The incompleteness theorems have been calculated. I guess this thread can now be closed - http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/756870/proof-of-god-kurt-godel

@karl Thanks for the input.

From the abstract I think its the old Lorentz transformation in disguise - but I'm not sure. I would have to see the proposed equations and explanation.

"...he requirement of invariance is removed..." would brake a very essential rule - and I don't think thats a good idea in this case (it would mean that there is a special frame of reference, braking relativity of motion).

To read the whole article would be interesting, but I don't have access to this journal - if you can download the article, maybe you can give me a copy (if so, please PM me ;-)

@v10tdi Yes, it is possible but would need several books to pack all the information of the equations into it - thats how you learn/understand the equations.

@Psyco: Regarding transformations compatible with the relativity theory: Have a look at this interesting article.

Anyone want to go for a group buy on this?

http://now.msn.com/einsteins-god-letter-is-for-sale-on-ebay

@soundgh2 It's so funny that you say that, because I remember now that in my Planetary Geology class in astrophysics that the teacher said on the first day that everything we would learn in the class would be invalidated in ten years. And he was right.

@igorek7 I assume you didn't really mean that our universe is only 1 kpc (1,000 parsecs), since you would not even leave our Milky Way galaxy by traveling only 1kpc.

You can assume that, and the math would be important work if you could do it. When I was studying astronomy, the best measurements were one milliarcsecond of parallax. I m.a.s. is of course far short of 1 kpc. Using some very sophisticated measuring techniques, we can extend that outwards a bit. The methods of measurement are laid out in the link I posted, and you can always submit a correction to the Wikipedia. Update the data BEFORE you leave the MWG or we won't get it in time.

The danger with Modern Science is the way it is perceived.

Asking why, why, why is a healthy process. It allows people to think for themselves, and in many cases answers can be found.

Danger creeps in when theories are presented in such a fashion as being absolute certainties. When this occurs the general public are quick to believe and certainly any shred of evidence that may disprove the existence of God is readily snapped up by the media. In a short space of time, theories like the Big Bang have become street terminology and the vast majority of people, who do not do any research into life beyond their own existence, believe it. Why? Human's like the idea of things fitting into models, it helps them to cope with the insecurities of life. Human's are also generally quite lazy, we like to accept whatever is going so long as everyone else believes it.

Now the problem that we have is that theories like the Big Bang are readily accepted and yet the scientific community is rejecting it as it does not fit. So what damage has this created? Is this not just a simple exercise of finding the truth? Who exactly is hurt through this process?

A generation has now grown up believing that God does not exist, period, the world and the universe as we know it was created by some mistake of an explosion, and science can answer everything. Dangerous ideas built upon one theory after another and not waiting for facts to be established leads to destruction.

References on this topic have been made to Human's way of thinking from many years ago. Explaining the likes of thunder away as an act of God as being somehow inferior thinking, and my o my how we have evolved since then. Really? You think things are clearer now? Do we really believe that when we look up at the stars at night we can answer all the questions there are to ask? Scientists can't even agree if the Earth is moving or not, in fact both models can be used for the projection of satellites.

Humans from days gone by had an appreciation that they were only Human, they had limitations in what they could answer, but ultimately they appreciated the existence of God and his power. I'm not saying that all people bowed the knee and believed in God, but generally people respected at least the idea of God. How far we have fallen, when somebody tries to bring God into the conversation it is immediately discounted as Religious babble, then closely followed by "they don't know what they are talking about anyway..... scoff scoff o how enlightened i am"

God has created a universe full of majesty and beauty, one that can leave a person breathless at how amazing and truly intricate it is. Designed by a loving father who wants us to ask why He made it, not how it was made. Now when we gaze upon the beauty of the heavens, we argue about how it works and ultimately every argument is replaced by the next one that pushes God further and further away from the center of it. When will we return to that "inferior" thinking of respect for a truly amazing creator who has made all things?

“But now, O Lord, You are our Father; we are the clay, and You our potter; and all we are the work of Your hand.” (Isaiah 64:8)

What are Keppler's Laws then? Guidelines, speculation? Conjecture? Fancy?

@soundgh2 Sounds like that your lecturer doesn't like his job ;-)

But he is right about string theory :-P

As an Astrophysics graduate and there in the middle of string theorys birth etc yawn - as my lecturer said on the first day of Uni - everything youve learned is bollocks everything im going to teach ou is bollocks - ok lets begin

@p4inkiller yes, just yes! I see sarcasm isn't necessarily easy to understand over the internet so I'll explain.

We humans tend to think of ourselves as special and tend to believe our own theories. Early humans didn't understand thunder/lightning but knew that other humans could make such noise so therefor there must be a "being" that is like humans that makes these noises, and we'll call him God. From then on, God was the explanation for everything that humans didn't understand. Bad weather? god did it. Disease? God did it. etc.

With the invention of science, we start to realize that there are real, observable, causes for things we don't understand and we reveal that the world works the same no matter how small or large you look. Everything is made of the same atomic soup and therefor everything must work the exact same way once you get down to the smallest level. It doesn't mean that we can't/won't stop looking, but it means that when people can't understand something, they invoke the God principle, only this time they call it theory. Oh, you can't explain how gravity works? Then we'll create a theory that fits! Someone else comes along and pokes a hole in that theory with another theory, and so forth. The problem is that this is essentially people making things up to explain something, much like making up God to explain thunder or famine. You start to get into paradox territory when you start looking at these things from a higher viewpoint, and realize that people are trying to explain something that another person created. It's like asking what time it is. People created time. It could be any time that we choose it to be! /sarcasm

I've spent many years in the academic realm and many more in the engineering world. I've come to one conclusion. People are full of shit. They want to make their mark on the world and will stop at nothing to do so. I've watched people claim false findings for money, I've been asked to change my stance on a subject to make it more "marketable" and many times I've seen modern science ruin people just because the status quo wouldn't accept that it was wrong even though it truly was. People will always think they know more than they do, (called illusory superiority) some of which are posting in this thread. :)

I don't knock people for trying, but people who have a need to restate a theory as fact, really need to understand that we'll never know the truth if we keep trying to prove that they are right(confirmation bias). It obfuscates the actual data observations and biases the learners into believing something that may not even be true.

@karl

Einstein uses the term "god" here to express what he thinks how nature works - don't take it to literally (it is clear to me from the german original, I don't know how the translation sounds to a native english speaker?). I'm a physicist myselfe and I did read some of his original works - he used the term "god" in his letters to other scientists often to talk about the universe as a whole - just some kind of economic wording, but I did never come across a section where his religious believe was ruling his reasoning.

Especially when talking about quantum mechanics, he used the term "god" opposed to the "observer". The observer was used by later physicists to put human beeings at the top of the universe - only what we observe is real - which is one of the most stupid things that ever happend in the history of physics. His god here, was just the rest of the universe excluding human beeings (think about his famous question: "Is the moon still there, even when nobody is looking at it?")

I don't think he believed in a made up masterplan, I think he just believed that a full describtion of the universe with the language of physics is possible - an idea that I share. We have learned a lot about our universe by now - as it follows some rules - but this set of insights are not complete. Can we ever get to the "theorie of everything" (I really do hate those marketing terms) ? I believe, if we have enough time, we might get there.

And sorry, but physics is not about making some modells - thats a wide spread missunderstanding and one reason why we are not getting anywhere at the moment. Modells are a tool in physics, not its core idea. Physics is about finding and understanding those "rules" that are giving our universe its structure. (Words, like "rules", are a bit missleading, but I can't come up with something better at the moment - my native language is german not english;-) Physics originates from philosophy, not engineering - but at the moment its taught the other way round.

Some examples for those "rules":

• constant speed of light (in flat spacetime) / the Lorentz transformations

• quantum correlation / Bell inequality

Both are found as the core of there respective theory and later proven by experiment. (Both are not fully understood till now.)

@Psyco: We seem to agree that scientists should be a little quicker in scrapping theories that don't fit observations instead of bending them to sometimes unreasonable degrees - but for different reasons.

Regarding the mind set of Mr. Einstein, which we both didn't meet personally: Einstein certainly did leave the religious community he was born into at the age of 17, and he certainly wasn't a naive believer in some personal god (he clarified his position on this in 1954, in this letter(1)(2).)

But he was nevertheless making use of religous terms in his reasoning, as in a letter he wrote to Cornelius Lanczos on 21st of March 1942:

„Es scheint hart, dem Herrgott in die Karten zu gucken. Aber dass er würfelt und sich telepathischer Mittel bedient (wie es ihm von der gegenwärtigen Quantentheorie zugemutet wird), kann ich keinen Augenblick glauben.“

Translation: "It seems hard to look into Gods cards. But I do not believe for a second that he rolls dice and makes use of telepathic measures (as current quantum theory expects from him)."

Maybe it's just a habit of people who grew up in a more or less religious environment to use such terms, and he may not even have put too much thought into using a formulation like this, but to me this wording is a very strong indication that he was definitely dismissing the idea that the universe could exist without some sort of "master plan" setting the rules.

You wrote: "Physicists are looking for the rules that are underlying our universe, but they didn't find it yet." To this I say (being a physicist myself): No, I am not looking for rules that are underlying our universe, and it is no wonder others did not find them yet, because there is no set of rules underlying our universe. Refined models and new theories can be valuable because they allow better predictions of what happenes in reality, but since there is no core of all things, there is no getting closer to it. The journey (if meant to be the ongoing efforts in science) will not end. (At least not because of finding the universal rule set, it may of course end with the dead of the last life form in the universe capable or willing to do research.)

So I am all for trying and using different theories and models at the same time. Discard the ones that turn out to contradict reality too much or which have no practical use - and keep the rest around as good tools. And tools are all they are, not master plans.

@psyco

Interesting read. What do you find absurd about the higgs particle?