I am hearing an irritating buzz in my ear...
Apparently cosmology is liberal.
Can someone tell me, what is a conservative cosmology? And what is the distinction?
More like this
Another loss to cosmology, as Geoff Burbidge dies at 84.
Geoff Burbidge was a major figure in the early days of cosmology.
ever wondered what age the universe is at redshift 6.7?
or how many nanoJanskys there are coming in the R band from a 23rd magnitude star?
well, a couple of web based calculators will tell you, rapidly and precisely
So, I'm teaching a freshman seminar right now, and covering, among other things "summary of current research topics" - to kinda tease the students about what is out there that might be interesting.
Two of the topics covered are exoplanets and modern cosmology.
Congratulations to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt for the
In a liberal cosmology, the Earth revolves around the Sun.
In a conservative cosmology, it revolves around Dubya.
You really ought to give a link for something like that, or tell a story. Otherwise
it leaves too much to the imagination.
Well, I don't want to contaminate my html by posting such links.
And I only have second hand sources... so far.
Apparently according to Ann Coulter the "Church of Liberalism" has its own "cosmology".
From the amazon.com blurb one is tempted to think she is referring to the Landscape...
This of course begs the question of what the non-liberal cosmology is.
Or, in a binary world, to simplify matters, what is the conservative cosmology?
Of course from a UK perspective, we want to know what the New and Old Labour cosmologies are, not wanting to have anything to do with wishy-washy liberalism;
and the rest of Europe wants to know if we can't just have some sort of a nice temporary coalition cosmology where everyone gets a little bit of something?
It can't be Steady State. I talked to Hoyle Himself on past occasion, and that's not it.
Maybe she means the "electric universe". Tee hee. It is silly enough I suppose.
Google as you need, if you have the intestinal fortitude.
Tom Weller's classic Science Made Stupid says, "The further away a celestial object is, the more it appears to astronomers on Earth to be shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Red shift shows increasing totalitarian domination of the outer reaches of the universe. Write your congressman!"
Isn't "red" == "conservative" in the current US lexicon?
Or does it imply that the universe used to be redder, apparently, and now appears to be bluer?
Except of course the actual stellar population were bluer then and are redder now, in the restframe.
All a matter of perspective... maybe that is the problem.
Excess relativism.
I believe that the conservative cosmology Coulter alludes to is highly anthropocentric, just like the Bible tells us. That we were created specially, the universe exists for our benefit and that we have some higher pre-ordained Destiny in store for us.
By contrast, "liberal" cosmology is one that could be theistic, deist, agnostic or atheist, but removes humans from any special place in the overall scheme of things, thus (according to "conservative" cosmology) demeaning the value of human life and leading to all sorts of unspeakable horrors, weep and gnash teeth, etc.
Just a guess based on selections from Ms. Coulter's incoherent ravings, but I think it fits.
Rumor goes she also "gets general relativity backwards". Antigravitation?