On Thu, 20 Oct 2005 cmekve@aol.com wrote:
> I was too young to know at the time, but I'm guessing that the Big Bang was not taught in high school (or even college) physics classes until some positive support was found (contra Popper). ID seems to want to be admitted (indeed mandated) to the classroom without producing any positive results and further saying to not bother looking because you won't (in fact, can't) find it. I have a problem with that.
>
I looked at the textbook that I had when I took an astronomy course as a
sophomore at Caltech. It was published in 1955, and it had a little less
than a page on "the theory of the expanding universe". That was preceded
by some speculation on other explanations of red shifts. I don't think it
mentioned the implication of a beginning except maybe for an allusion to
the oscillating universe theory. I do not recall whether this was covered
in the lectures. I was certainly very much aware of the issue, especially
since there was a visitor on campus by the name of Fred Hoyle, whom I
frequently observed going for a walk on campus obviously engaged in deep
thought. My friends in the InterVarsity group occasionally discussed the
fact that this atheist was attempting to oppose the idea of a beginning to
the universe with his steady state cosmology.
Also, in looking at others of my old textbooks, I found that noble or
inert gases cannot react with anything, that the human zygote has 48
chromosomes, and that there is no mechanism to support the theory of
continental drift. At least the mathematics texts are still reliable.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
Received on Fri Oct 21 17:07:30 2005
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