Science Museums Refuse Imax Film About Evolution

[dwckabal]

From DailyKos, an article in the NY Times (free subscription required):

Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.

Well, the Bible-thumpers are at it again. And as the DailyKos writer points out, it's not about lobbying for the discussion of so-called Intelligent Design—it's about silencing discussion of evolution.

Ms. Murray said 137 people participated in the survey, and while some thought it was well done, "some people said it was blasphemous."

In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like "I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact," or "I don't agree with their presentation of human existence."

I think my head just a-sploded.

[BlueEyedSon]

1. What? Are they "Christian Science" Museums???

Idiots.

[YankeyMCC]

2. This is truly disturbing

This line in particular: "They have to be extremely careful as to how they present anything relating to evolution,"

We all have to watch what we say and do now or the religious police will get us.

They have to fight knowledge in order to keep alive - and they're winning some key battles.

It'd be nice organize protests at the places named in this article.

[BlueEyedSon]

3. Yeah, and shhhhhhh don't say the word "gravity" quite so loud!

[progressoid]

4. Holy shit on a stick

"The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South."

Well, that's good for me in my part of the country, but without sounding too elitist, it's theartres in the bible belt that NEED to show it.

Even more disturbing is that they based this decision on a survey audience of whopping 137 people in Fort Worth. "some people said it was blasphemous"

:argh:

[Pepperbelly]

5. Big Bang shouldn't be shown ...

Secular mythology at its worst. It's supporters have already began a "Tommy Flannigan" style defense of an insupportable position.

[immoderate]

6. Who?

Not the piano player, right? Or, am I missing some sarcasm here?

--IMM

[Pepperbelly]

7. Tommy Flannigan ...

the character played by Jon Lovitz on SNL. "Yeah, that's the ticket!"

[immoderate]

8. Thanks.

I missed it.

--IMM

[Bill McBlueState]

10. Yeah, stay away from that Big Bang

We all know there are far better explanations than the big bang for the near-uniform temperature and pervasiveness of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Funny how none of the anti-Big Bang people ever have an alternative explanation. I guess scientists are supposed to keep coming up with ideas until they find one that is *right* while also assuaging the egos of people who need to feel important in the grand scheme of things.

[Pepperbelly]

11. what are you rambling about?

BOOMERANG and MAXIMA destroyed the Big Bang. There is nothing left now but "Tommy Flannigan" style addendums.

[lazarus]

12. Oh, really?

One of the key pieces of evidence for the big bang is that the cosmic microwave background has a perfect black-body spectrum with a temperature around 2.73 K in all directions. However, theory predicts that there should be temperature fluctuations at the level of 10-5 in order to seed galaxy formation. Indeed, such fluctuations were discovered in 1992 by the COBE satellite, which had an angular resolution of 7o.

The much higher resolution of the Boomerang experiment has enabled astronomers to make a fundamental test of the nature of the fluctuations. The primordial fluctuations are enhanced by the astrophysics of the early universe on small angular scales. These scales correspond to the maximum distance a fluctuation driven by pressure variations can propagate in the early universe. A peak in intensity occurs on the horizon of the universe 300 000 years after the big bang, when the matter and radiation ceased to interact via photon scattering. In the case of a flat universe, this peak is predicted to occur at a characteristic angular scale of 45 arcminutes.

This physical scale translates to an angular scale in the sky that depends on the curvature of the universe. If the universe is negatively curved, or has a lower density, the predicted peak shifts to smaller angles. In effect, the gravity field of the universe acts like a lens.

Boomerang has measured the peak with unprecedented precision and gives confirmation of the primordial origin of the fluctuations. Moreover, the measured peak agrees precisely with the expectation for a flat universe. The location of the peak means that the density of matter is within 10% of the critical value. The universe must therefore be dominated by dark energy - the modern reincarnation of the cosmological constant.

Tentative measurements of the distances to Type Ia supernovae show evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, as predicted for a universe that is spatially flat but in which two-thirds of the critical density is accounted for by the dark energy associated with the cosmological constant (B P Schmidt et al. 1998 Astrophys. J. 507 46 and S Perlmutter et al. 1999 Astrophys. J. 517 565). Hence cosmologists are happy, and a consistent cosmological model beckons with independent verification of an unexpected key parameter from two totally independent experiments.

And according to this article, the data from both actually support the inflationary model of the Big Bang.

You forgot about DASI, btw.

[Pepperbelly]

13. nope ... they should've kept looking because ...

what finally came out in the wash made it pretty clear that the Big Bang fizzled as a theory. The problem was that where a second peak should have been, instead the data showed only a slight bulge. Musser, in the 7/2000 issue of Scientific American pointed out, "According to Max Tegmark of the University of Pennsylvania and Matias Zaldarriaga of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the Boomerang results imply that subatomic particles account for 50 percent more mass than standard big bang theory predicts—a difference 23 times larger than the error bars of the theory."

The data did not support a flat universe. Musser, continuing: "Follow-up studies soon showed that the lingering discrepancy, taken at face value, indicates that the universe is in fact spherical, with a density 10 percent greater than that required to make it flat. Such a gentle curvature seems awkward. Gravity quickly amplifies any deviations from exact flatness, so a slight sphericity today could only have arisen if the early universe was infinitesimally close to flat."

(I don't have a link for Musser but here is the citation: Musser, George (2000), “Boomerang Effect,” Scientific American, 283<1>:14-15, July.)

Then you have the problem presented by Quasars. Remember, much of Big Bang is based on red shift measurement. And remember as well that in the universe, the arrival of light is like a time machine, that is the light we perceive from a star 4 light years away was generated 4 years ago. It's standard fare at almost every planetarium. Here's the problem. Big Bangers put the moment of the shit hitting the fan at around 13 billion years ago, give or take a bit (13.7 if you want to get technical.) They peg the beginnings of galaxies at 800,000 to 1.0 million years after that.

Quasars are believed to have been formed AFTER hypothetical galaxies and energy sources appeared. The problem is that they have found clusters of Quasars from 12 billion years ago and individual quasars from 12-13 billion. This is far more oranization than Big Bang theory allows. Far too much.

So that leaves you with a delimma. If BB is right, then the Quasars are impossible UNLESS the theory of red shift is wrong which then undercuts the rest of the BB's case.

[AZCat]

14. Just FYI: SciAm articles are available online (for a price)

I thought you might like to know that SciAm articles are available online, although you have to pay. If you don't want to, at least you can view the summary for free.

Example:

Boomerang Effect; July 2000; by Musser; 2 page(s)



Pretty cool - it's better than scavenging the local used bookstore for back issues.

[Pepperbelly]

15. yeah ... the bastards!

:D

[lazarus]

18. So we have a disagreement

Wonderful.

That's what scientists do. They disagree. They keep looking. They keep refining theories until they fit all the facts.

They don't just scrap a theory and say "I dunno, must be god or sump'n" the first time they come up with data that may not fit.

They've found quasars from roughly 800 million years after the BB. And haven't really had fits about it, from what I can tell.

Astronomers have been looking for clues in distant quasars, which are very energetic young galaxies. A few weeks ago, Ian Robinson, with the UK Astronomy Technology Center in Edinburgh, reported that a British team using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii has found massive amounts of metal-rich dust in one of those quasars. Then Dr. Freudling's team reported having discovered iron in others. Given the youth of these quasars - about 900 million years after the big bang - both scientific teams conclude that the stars that produced the dust probably formed when the universe was only 200 million years old.

That's far earlier than astronomers once thought possible. Yet it's consistent with what a NASA satellite is finding in radiation left over from the original big bang. Tiny variations in that radiation today reveal details of early conditions. As reported at a Washington press conference in February, those details now show that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, with an uncertainty of only 1 percent. It is composed of 4 percent ordinary matter, 23 percent of an unknown material called "dark matter," and 73 percent of mysterious dark energy. The details also indicate primordial stars did indeed ignite when our universe was only 200 million years old.

Cosmic history still raises many questions. But when it comes to the big one - is the concept of a big-bang origin valid - the data now say "yes."

[fshrink]

19. I would add

that cosmological questions are not at base ontological questions. They are essential within the waaayyyy larger question of finding a way to fit all the forces we know into a global and coherent model. That's where the beef is.

[Pepperbelly]

20. But ...

the quasars are far more organized than BB allows. Be that as it may, the BB proponents also leave out of the theory the biggest question of all and many physicists have noted this lack as well: the theory has no model of why there was a singularity and the nature of the pre- BB universe.

Or why there is something vs. nothing. IOW, from whence did the primordial stuff come from.

on edit: I forgot the little assertion at the end of the CS Monitor article re: composition of the universe and once again we see them refer to dark matter/energy from the "Tommy Flannigan" school of Cosmology. I plodded through the paper from the Fermi Labs explaining dark matter and I do not know when I have ever seen something so lame being taken so seriously. "The math doesn't work? That's because of ... dark matter! That's the ticket. And dark energy as well. Whatever the math needs to work so the BB is sacrosanct, that's the values of dark energy and mass. That's the ticket!"

[lazarus]

21. Yeah, those silly scientists

Just making shit up as they go along.

As for what came before the Big Bang, that's getting into cosmology. BB proponents aren't required to explain it.

Actually, nothing existed before the Big Bang/singularity, since that by nature created the universe.

What you're really doing is criticising science for not having all the answers.

The problem with your position is that science constantly finds new answers, new information, and adapts as it goes along. Criticising science for not having all the answers (yet) is a rather specious argument.

[Pepperbelly]

24. LOL

Secular mythology.

Nothing existed before the BB?

Before the BB, some 13.7 billion years ago, there was a singularity, huh? Well. where did that come from? What was it made of? Did the BB create space as well? The reason why that is important is that even though the BBers want to pretend they can cut off consideration at 13.7 billion years ago and that is crap.

Nothing exists before the BB? Prove it.

[dwckabal]

22. Specious...and intellectually dishonest

After all, dark matter & dark energy can be lumped in with other "unknown" forces and/or substances, such as Bose-Einstein condensates or the hydration force, both of which were theorized, but not proven until many years later.

Science is full of theories and equations with unknowns, used to make the equations match observed phenomena. Sometimes, through experimentation, these unknowns are shown to exist, as with magnetism and gravity, other times they are disproven, as with luminiferous aether and phlogiston.

Over time, dark matter and/or dark energy may be shown to be incorrect or non-existent. But to say that scientists are using these two substances solely to prop up the Big Bang Theory is disingenuous, to say the least.

[Pepperbelly]

23. neither specious nor intellectually dishonest ...

I read Carroll's paper from Fermi and whether you want to acknowledge it or not, it is a "the dog ate my homework" scenario from the beginning.

Ok, I will apply the same standard to BB as the skeptics apply to everything not part of the secular mythology. Where is the physical proof? This stuff makes up a huge majority of the matter in the universe, what is it made of? What does it look like? Can they point to just a smidgeon of it somewhere so we can evaluate it?

At this point, it is science's baby and let's see some proof rather than intellectual Tommy-Flanniganisms. Put some of it in my hand. Or show me a pic. The ufo people can do that. Or is it ... yeah ... look at any Hubble pic and where you don't see anything, there's the dark matter. That's the ticket!

[dwckabal]

25. Ask, and ye shall receive...

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/03/22/dark.energy/index.html

Until now, evidence for dark energy, a mysterious antigravity force apparently pushing galaxies outward at an accelerating pace, has only been found in the farthest reaches of the universe.

But an international team of researchers has used computer models supported by observations from the Hubble Space Telescope to find hints of dark energy closer by.

http://space.com/scienceastronomy/050321_big_bang.html

What do you get when you turn the temperature up to a trillion degrees?

Quite a heating bill.

Actually physicists claim that at this temperature nuclear material melts into an exotic form of matter called a quark-gluon plasma – thought to have been the state of the universe a microsecond after the Big Bang.

Recreating this primordial soup is the primary purpose of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. After five years of data, it appears as if RHIC may have succeeded.

You can keep throwing out the Tommy Flannigan-ism slur on every theory you don't agree with, but that horse laugh argument got old about 50 posts ago. Please try and stick to the scientific method, and attack a theory for its weaknesses, not because you think the scientists are involved in upholding some "secular mythology."

[Pepperbelly]

26. The Tommy-Flannigan reference must sting ...

or you wouldn't bring it back up. Good.

Now, so far as your links went, what did you hope to prove by those? They just replowed the same old ground although the article on the accelerator did say "thought to be the state ..." Is THAT why you linked to it?

That isn't proof. It's some writer saying what some people think.

[dwckabal]

27. No it doesn't sting,

it's just stupid. You have used it on just about every thread now as if repetition makes it true. It does not. Most people don't even get the reference, because although the Tommy Flannigan character was popular for about 15 seconds, more people probably remember Jon Lovitz for voicing Jay Sherman in The Critic (which was way funnier, anyway).

I didn't say the links were proof, although it directly refuted your claims of dark matter and dark energy being simply a prop to hold up the "secular mythology" of the Big Bang Theory.

I'll repeat what I wrote before, since you conveniently "forgot" to address in in one of my previous posts:

Science is full of theories and equations with unknowns, used to make the equations match observed phenomena. Sometimes, through experimentation, these unknowns are shown to exist, as with magnetism and gravity, other times they are disproven, as with luminiferous aether and phlogiston.

Over time, dark matter and/or dark energy may be shown to be incorrect or non-existent. But to say that scientists are using these two substances solely to prop up the Big Bang Theory is disingenuous, to say the least.

[Pepperbelly]

28. the remark of which you ...

are so proud ... I don't even know where to begin.

What other reason is there for dark matter?

No one has seen it.

The inferences of it are ALL subject to alternative causality that is simpler and makes more sense. If there wasn't such a BB cottage industry, when the numbers didn't work out, they would have went back to the drawing board rather than having a Weekend-at-Bernie's with the corpse of their favored theory.

So far as humnor goes, I suppose I will take your criticisms under advisement although truthfully, you haven't shown any indication that a sense of humor is something with which you are actually familiar.

[dwckabal]

30. You haven't shown any indication

that you can engage in thoughtful discussions without attacking the person posting. I have yet to see a post from you that did not disintegrate into some form of personal attack, direct or otherwise.

Personal attacks aside, your entire problem with dark matter as it relates to the Big bang Theory is simply, "no one has seen it?"

I'll try to remember that the next time I breathe, throw a baseball, or use my credit card.

[Pepperbelly]

31. What attack?

Where did I attack ANYONE?

I double-dog DARE you to point it out.

[Bill McBlueState]

9. planetariuum directors do that too

I did a study as an undergrad of how planetariums handle the interaction between science and religion. A surprising number of planetarium directors said things like "I just make sure I don't present anything about evolution or the big bang when I do shows for religious groups."

And they seemed to think that was an acceptable resolution to the problem.

Staying quiet about evolution and the big bang just keeps people stupid, so I'm surprised science educators are happy with that.

[progressoid]

16. Great - lets leave out some of the most fascinating stuff because it

might offend a few people that want to live in the 13th century.

Sheesh.

[fshrink]

17. Problem is

it's not even about evolution or the BB. It can be anything, at any time. And this as long as no one will dare to stand firm. Since the fashion is now to extend a hand to these psychotics in a general spirit of "reconciliation" or to "reframe", this doesn't look like it's going to happen.

[GOPFighter]

29. The Fort Worth Museum reversed itself...

...and will now show the film ("Volcanos").

See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1338588

[bookman]

32. STOP...

...you're making my brain hurt!

:)

Kidding, I love discussions on DU.