Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Thursday, February 04, 2021, 08:53 (1170 days ago) @ dhw

Einstein theory

DAVID: A great review of the whole history and all the wonders about the universe it has produced:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/einstein-theory-general-relativity-gravity-black-ho...

DAVID: a ten minute read well worth it.

Thank you. It took me more than ten minutes, but was well worth the time spent. Just one quote:

“General relativity has become the foundation for today’s understanding of the cosmos. But the current picture is far from complete. Plenty of questions remain about mysterious matter and forces, about the beginnings and the end of the universe, about how the science of the big meshes with quantum mechanics, the science of the very small.”

While we marvel at the extent of what we know, the fact of the matter (I use the phrase deliberately) is that we know next to nothing!

Xxxxxx

spiders lasso, lift huge prey

DAVID: They certainly know how to use their webs. The usual debate will be how much did God help? He designed their ability to spin steel-like webs but this may be their own learned adaptation.

I don’t know if this is the usual debate, but I’ll join in. What do you mean by “he designed their ability”? Do you mean he gave them the intelligence to work out how to design webs, or do you mean that as part of his goal of evolving humans and their food supply, he popped in to give spiders courses in web-spinning, or he operated on pre-web-spinning spiders to give them their web-spinning apparatus, or 3.8 billion years ago he provided the first cells with programmes not just for the evolution of spiders but also for their web-spinning ability?