel way in which to overcome the hurdles that exist in our representative form of democracy. The use of digital media, in this way, is “the experiment” referred to in the link above. The truth about the West is that, in our daily lives, we do not care about the plight of Africans. I disagree with the claim that we “feel guilty” or somehow “responsible” for the current state of Africa. Certainly, Western colonialism had a detrimental effect on traditional ways of living in Africa and, most definately, the problems of Africa can be seen to be a product of its colonial past. However, the roads of our peoples have not so decisively diverged. In the plight of Ugandans, as just one example, we in the West see disasters that we would also be aggrieved to have lived through. The key difference is one of equality. Western people, for the most part, do not live in those conditions, which are all too familiar to many Ugandans, but we do not feel guilty for it. On the contrary, it is our privledge and, dare I say, responsibility, if we so care about the value of our own lifestyles: where freedom, tolerance, and safety are not a dream, but a way of life; then we owe it, not just to those yet to experience such contentment, but to ourselves. If we truly value our right to our way of life then we must not stand idly by while others are denied the opportunity to live, feel, and care as we do. Campaigns, such as KONY 2012, act to foster this kind of world view. We, in the West, have, for the most part, long and fullfilling lives when compared to our cousins in Africa. Efforts should be made to narrow the gap that has arisen between us.Â
At 8:55 9-15 when the Dr is explaining the critical points of his book, the audio quality is degraded to make it nearly inaudible, until he’s speaking about the certainty of his findings.
24:03 “In order to make space collapse and expand you have to fill it with very weird kinds of energy, and huge amounts of energy. And, um, in fact to make space expand behind you, uh, at that rate, you have to fill it with something called negative energy, which sounds like something invented by physicists in a room without windows for too long. And probably that’s true but it actually exists in small scales through the laws of quantum mechanics. The question is could you create it in the laboratory and we don’t – we don’t know the answer. But we do know that even if you wanted to, the amount of energy required to make that kind of thing happen…would take more energy than there is mass in the galaxy.” (So it sounds like you can’t crate it in the lab, eh?)
Where did the transcendental laws of quantum mechanics come from? Where has all of this energy come from?
Interesting to note that the laws of science are upheld as all that there is. Science says something must come from something. Something from nothing is impossible in the atheist worldview. But it’s good to see that the atheist worldview is accepting that the universe has a beginning (refuting the “big bang theory”). Furthermore, that what we see is not all that there is. Once again, atheists accept the Biblical Christian worldview in order to argue against it. As if one used air to argue against the existence of air, a self-defeating argument.