I'm a big fan of Dawkins and Krauss, but I was somewhat disappointed by this offering. It was self-aggrandizing, a lot of shots of them driving around in fancy cars. I think they would do better to avoid belittling the intelligence of their adversaries: it will lose converts. They need to realize that not everyone is lucky enough to be as smart as they are or have gotten their level of education. Most people respond better to emotional appeals than to pure reason, especially in crowds. Maybe they were trying to play on that, but especially Dawkins came off as narcissistic.
I was looking forward to seeing the debates, but they just cut off their opponents at the beginning. Not very sporting. Come on, "why" is not a stupid question!
That said, I believe that cosmology definitely provides a better answer than organized religion: it has predictive power, and it provides a sense of urgency for getting off the planet. I'm not a cosmologist, but my impression is that the best evidence for the Big Bang is that Hubble observed the universe to be expanding in all directions. Running this backwards, common sense dictates there would have been a Big Bang. Why didn't they once say this? Why just state "Big Bang is fact", "evolution is fact"?
My sentiment is that these guys come off as being dogmatic themselves--about the status quo of science. I'm willing to bet there are general relativity solutions out there that don't posit a Big Bang that perhaps also involve a universe that seems to expand, maybe depending on where you are in it. Or solutions that don't involve an end of the universe. Maybe that could explain dark matter/dark energy? Just a thought. I don't think that the Big Bang has been proved as a mathematical necessity within relativity, or that all physical arguments to the contrary have been exhausted. Even less so for an end of the universe. Even general relativity is not the final word in physical theory.
It's important to keep in mind that physics has its limitations. Computer science has allowed us to prove that there are questions which are undecidable--which cannot be answered. The classification of four-dimensional spaces, if I remember correctly, is one of those questions. That probably also applies to relativistic space times, a subset of the 4d spaces. If so, I'm betting the Big Bang debate is far from being settled.
I don't find anything endearing or heartwarming about the universe needing to have an end. So indeed we should be trying to find a way out of that. Maybe one possibility, even if the universe does have an end, is to use a black hole's gravity to make OUR sense of time seem infinite, even if a farther-away observer would see an end in finite time.
I was looking forward to seeing the debates, but they just cut off their opponents at the beginning. Not very sporting. Come on, "why" is not a stupid question!
That said, I believe that cosmology definitely provides a better answer than organized religion: it has predictive power, and it provides a sense of urgency for getting off the planet. I'm not a cosmologist, but my impression is that the best evidence for the Big Bang is that Hubble observed the universe to be expanding in all directions. Running this backwards, common sense dictates there would have been a Big Bang. Why didn't they once say this? Why just state "Big Bang is fact", "evolution is fact"?
My sentiment is that these guys come off as being dogmatic themselves--about the status quo of science. I'm willing to bet there are general relativity solutions out there that don't posit a Big Bang that perhaps also involve a universe that seems to expand, maybe depending on where you are in it. Or solutions that don't involve an end of the universe. Maybe that could explain dark matter/dark energy? Just a thought. I don't think that the Big Bang has been proved as a mathematical necessity within relativity, or that all physical arguments to the contrary have been exhausted. Even less so for an end of the universe. Even general relativity is not the final word in physical theory.
It's important to keep in mind that physics has its limitations. Computer science has allowed us to prove that there are questions which are undecidable--which cannot be answered. The classification of four-dimensional spaces, if I remember correctly, is one of those questions. That probably also applies to relativistic space times, a subset of the 4d spaces. If so, I'm betting the Big Bang debate is far from being settled.
I don't find anything endearing or heartwarming about the universe needing to have an end. So indeed we should be trying to find a way out of that. Maybe one possibility, even if the universe does have an end, is to use a black hole's gravity to make OUR sense of time seem infinite, even if a farther-away observer would see an end in finite time.