Reddit mentions: The best astronomy & space science books

> Can you recommend some eyepieces which I should get?

Well, for starters you'll want to replace that 9mm with something better, and you'll want a planetary eyepiece. For planetary a 5-6mm eyepiece will work nicely. As for which one in particular -- whichever you can afford from what I linked :)

5-6mm planetaries:

• TS 5mm HR Planetary
  
• Omegon 5mm ED Flatfield
  
• Celestron X-Cel LX 5mm
  
• Omegon Ultrawide 6mm
  
  9mm replacements:
  
  
• William Optics SWAN 9mm
  
• Omegon Ultrawide 9mm
  
  Later on you might want to get something in the mid range, like 15-20 mm, but honestly, pretty much anything will work here. Higher AFoV (degrees) is preferred over longer focal length in most cases.
  
  And finally at some point you'll want to replace the 30mm 2" one. I would highly recommend the Explore Scientific 30mm 82° one, but it's definitely nowhere near being important purchase, your kit 30mm will serve you well. Alternatively, a William Optics SWAN 33mm eyepiece is another good choice, but it's barely different from your current one, though the FoV is still larger. But for your scope 30-35mm eyepiece is the limit, don't go with larger ones, you'll be losing light from too large exit pupil.
  
  As it is with most astronomy stuff, higher quality stuff will cost you more.
  
  > Where should I spend more money? and what sort of filters should I get? I need one for the Moon atleast dont I?
  
  Priority list:
  
  

1. Telescope -- you cannot upgrade aperture, everything else can be changed later. But the 10" you chose will be a superb starting instrument, congratulations :)
   
2. "Turn Left at Orion" or "Nightwatch" -- your essential night sky guides! Stellarium for the cloudy nights and lazy days :)
   
3. Missing eyepiece ranges -- as I have mentioned above. Planetary is a must-have if you want to view planets (you do want, trust me). Then look into either mid-range plug, or the 9mm replacement, depending on how well the kit 9mm performs for you. If you're happy with it, stick with it. I'd order the planetary of choice along with scope, and wait for the rest until you've got chance to field test the setup a couple of times.
   
4. Filters -- Yes, Moon filter is a must with this telescope, however I would highly recommend a much more versatile Variable Polarizing Filter instead. The 2" is more expensive, however, the low-magnification is where you need it the most. And 2" filters should be able to be mounted on the 2"-to-1.25" adapters to work with 1.25" eyepieces. Alternative is to wear your sunglasses at night. Another great choice is a narrowband UHC filter, like this one from Baader. It will also help out against the light pollution. On the other hand, I would recommend against spending money on a wideband "light pollution" filter, as in my experience I haven't found them to be of any use whatsoever.
   
5. Telrad/Rigel QuickFinder -- I've already covered those in my previous post.
   
6. Dew heaters -- self-explanatory. If dewing up of eyepieces and/or mirrors becomes a problem, and you have no hairdryer at hand, there's your more portable (but more expensive) solution.
   
7. Binoculars -- surprisingly good accessory to telescope, and on their own! Wide field of view and super high portability makes them excellent tool for quick stargazing, observing of objects otherwise too large to fit into telescope's view, and useful for finding a good star-hopping route to the next faint fuzzy of your choice! Also useful for travelling, birdwatching, and other daytime activities. A simple but good set of 7x50/10x50/8x42 binoculars will set you back like 80-150€ tops, unless you want something of highest quality. But once again, entirely optional!

Thank you for the effort! I'll try to do you justice with a thorough response.

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> 1. God says what he needs to say to us through the Bible.

Sure it's the Bible and not Harry Potter? To anyone without your obvious bias, the Bible looks like a collection of fanciful but poorly edited fiction. God's message hasn't reached me and it hasn't reached 5 billion other humans alone among the living. In other words, if this is an omnipotent's idea of effective communication, God sucks as a communicator.

> 2. God is not inert, he sometimes does miracles

Prove this and I'll leave you alone. Has God ever healed an amputee? Has God ever accomplished a miracle that has no natural explanation?

No wait, references to the work of fiction mentioned in #1 don't count. There is not the slightest bit of evidence that your precious Bible is anything more than a stack of useful rolling papers. I've addressed this before. J.K. Rowling has Harry Potter performing scores of miracles in her books, it's really easy to create a miracle with pen and paper.

> 3. The evidence is not inadequate. If you want evidence of his existence, there is evidence everywhere, and in sheer necessity, it is pointed out that God must exist.

So you say. Your following arguments are... sorely lacking. Here we go:

> 3.1 The need of a creator
If you saw a car in the forest, you wouldn't say it randomly came into existence and over time came together by itself, because it is too complex for that to have happened.

Correct. That's easy for me to say because I know exactly what a car is and how it's made.

> In the same way, this universe and everything in it is far too complex to randomly explode into existence and come together by itself, a creator is needed and that creator is God.

Your analogy doesn't hold. The universe is not very complex conceptually, it's been satisfactorily explained how all heavenly bodies resulted from the expansion of space followed by the clumping of clouds of primeval hydrogen. Suns and the nuclear process in them? A natural consequence of packing a lot of hydrogen with gravity. Heavy elements? The ashes of nuclear fusion. Planets circling around suns? That's what happens when heavenly bodies nearly collide in a vacuum, influenced only by each other's gravity. Finally, the complexity of life on earth is neatly explained by evolution from very primitive beginnings from substances that occur -naturally- in the void of lifeless space. No magic is required to explain any of this. But I see we get to talk about this in greater depth in #4.

Still, for your interest, this video refutes Craig's Kalam Cosmological argument and is thoroughly captivating while presenting modern cosmology. Highly recommended!

> 3.2 The need for an original mover/causer
You know nothing moves by itself correct?

No, I don't know this, because I have a solid education in physics. Atomic nuclei spontaneously explode and particles fly from them - movement without a mover. Plato's Prime Mover argument dates back to a time when people didn't know anything about physics and science was done by sitting on your butt, guessing and thinking.

> 3.3 The need of a standard
When you call something, for instance let's say "good", there has to be a standard upon which good is based.

This response of yours -so far- is sounding suspiciously like a copy of a William Lane Craig debate argument. Please note that all of his arguments have been successfully refuted - though not necessarily within one debate or only within debates. But regardless, I can easily address your arguments on my own.

Now then. Basic moral behavior has been shown to emerge naturally as a result of evolution. Yes, this is why theists hate evolution so much. It explains a lot of stuff that used to be attributed to God. Animals in the wild show moral behavior such as altruism, fairness, love, cooperation, justice and so forth. Even robot simulations, given only the most minimal initial instructions, develop "moral" behavior because that turns out to be a successful selection criteria for survival.

If you try to point out that humans display and think about much more complex moral situations than animals, I'll agree. But you know who invented those extensions of purely survival-oriented moral behavior? Humans did, not God. Humans look at the behaviors that promote survival and well-being in animals and humans and call it "good." They see behavior that hurts and kills animals and people and makes them suffer, and they call it "bad." Your five year old kid can grasp this concept - you insult your god when you claim this is so difficult it necessarily requires divine intervention. I recommend Peter Singer's book Practical Ethics, a thoughtful and thorough discussion of morals far more nuanced and acceptable to a modern society than the barbaric postulates of scripture. Rape a virgin, buy her as a wife for 50 shekels, indeed!

> 4.1 About the Origin of Life/Finely tuning a killer cosmos

> Anyway, for life to come together even by accident, you would need matter

Correct.

> now the universe is not infinite and even scientists know that.

I'm not sure that's certain, but it's probably irrelevant. Let's move on.

> that scientists say made the universe would need matter present.

Correct. We certainly observe a helluva lot of matter in the present-day universe (to the extent we can observe it).

> Where do you expect that matter to have come from?

An empty geometry and some very basic laws of physics (including quantum physics). This is very un-intuitive, which is why people restricted to Platonic thinking have trouble with it. But you know that matter and energy are equivalent, via E=mc^2 , right? Given the raw physics of the very early universe, matter could be created from energy and vice versa. OK, that still doesn't explain where the (matter+energy) came from. Here's the fun part: it turns out that the universe contains not just the conventional "positive" energy we're familiar with, but also negative energy. And it turns out that the sum of (matter + positive energy) on one hand and (negative energy) on the other are exactly equal and cancel out. In other words, and this is important, the creation of the universe incurred no net "cost" in matter or energy. This being the case, it becomes similarly plausible for for the entire universe to have spontaneously popped into existence just like those sub-atomic particles that cause the Casimir Effect. Stephen Hawking has explained this eloquently in his book The Grand Design but you may prefer Lawrence Krauss' engaging lecture A Universe From Nothing.

> I know for a fact that people are smarter than an explosion and even they have been unsuccessful in making organic life forms from scratch

Wrong again. It took them 15 years, but Craig Venter and his project recently succeeded in constructing the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell.

By way of interest, people making the kind of claims you do were similarly amazed when Friedrich Wöhler, in 1828, synthesized the first chemical compound, urea, that is otherwise only created by living beings. This achievement torpedoed the Vital Force theory dating back to Galen. Yet another job taken off God's hands.

> let alone have them survive the forming of a planet.

Now this is just dumb. First the planet formed, then it cooled down a bit, then life developed.

> Because of that, I doubt an explosion could do it either.

So you're right there: The explosion just created the planet and the raw materials. Life later arose on the planet.

> Chance doesn't make matter pop into existence.

Yes it does. The effect I was mentioning earlier is called quantum fluctuation.

> 4.2 The human brain

(skipping the comparison of man with god. I don't see it contributing anything. All of this postulating doesn't make God plausible in any way)

> 4.3 The Original Christian Cosmos

> 4.3.1. Maybe because we are after the fall, we have already lost that perfect original cosmos Paul imagined.

Wait, this contradicts your next point.

> 4.3.2 You have to give Paul some credit for trying. He didn't have any the information or technology we have today.

Thank you, this confirms my assertion that the Bible and its authors contain no divinely inspired knowledge. The Bible is a collection of writings by people who thought you could cleanse leprosy by killing a couple of pigeons.

Now, about that original cosmos: either Paul was too uneducated to conceive the cosmos as it really exists, or what he imagined is irrelevant. In any case, what you consider the "after loss" cosmos is trillions of times larger than Paul imagined; it would be silly to call this a loss.

The fact remains that the world as described in the Bible is a pitiful caricature of the world as it is known today. And Carrier's main point remains that our cosmos is incredibly hostile to life; and if man were indeed God's favorite creation, the immensity of the cosmos would be a complete waste if it only served as a backdrop for our tiny little planet.

Friend asked for a similar list a while ago and I put this together. Would love to see people thoughts/feedback.

Very High Level Introductions:

• Mr. Tompkins in Paperback
  
  • A super fast read that spends less time looking at the "how" but focused instead on the ramifications and impacts. Covers both GR as well as QM but is very high level with both of them. Avoids getting into the details and explaining the why.
    
    
• Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution (Great Courses lecture)
  
  • This is a great intro to the field of non-classical physics. This walks through GR and QM in a very approachable fashion. More "nuts and bolts" than Mr. Tompkins but longer/more detailed at the same time.
    
    
    Deeper Pop-sci Dives (probably in this order):
    
    
• Quantum Theory: A Very Brief Introduction
  
  • Great introduction to QM. Doesn't really touch on QFT (which is a good thing at this point) and spends a great deal of time (compared to other texts) discussing the nature of QM interpretation and the challenges around that topic.
    
• The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces
  
  • Now we're starting to get into the good stuff. QFT begins to come to the forefront. This book starts to dive into explaining some of the macro elements we see as explained by QM forces. A large part of the book is spent on symmetries and where a proton/nucleon's gluon binding mass comes from (a.k.a. ~95% of the mass we personally experience).
    
• The Higgs Boson and Beyond (Great Courses lecture)
  
  • Great lecture done by Sean Carroll around the time the Higgs boson's discovery was announced. It's a good combination of what role the Higgs plays in particle physics, why it's important and what's next. Also spends a little bit of time discussing how colliders like the LHC work.
    
• Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time (Great Courses lecture)
  
  • Not really heavy on QM at all, however I think it does best to do this lecture after having a bit of the physics under your belt first. The odd nature of time symmetry in the fundamental forces and what that means with regards to our understanding of time as we experience it is more impactful with the additional knowledge (but, like I said, not absolutely required).
    
• Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics
  
  • This is not a mathematical approach like "A Most Incomprehensible Thing" are but it's subject matter is more advanced and the resulting math (at least) an order of magnitude harder (so it's a good thing it's skipped). This is a "high level deep dive" (whatever that means) into QFT though and so discussion of pure abstract math is a huge focus. Lie groups, spontaneous symmetry breaking, internal symmetry spaces etc. are covered.
    
• The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
  
  • This is your desert after working through everything above. Had to include something about string theory here. Not a technical book at all but best to be familiar with QM concepts before diving in.
    
    Blending the line between pop-sci and mathematical (these books are not meant to be read and put away but instead read, re-read and pondered):
    
    
• A Most Incomprehensible Thing: Intro to GR
  
  • Sorry, this is GR specific and nothing to do with QM directly. However I think it's a great book acting as an introduction. Definitely don't go audible/kindle. Get the hard copy. Lots of equations. Tensor calculus, Lorentz transforms, Einstein field equations, etc. While it isn't a rigorous textbook it is, at it's core, a mathematics based description not analogies. Falls apart at the end, after all, it can't be rigorous and accessible at the same time, but still well worth the read.
    
• The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics
  
  • Not QM at all. However it is a great introduction to using math as a tool for describing our reality and since it's using it to describe classical mechanics you get to employ all of your classical intuition that you've worked on your entire life. This means you can focus on the idea of using math as a descriptive tool and not as a tool to inform your intuition. Which then would lead us to...
    
• Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum
  
  • Great introduction that uses math in a descriptive way AND to inform our intuition.
    
• The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
  
  • Incredible book. I think the best way to describe this book is a massive guidebook. You probably won't be able to get through each of the topics based solely on the information presented in the book but the book gives you the tools and knowledge to ask the right questions (which, frankly, as anybody familiar with the topic knows, is actually the hardest part). You're going to be knocking your head against a brick wall plenty with this book. But that's ok, the feeling when the brick wall finally succumbs to your repeated headbutts makes it all worth while.

I'd like to give you my two cents as well on how to proceed here. If nothing else, this will be a second opinion. If I could redo my physics education, this is how I'd want it done.

If you are truly wanting to learn these fields in depth I cannot stress how important it is to actually work problems out of these books, not just read them. There is a certain understanding that comes from struggling with problems that you just can't get by reading the material. On that note, I would recommend getting the Schaum's outline to whatever subject you are studying if you can find one. They are great books with hundreds of solved problems and sample problems for you to try with the answers in the back. When you get to the point you can't find Schaums anymore, I would recommend getting as many solutions manuals as possible. The problems will get very tough, and it's nice to verify that you did the problem correctly or are on the right track, or even just look over solutions to problems you decide not to try.

Basics

I second Stewart's Calculus cover to cover (except the final chapter on differential equations) and Halliday, Resnick and Walker's Fundamentals of Physics. Not all sections from HRW are necessary, but be sure you have the fundamentals of mechanics, electromagnetism, optics, and thermal physics down at the level of HRW.

Once you're done with this move on to studying differential equations. Many physics theorems are stated in terms of differential equations so really getting the hang of these is key to moving on. Differential equations are often taught as two separate classes, one covering ordinary differential equations and one covering partial differential equations. In my opinion, a good introductory textbook to ODEs is one by Morris Tenenbaum and Harry Pollard. That said, there is another book by V. I. Arnold that I would recommend you get as well. The Arnold book may be a bit more mathematical than you are looking for, but it was written as an introductory text to ODEs and you will have a deeper understanding of ODEs after reading it than your typical introductory textbook. This deeper understanding will be useful if you delve into the nitty-gritty parts of classical mechanics. For partial differential equations I recommend the book by Haberman. It will give you a good understanding of different methods you can use to solve PDEs, and is very much geared towards problem-solving.

From there, I would get a decent book on Linear Algebra. I used the one by Leon. I can't guarantee that it's the best book out there, but I think it will get the job done.

This should cover most of the mathematical training you need to move onto the intermediate level physics textbooks. There will be some things that are missing, but those are usually covered explicitly in the intermediate texts that use them (i.e. the Delta function). Still, if you're looking for a good mathematical reference, my recommendation is Lua. It may be a good idea to go over some basic complex analysis from this book, though it is not necessary to move on.

Intermediate

At this stage you need to do intermediate level classical mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and thermal physics at the very least. For electromagnetism, Griffiths hands down. In my opinion, the best pedagogical book for intermediate classical mechanics is Fowles and Cassidy. Once you've read these two books you will have a much deeper understanding of the stuff you learned in HRW. When you're going through the mechanics book pay particular attention to generalized coordinates and Lagrangians. Those become pretty central later on. There is also a very old book by Robert Becker that I think is great. It's problems are tough, and it goes into concepts that aren't typically covered much in depth in other intermediate mechanics books such as statics. I don't think you'll find a torrent for this, but it is 5 bucks on Amazon. That said, I don't think Becker is necessary. For quantum, I cannot recommend Zettili highly enough. Get this book. Tons of worked out examples. In my opinion, Zettili is the best quantum book out there at this level. Finally for thermal physics I would use Mandl. This book is merely sufficient, but I don't know of a book that I liked better.

This is the bare minimum. However, if you find a particular subject interesting, delve into it at this point. If you want to learn Solid State physics there's Kittel. Want to do more Optics? How about Hecht. General relativity? Even that should be accessible with Schutz. Play around here before moving on. A lot of very fascinating things should be accessible to you, at least to a degree, at this point.

Advanced

Before moving on to physics, it is once again time to take up the mathematics. Pick up Arfken and Weber. It covers a great many topics. However, at times it is not the best pedagogical book so you may need some supplemental material on whatever it is you are studying. I would at least read the sections on coordinate transformations, vector analysis, tensors, complex analysis, Green's functions, and the various special functions. Some of this may be a bit of a review, but there are some things Arfken and Weber go into that I didn't see during my undergraduate education even with the topics that I was reviewing. Hell, it may be a good idea to go through the differential equations material in there as well. Again, you may need some supplemental material while doing this. For special functions, a great little book to go along with this is Lebedev.

Beyond this, I think every physicist at the bare minimum needs to take graduate level quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics. For quantum, I recommend Cohen-Tannoudji. This is a great book. It's easy to understand, has many supplemental sections to help further your understanding, is pretty comprehensive, and has more worked examples than a vast majority of graduate text-books. That said, the problems in this book are LONG. Not horrendously hard, mind you, but they do take a long time.

Unfortunately, Cohen-Tannoudji is the only great graduate-level text I can think of. The textbooks in other subjects just don't measure up in my opinion. When you take Classical mechanics I would get Goldstein as a reference but a better book in my opinion is Jose/Saletan as it takes a geometrical approach to the subject from the very beginning. At some point I also think it's worth going through Arnold's treatise on Classical. It's very mathematical and very difficult, but I think once you make it through you will have as deep an understanding as you could hope for in the subject.

> I've come to the conclusion that my minimum requirements are to see the Rings of Saturn and the bands on Jupiter.

Go big.

I've a 50 mm finderscope (an auxiliary "rifle sights" scope that sits on top of a much larger scope) that can "resolve" the rings of Saturn if I put a strong eyepiece in it, but it looks like a little dot crossed out by a very thin thread. And this is a high-quality Stellarvue achromat refractor.

Get the biggest aperture your money can buy. That basically means a dobsonian reflector. Someone suggested a refurbished 6" dob. If that's all you can afford, go for it. You may have to get an extra eyepiece for it, something like a 12 mm or even 8 mm.

The smallest dob that is not a compromise in any way is the Zhumell Z8 - the archetypal 8" dob. If you can afford it, it could be a "forever scope". If you can't afford it, just get the biggest dob you can - it's the architecture that provides the most aperture per dollar. Smart 8 year olds can handle a 6" ... 8" dob; they may need a small stool to step on when the 8" dob is vertical, but that will cease being a problem in a year or so, when the kid gets taller. :)

You can sort-of cheat with a small-ish aperture for the rings of Saturn, but you'll see them small. Jupiter's bands, OTOH, are low-contrast features. You could see them on a sub-100mm scope, but they are not very impressive; you can tell they are there, but that's it. There is no substitute for large aperture in that case. Go BIG.

Aperture is king.

BTW, Saturn goes in hiding for the next several months. But Jupiter is on the rise in the East; very bright and pretty, go outside tonight and look east.

> Everyone is familiar with refractor telescopes.

It's easy to make small-aperture refractors, that's why they are popular. But as soon as aperture goes beyond a certain limit, things get flipped over and reflectors rule the game.

A good 4" (100 mm) refractor is a thousand bucks. A good 4" dob is 1/4 of that price.

> Do you think we would be disappointed with the 80mm refractor when trying to view Saturn & Jupiter?

Yes. Anything is disappointing after looking at big colorful space telescope images. Well, almost anything, except over-24" dobs under dark skies with great seeing. :) If your goal is to blow the kid's mind, go big. Forget anything else, features, bells, whistles - hunt for aperture instead.

Make sure you have at least two eyepieces; one at, let's say, 30x ... 50x magnification (for wide images - large but faint objects like nebulae), another at 120x ... 180x or so (for higher magnification - small objects like planets or double stars). Good dobs usually come with two glasses like that included. You'll figure out later when/if you need a more diverse collection of glass. This assumes you get a reasonable aperture; a tiny 80mm scope will fall apart at 180x.

Magnification is like a car's speed. You don't drive your car all the time at 200 km/h; sometimes you drive slow, when you go to the grocery store; other times you go fast, such as on the freeway. Each situation requires a certain speed. Same with scopes and magnification. Don't fall into the beginner's trap and believe that "more is better" for magnification. It is not. However, more is always better when it comes to aperture.

Get Turn Left At Orion - it's a wonderful book that will teach you where and how to find all sorts of amazing objects on the sky. It's perfect for the kid too - not too complicated, lots of pictures.

Install Stellarium on a laptop or iPhone. It's like a map, but for the sky. You could also get the Pocket Sky Atlas after a few months - it's a bit more technical but it's a real sky map like the ones "real" astronomers use.

Keep your scope collimated for best performance. link1 link2

Astrophotography is a hobby in its own right.
For the budget you have listed, you would most likely end up buying a mount that is not up to the task.

I would suggest a nice pair of 10x50 binoculars and this book first.

If you are committed to getting a scope, then this is my suggestion assuming the $1000 budget is all inclusive meaning scope, accessories, and books.

1. Get a dobsonian. 8inches F4.5-5 10" or 12" would be nice but would blow your budget for the necessary accessories. Something like this would be a great place to start. Also nice would be the 10" Meade Lightbridge.
   
   2)The skywatcher comes with 2 eyepieces (25mm and 10mm IRC) THe light bridge comes with one. In either case I would invest in a NICE barlow like this one Barlows are an inexpensive way to improve your options. A 24 mm EP in a 2x barlow becomes a 12mm a 10mm becomes a 5mm. Its not as great as discrete eps in those sizes, but it is an economical way to get more versatility out of your existing eyepieces. I also can't talk enough about the Televue Panoptic EPs. They are affordable and incredibly nice. Eyepieces are something that will last through many scopes. I have 10 or so but only ever use about 3 of them.
   Get a Telrad or a Rigel finder. The Skywatcher has a finderscope, the meade has a red dot finder. Personally I hate red dot finders. I think they are complete junk. Telrad is the defacto standard for zero magnification finders, I prefer the rigel for its smaller size and built in pulse circuit. They are both about the same price. You will need to collimate your scope, a cheshire works great, or a laser collimator will do as well. Many folks use a combination of both. I have gone both ways, cheshire is fine, laser is fine, a combination of both is also fine. Accessories can go on forever, the only other must have that I can think of is a redlight flashlight. This is a good one or you can add red film to an existing flashlight you have or you can do what myself and many others have done and get an LED headlamp and replace the white LEDs with red ones.
   
   
2. books
   
   

• Nightwatch
  
• Turn Left at Orion
  
• The Backyard Astronomers Guide
  
• The Pocket Sky Atlas
  
• The Collins Guide to stars and planets as a pocket field guide I prefer this to the petersen field guide.
  
• The Ultimate Messier Object Log Its free! Has Telrad charts for all the Messier objects and you can download a PDF and print it out. A few years ago I printed a portion of the PDF out, laminated it and took it to kinkos and had it spiral bound. FANTASTIC resource and is my goto for finding messier objects.
  
  I would start with the backyard astronomers guide. Buy that first before you buy anything. It has some very good sections on scopes and observing that can help you answer some questions.
  
  

4. find a local club. Join it. ask questions and goto meetings. Check out Cloudynights.com. Remember that this is something you are doing for FUN.
   
   Lastly I always say go with a dobsonian scope. They are easy to setup and use and they force you to learn the sky. Once you are comfortable operating a scope and moving around the night sky, then I would think about investing in an equatorial mount and scope for astrophotography use.
   
   Good luck and Clear Skies!

Not knowing what your budget is, I'll start small and work up :)

• Turn Left At Orion is the bible of star hopping and familiarization with the sky. Since he's already demonstrated enjoyment of pointing out this star or that, it's right up his alley.
  
  
• Maybe a nice pair of binoculars. I know he has a scope, but good binocs can offer really stunning views in their own right, and are much more portable and easy to "grab and go" on a hike, or a neighborhood walk, or whatever. Doesn't have to be the pair I linked, that's simply one fairly well regarded brand/model.
  
• Maybe something as simple as a gift certificate to his favorite astronomy store?
  
• Is he a tinkerer or DIYer? If so, then introduce him to Stellafane and maybe take a trip there for one of their ATM workshops, or maybe buy him a starter mirror grinding kit. I've had great success with the folks at First Hand Discovery but there are plenty of other top notch companies that can hook you up as well. :)
  
• Not sure where you live, but a trip to dark skies could be amazing. /u/KaneHau has already provided you with lots of info about a trip to the islands, but if CONUS is more in your budget, then there are LOTS of great trips to the SW USA for dark skies. My personal favorite are the fine folks at Marathon Sky Park in Marathon, TX. They are an amazing group of people, service is first rate, facilities are amazing, and the skies are gorgeous. :)
  
  
  

On science and evolution:

Genetics is where it's at. There is a ton of good fossil evidence, but genetics actually proves it on paper. Most books you can get through your local library (even by interlibrary loan) so you don't have to shell out for them just to read them.

Books:

The Making of the Fittest outlines many new forensic proofs of evolution. Fossil genes are an important aspect... they prove common ancestry. Did you know that humans have the gene for Vitamin C synthesis? (which would allow us to synthesize Vitamin C from our food instead of having to ingest it directly from fruit?) Many mammals have the same gene, but through a mutation, we lost the functionality, but it still hangs around.

Deep Ancestry proves the "out of Africa" hypothesis of human origins. It's no longer even a debate. MtDNA and Y-Chromosome DNA can be traced back directly to where our species began.

To give more rounded arguments, Hitchens can't be beat: God Is Not Great and The Portable Atheist (which is an overview of the best atheist writings in history, and one which I cannot recommend highly enough). Also, Dawkin's book The Greatest Show on Earth is a good overview of evolution.

General science: Stephen Hawking's books The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time are excellent for laying the groundwork from Newtonian physics to Einstein's relativity through to the modern discovery of Quantum Mechanics.

Bertrand Russell and Thomas Paine are also excellent sources for philosophical, humanist, atheist thought; but they are included in the aforementioned Portable Atheist... but I have read much of their writings otherwise, and they are very good.

Also a subscription to a good peer-reviewed journal such as Nature is awesome, but can be expensive and very in depth.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is also an excellent look at the human mind and genetics. To understand how the mind works, is almost your most important tool. If you know why people say the horrible things they do, you can see their words for what they are... you can see past what they say and see the mechanisms behind the words.

I've also been studying Zen for about a year. It's non-theistic and classed as "eastern philosophy". The Way of Zen kept me from losing my mind after deconverting and then struggling with the thought of a purposeless life and no future. I found it absolutely necessary to root out the remainder of the harmful indoctrination that still existed in my mind; and finally allowed me to see reality as it is instead of overlaying an ideology or worldview on everything.

Also, learn about the universe. Astronomy has been a useful tool for me. I can point my telescope at a galaxy that is more than 20 million light years away and say to someone, "See that galaxy? It took over 20 million years for the light from that galaxy to reach your eye." Creationists scoff at millions of years and say that it's a fantasy; but the universe provides real proof of "deep time" you can see with your own eyes.

Videos:

I recommend books first, because they are the best way to learn, but there are also very good video series out there.

BestofScience has an amazing series on evolution.

AronRa's Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism is awesome.

Thunderfoot's Why do people laugh at creationists is good.

Atheistcoffee's Why I am no longer a creationist is also good.

Also check out TheraminTrees for more on the psychology of religion; Potholer54 on The Big Bang to Us Made Easy; and Evid3nc3's series on deconversion.

Also check out the Evolution Documentary Youtube Channel for some of the world's best documentary series on evolution and science.

I'm sure I've overlooked something here... but that's some stuff off the top of my head. If you have any questions about anything, or just need to talk, send me a message!

Hello and welcome! Indoctrination in most cults can leave a person bitter about the world around them. Learning the actual facts about reality, the universe, and humanity is a good way to counter those negative feelings in my experience. Not sure how much of this applies to you, but here are my recommendations for de-indoctrinating yourself:

Take some time to learn about the history of the bible. For example, you can take the Open Yale Courses on Religious Studies for free.

Read Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman

Also read A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Watch this talk from Sam Harris where he explains why "free will" is likely an illusion, which debunks the entire premise of "the fall of man" as presented by most Christian religions.

Watch this video on the Cordial Curiosity channel that teaches how the "Socratic Method" works, which essentially is a way to question why we believe what we believe. Do we have good reasons to believe them? If not, should we believe them?

Watch this video by Theramin Trees that explains why we fall for the beliefs of manipulative groups in the first place.

This video explains why and how childhood indoctrination works, for those of us born-in to a high-control group.

Another great source is this youtube series debunking 1914 being the start of the last days.

Next, learn some science. For example - spoiler alert: evolution is true. Visit Berkeley's excellent Understanding Evolution Website. Or, if you're pressed for time, watch this cartoon.

Read Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne.

Read The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins.

Watch this series where Aron Ra explains in great detail how all life is connected in a giant family tree.

Learn about the origin of the universe. For example, you could read A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

Learn about critical thinking from people like [Michael Shermer] (http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_on_believing_strange_things?language=en), and how to spot logical fallacies.

For good measure, use actual data and facts to learn the we are NOT living in some biblical "last days". Things have gotten remarkably better as man has progressed in knowledge. For example, watch this cartoon explaining how war is on the decline.

Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker.

Watch this Ted Talk by Hans Rosling, the late Swedish Statistician, where he shows more evidence that the world is indeed becoming a better place, and why we tend to wrongly convince ourselves otherwise.

I wish you the best. There is a whole world of legitimate information out there based on actual evidence that you can use to become a more knowledgeable person.

You may still wonder how you can be a good human without "the truth." Here is a good discussion on how one can be good without god. --Replace where he talks about hell with armageddon, and heaven with paradise--

Start to help yourself begin to live a life where, as Matt Dillahunty puts it, you'll "believe as many true things, and as few false things as possible."

Pretty much everything that passes by. I love learning new things and expand my knowledge, but here are my biggest passions:

-Music: I'm studying to become a composer and music has been a major part of my life since birth, as I was born into a musical family. It's such a joy when I find a new band or composer and start going through their works and discover many new, exciting works. It's even better when you analyse scores and play then on piano, and everything starts to make sense, the melodies, harmonic structure,... sometimes it gives you the same feeling as when you open your christmas present, except you have been given an insight into a mind of a musical genius from the past.

-Lore: A lot of times I pick up a new game/book/TV series/movie, if I really like it, I go and read as much background lore as possible. The extra information and insight behind the main plot is really interesting to read and I tend to memorize unhealthy amounts of useless information :) So far it spans through Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Warhammer 40k, Elder Scrolls, and probably a few more I forgot.

-History: It's real life lore :) Big emphasis on Roman empire/Viking culture/WW2.

-Philosophy: Basically discussing everything ranging from old philosophical problems to problems and dilemmas of the today's world.

-Physics: I love reading about space, black holes, wave-particle duality, electricity,... The more experimental it is, the better. I highly recommend this book.

-Motorsports: Rally and F1 mostly, but I love to drive and I am always blown away by the skills these drivers have. Also, the tech behind the cars is amazing and very interesting.

But the best part is if I can explain the above things to somebody else. It's really one of my favorite things to do. I really like to share my enthusiasm with other people and I can go on for hours at the time :)

Hello :-)

This one, right? http://www.celestron.com/browse-shop/astronomy/telescopes/cometron-114az (not the 114 on EQ mount)


Resources

consider getting "turn left at orion" http://www.amazon.com/Turn-Left-Orion-Hundred-Telescope/dp/0521781906

and download http://stellarium.org.


What you can see

Stellarium uses photographs of objects, this will not represent the visual view, for that, check out

• http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/196278-what-can-i-expect-to-see/
  
  
• and http://www.deepskywatch.com/Articles/what-can-i-see-through-telescope.html
  
  Especially if you are interested in deep-sky (galaxies, nebulae...) and you can see the milky way from your location (else light pollution might be too high) the book is a very good resource (along with a dim red light to preserve night vision).
  
  Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus will appear as very bright "stars", so if you check the general direction in Stellarium you should be able to find them easily.
  
  Set up
  
  Align the finder scope of your telescope during the day on a very far object. Never look into the sun with your telescope without a GOOD front filter, else you can damage or loose your eye sight instantly.
  
  Practice focusing during the day.
  
  Eyepieces
  
  Do you have the original eyepieces?
  
  
  The magnification is easily calculated. The telescope has a 450mm focal length and comes with 10mm and 20mm eyepieces.
  
  
  450 : 10 = 45x magnification, 450 : 20 = 22.5x magnification.
  
  That is great for the Andromeda Galaxy, the Orion nebula, h&chi Persei and many others, enough to see Jupiter's moons and that Saturn is not round, but to really enjoy any surface details a bit more magnification is in order.
  
  Please note that Magnification is not the main quality of a telescope, as many objects look great in 20-60x magnification and the higher you magnify, the dimmer the image gets. The manufacturer states 269x magnification and that will be pretty much useless on such a telescope. They state that it is a parabolic mirror, but at f/4 (short focal length to aperture diameter ratio) and in this price range I would stay way under that. Especially seeing (Atmospheric turbulences) limit magnification on most days anyway.
  
  Accessories
  
  Do you have any additional equipment?
  
  I would not spend too much on this telescope. Use it as-is for now. If you do want to try more magnification: Be aware that cheap eyepieces that will give you more magnification under 10-6mm have a verrrrry short eye relief, making it almost impossible to view through.
  
  A achromatic barlow (Will add chromatic abberration/lower the contrast) increasing the magnification, typically by the factor 2: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Achromatische-Barlow-Linse-BA2-2x-fur-Teleskope-31-7mm-/200607942106?pt=DE_Foto_Camcorder_Okulare&hash=item2eb52a45da (Cheapest achromatic I could find on ebay USA, actually I own this one, the shop is in germany though so it will take a while)
  
  and/or
  
  A nice wide angle eyepiece such as this 6mm http://corvus-optics.com/product/ultrawide-eyepieces/ (used to sell on ebay for $30 shipped, the shop increased the price; On Aliexpress you can get it for $24 sometimes, but from Hong Kong).
  
  The HR Planetary and BST Explorer eyepieces are another "cheap" ($40-60) choice for eyepieces under 6mm. For 10mm and up you can buy $20-$30 Plössl eyepieces or the $30 "gold-line" I mentioned, but I would use the kit eyepieces for now.
  
  
  Upgrade warning
  
  You would be amazed what is visible with the kit accessories under a truly dark site. Even a mile or two out of town to avoid some of the light pollution helps a great deal.
  
  Before spending too much consider an upgrade to a larger telescope. The short 4.5" telescope will have it's limits, and some people tend to spend more on accessories then what a upgrade would cost :-)
  
  Have fun with your telescope and this amazing hobby :-)
  
  
  
  ___
  
  Here a few links regarding light pollution
  
  
• http://www.perezmedia.net/beltofvenus/archives/images/2011/img201101AN_M42PosLG.jpg
  
  
• http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2010/12/06/how-dark-is-your-sky/
  
  
• http://www.rocketmime.com/astronomy/Telescope/sky.html
  
  
• http://academo.org/demos/bortle-scale/
  
  

I love science books. These are all on my bookshelf/around my apt. They aren't all chemistry, but they appeal to my science senses:

I got a coffee table book once as a gift. It's Theodore Gray's The Elements. It's beautiful, but like I said, more of a coffee table book. It's got a ton of very cool info about each atom though.

I tried The Immortal Life of Henrieta Lacks, which is all about the people and family behind HeLa cells. That was a big hit, but I didn't care for it.

I liked The Emperor of all Maladies which took a long time to read, but was super cool. It's essentially a biography of cancer. (Actually I think that's it's subtitle)

The Wizard of Quarks and Alice in Quantumland are both super cute allegories relating to partical physics and quantum physics respectively. I liked them both, though they felt low-level, tying them to high-level physics resulted in a fun read.

Unscientific America I bought on a whim and didn't really enjoy since it wasn't science enough.

The Ghost Map was a suuuper fun read about Cholera. I love reading about mass-epidemics and plague.

The Bell that Rings Light, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, Schrödinger's Kittens, The Fabric of the Cosmos and Beyond the God Particle are all pleasure reading books that are really primers on Quantum.

I also tend to like anything by Mary Roach, which isn't necessarily chemistry or science, but is amusing and feels informative. I started with Stiff but she has a few others that I also enjoyed.

Have fun!

I came to the same conclusion, but I am most assuredly not a neuroscientist, just an avid fan of it! I work for a tech hosting company that's heavily cloud based, and happen to be someone who teaches our employees how to manage and troubleshoot the technology behind "the cloud", as well as the servers in the cloud, etc. To teach more efficiently, I eventually stumbled upon brain science books and TED talks (back when they were amazing, like Jeff Hawkins-amazing) and blogs, and tDCS, and learning theory and the list goes on. Somewhere along the line, someone ended up suggesting I try out some mindfulness meditation, and recommended Get Some Headspace, which helped me tremendously.

I eventually got to the point of where you are describing; you really do just observe, and sometimes it can provide great clarity. I then started thinking a lot about who I am, where am I when I am dreaming, or when I am not dreaming, where I am when I'm observing myself and my thoughts, even when I was driving. Someone also really dug me deeper into a mental hole when they showed me some podcast discussing consciousness, which mentioned that when driving your car, your conscious sense of "self" extends to your entire vehicle. So I applied the claim as theory, and tested it, and understood exactly what they were saying at that moment. I had always taken it for granted, lol. So, jump to about 6 months ago.

I, similarly, had already started noting synchronicity between the seperation of brain and mind and the end-result of a cloud-based virtual server operation (groupings of hypervisors, which run vms, are waiting to be used, but the communication/action happens due to what's happening within the hyp, etc). It's ironic, too, because I had just been introduced to the concept of Docker containerization concepts, and then the next day, someone i had just met ended up serendipitously suggesting I read this book after he and I had discussed a lot of the same books we've read. I'm very skeptical when anyone mentions any consciousness theories, so it really only was the reason that he and I had been talking about books like Mindsight, Mindset, A Whole New Mind, Start with Why, Talent Code, and the list goes on; I had deduced this person was not a crackpot. So I said, "I'll just see what this is about." I highly suggest being very skeptical about it, treat it like historical "what if" fiction, and enjoy the theory. There are parts with which I do not agree, but as someone who works in technology and also takes an active interest in learning theory, neuroscience, and AI, it makes A LOT of sense. I used to write stories a lot back in college, so I'm used to taking a fictional "what if" on a stroll down mental lane. I decided to make it to the end and then judge for myself. I'm not finished yet, but I'm in the final stretch. I have to say, I'm intrigued enough to suggest it to others if they show the same awareness. I hope you have the open-enough mind to ponder it and reserve judgement until full grokking/understanding has been achieved.

As for meditation, I practice daily now. I'm very happy I stumbled across the suggestion of de-stressing by mindfulness meditation. It's led to nothing but more reality and context being shaped around me, and it's allowed me to understand myself very well.

Edit: format

No problem!

Philosophy of time is an enormous area!

Not only are there many distinct positions that attempt to address the scientific and philosophical questions in different ways, there are different positions regarding the very method by which we should attempt to answer these questions! Some of these certainly overlap.

What do I mean by this?

Putting it roughly:

There are those who tend to think that we should use science to answer these questions about time. All we should care about is what observations are made; we should only care about the empirical data. These people might point to the great success of our best scientific theories that refer to 'time', such as those in physics, including; Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Entropy (The Arrow of Time), and even Quantum Theory, but also those in neuroscience and psychology, where our perception of time becomes relevant (such as the Inference Model of Time and the Strength Model of Time). So we have notions of physical/objective time, and subjective/mental time. We may talk about time slowing down around a massive body such as a black hole, or time slowing down when a work-shift is boring or when we're experiencing a traumatic event.

But there are also those who tend to think that we should use not just science, but also uniquely philosophical methods as well. Conceptual analysis is one such method; one that involves thinking very carefully about our concepts. This method is a distinctically a priori method (A priori is just philosophical jargon meaning; "Can be known without experience," for example, the statement "All triangles have three sides"). These people think we can learn a great deal about time by reflecting on our concepts about time, our intuitions about time, and the laws of thought (or logic) and how they relate to time. This philosophical approach to answering questions about time is distinctively metaphysical opposed to the former physical and cognitive theories about time.

Of course there are many who may see the use in all of these different approaches!

Recommendations:

Physics:

Hawking, S 1988, A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes, Bantam Books, Toronto; New York. [Chapters 2, 9 & 10. Absolute Classic, little dated but still great read]

Gardner, M 1988, Time Travel and Other Mathematical Bewilderments, W.H. Freeman, UK. [Chapter 1]

Greene, B 2010, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, W. W. Norton, New York. [Chapter 2 is a great introduction for Special Relativity]

Physics and Metaphysics:

Dainton, B 2010, Time and Space, 2nd edn, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal; Ithaca N.Y. [Chapters 1-8, 18, 19 & 21. This book is incredible in scope, it even has a chapter on String Theory, and it really acknowledges the intimate connection between space and time given to us by physics]

Metaphyics:

Hawley, K 2015, Temporal Parts, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/temporal-parts/>. [Discussion of Perdurantism, the view that objects last over time without being wholly present at every time at which they exist.]

Markosian, N 2014, Time, The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/time/>.

Hunter, J 2016, Time Travel, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
<http://www.iep.utm.edu/timetrav/>.

Callender, C & Edney, R 2014, Introducing Time: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Limited, UK. [Great book if you want something a bit less wordy and fun, but still very informative, having comprehensive coverage. It also has many nice illustrations and is cheap!]

Curtis, B & Robson, J 2016, A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Time, Bloomsbury Publishing, UK. [Very good recent publication that comes from a great series of books in metaphysics]

Ney, A 2014, Metaphysics: An Introduction, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, London; New York. [Chapters 5 & 6 (Chapter 4 looks at critiques of Metaphysics in general as a way of answer questions and Chapter 9 looks at Free-will/Determinism/Compatiblism)]

More advanced temporal Metaphysics:

Sider, T 2001, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time, Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, Oxford New York. [Great book defending what Sider calls "Four-Dimensionalism" (this is confusing given how others have used the same term differently) but by it he means Perdurantism, the view that objects last over time without being wholly present at every time at which they exist.]

Hawley, K 2004, How Things Persist, Clarendon Press, UK. [Another great book: It's extremely similar to the one above in terms of the both content and conclusions reached]

Some good Time travel movies:

Interstellar (2014)

Timecrimes (2007)

Looper (2012)

Primer (2004) [Time Travel on drugs]

12 Monkeys (1995)

Donnie Darko (2001)

The Terminator (1984)

Groundhog Day (1993)

Predestination (2014)

Back To the Future (1-3) (1985-1990)

Source Code (2011)

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

> Thank you for the attempt at clarification. I am afraid that I still do not understand - it makes more scientific sense to claim that something came from nothing?

This is a common misunderstanding of what the Big Bang is referring to.

The Big Bang is not an event 13.7 billion years ago that created the universe. The Big Bang is the currently happening expansion and evolution of the universe. It is an event that happened after time=0. The Big Bang is not an explosion into spacetime. It is an explosion OF spacetime.

When atheists say things like 'Time didn't exist before the Big Bang, so it's nonsense to ask what happened before the Big Bang' they are not being facetious or evasive.

It really is like asking 'What's north of the North Pole?' If you are standing on the North pole, there is no direction you can face that can be described as being 'north' of your position. Even looking straight up or straight down are not 'north' of your position.

There is no 'before' the Big Bang, because time starts with the Big Bang.

What happened at time=0? "We don't know, and it is possible we CAN NEVER know." In fact, it is possible that the question is meaningless.

What I do know though, is that saying 'God did it' doesn't answer the question, and prevents exploration that may answer the question.

> Matter has always existed a priori, which therefore allowed the chemical reaction of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang was not a chemical reaction. I hope by my brief explanation above you get that now.

> Matter came as a result of the "Big Bang," but we do not know what caused the "Big Bang" in terms of quantifiable, physical evidence. All that is offered is conjecture.

Essentially correct. However, the conjecture has a grounding and does not violate ANY of the known laws of the universe. I HIGHLY recommend watching the lecture by Laurence Krauss, "A Universe From Nothing".

Now, as for how matter came to be, we actually have very good explanations, based on particle accelerator experiments. Very early, the universe was so hot and dense that there was no matter, just a lot of heat and energy. As the universe expanded, it cooled. Once it cooled enough, the energy was able to bundle into discrete particles, when then combined into mostly hydrogen atoms, with a little helium thrown in for variety. The rest of everything in the universe came about by nuclear fusion within the heart of stars. We are literally made from the dust of the stars.

I highly recommend The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene and Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh as a good introduction to the science of cosmology.

> The problem is that if we do not apply the attribute of eternity to God, then we will find ourselves citing an infinite regression of "God X created God Y, who was created by God Z." But, again, I simply point back to the acceptance of either the Big Bang or matter always existing - scientists do not know with absolute certainty, but still make the claim.

Exactly the same issue here on the other side: you believe, but do not KNOW (remember what I said about semantics mattering sometimes?) that God is in fact eternal. You MUST assert the eternal nature of God for precisely the reason you presented; to end the infinite regress. However, you haven't answered the question, you have made an assertion, based on belief, not knowledge.

> Both atheist materialists and Christians have to accept something a priori to defend a premise and a conclusion. First and foremost, of course, is the premise that we really exist. Second is that we can come to know something. Third would be that reality as we see it is real.

Totally agree. And philosophy is useful for thinking about these premises. However, no matter what you think about the situation, if we do not accept these three premises, we can't accomplish much.

First, you have to assume you exist. Trying to operate while assuming anything contrary to that is meaningless. You literally cannot do it. Part of the nature of consciousness is the implied fact that you exist, for without that implication, you would not be conscious. Sure, it's a tautology, but there you go.

Second, obviously we can come to know things, because otherwise we would be a brain in a vat, cut off from all sensory perception. Since we have sensory perception, we have information flowing into our consciousness. If nothing else, we come to know that sensory input. The question becomes how trust worthy is it? Since it is fairly obvious to anyone who has seen an optical illusion that our senses can be tricked, we have developed the scientific method to test our sensory perception.

And that's where we hit the third premise. Science allows us the best way yet found to determine if what we know does in fact reflect the nature of reality. How do we know science is the best way we have found? Because SCIENCE WORKS BITCHES!!! Yes, I am invoking utilitarianism.

> And yet we hold to abstract ideas of non-provable ideals. The human race (in general) holds to concepts of "morality" and "truth" and "goodness" and "badness", but we cannot test or defend those ideas with physical, repeatable, empirical evidence.

Correct. I agree 100%. Science cannot tell us what is good, right, wrong, moral, immoral, bad, evil, etc. Science can only tell us what is. The value judgments are left up to us.

Now, science CAN (and in fact is beginning to) tell us where and how these 'moral ideals' we have came from/developed.

As an atheist, if you follow the the concept to it's logical end, you come to the realization that there is no such thing as objective morality. All morality is subjective. The best I have ever heard it stated:

The difference between good and evil is EXACTLY the difference between the lion and the gazelle.

I don't see a collision between science and philosophy. Generally what I see is a failure to understand how best to integrate the two disciplines.

The claim that "time is exactly like space" is not true. Time is treated as a dimension in Special Relativity (SR) and General Relativity (GR), but it is very different from the "usual" spatial dimensions. (It boils down to "distance" along the time direction being negative, but that statement doesn't really mean anything out of context.) The central idea of relativity is that while the entire four dimensional "thing" (spacetime) just is (is invariant), different observers will have different ideas about which way the time direction points; it turns out to be convenient for our description of nature to respect the natural "democratic" equivalence of all hypothetical observers.

I can point you to a couple of good resources:

This
is a very good, book about SR, and some "other stuff". It's pretty mathematical, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who isn't totally comfortable with college level intro physics and calculus.

This
is the "standard" text for undergraduate SR; it's less demanding than the above, but uses mathematical language that won't translate immediately if you go on to study GR. (I have not read this myself.)

This is the book that I learned from; I thought it was pretty good.

This is Brian Greene's famous popularization of String Theory. It has chapters in the beginning on SR and Quantum Mechanics that I think are quite good.

This is Einstein's own popularization, only algebra required. All the examples that others use to explain SR pretty much come from here, and sometimes it's good to go right to the source.

This is a collection of the most important works leading up to and including relativity, from Galileo to Einstein, in case you'd like to take a look at the original paper (translated). The SR paper requires more of a conceptual physical background than a mathematical one; the same can't be said of the included GR paper.

I don't know what your background is--the first three options above are textbooks, and that's probably much more than you were hoping to get into. The last three are not; the book by Brian Greene and the collection (edited by Stephen Hawking) are interesting for other reasons besides relativity as well. For SR, though, another book by Greene might be a bit better: this.

Yes, I do believe it is by chance and I don't believe one needs to posit a god as the creator of the universe to explain its existence. And if one does, then where did that god come from?

E.g., one could explain the existence of the universe as the eminent theoretical physicist and cosmologist Steven Hawking did in The Grand Design.

>In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of which is published in Eureka magazine in The Times, Hawking said: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”
>
>He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”

Source: Stephen Hawking: God was not needed to create the Universe

I know it is hard for many people to accept that chance is involved in our existence. The theoretical physicist Albert Einstein is reputed to have remarked about God in relation to quantum mechanics that "I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice", which is commonly paraphrased as "God does not play dice with the universe." Supposedly, either Neils Bohr or Enrico Fermi remarked "Stop telling God what to do with his dice." - Source. And, Stephen Hawking remarked in a 1994 debate with Roger Penrose that "Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen." Source.

Note: One shouldn't assume that the use of "God" by any of them means the notion of God commonly held by Christians today. But, their remarks do show that there has been much disagreement among eminent physicists regarding the role that chance plays in the universe.

If by chance most species of dinosaurs on earth had not been wiped out by a cataclysmic event, such as an asteroid strike on earth, 65 million years ago, the creatures posing the question "Do you really think that our existence is owed just to chance" might look something like one of the creatures depicted here.

We may simply be like that puddle mentioned by Douglas Adams.

>This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there's plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that's a very dangerous thing to say.

Source: Is there an Artificial God?

As to why humans tend to find certain environmental features beautiful, well natural selection offers an explanation.

>One of the most important considerations in the survival of any organism is habitat selection. Until the development of cities 10,000 years ago, human life was mostly nomadic. Finding desirable conditions for survival, particularly with an eye towards potential food and predators, would have selectively affected the human response to landscape—the capacity of landscape types to evoke positive emotions, rejection, inquisitiveness, and a desire to explore, or a general sense of comfort. Responses to landscape types have been tested in an experiment in which standardized photographs of landscape types were shown to people of different ages and in different countries: deciduous forest, tropical forest, open savannah with trees, coniferous forest, and desert. Among adults, no category stood out as preferred (except that the desert landscape fell slightly below the preference rating of the others). However, when the experiment was applied to young children, it was found that they showed a marked preference for savannahs with trees-exactly the East African landscape where much early human evolution took place (Orians and Heerwagen 1992). Beyond a liking for savannahs, there is a general preference for landscapes with water; a variety of open and wooded space (indicating places to hide and places for game to hide); trees that fork near the ground (provide escape possibilities) with fruiting potential a metre or two from the ground; vistas that recede in the distance, including a path or river that bends out of view but invites exploration; the direct presence or implication of game animals; and variegated cloud patterns. The savannah environment is in fact a singularly food-rich environment (calculated in terms of kilograms of protein per square kilometre), and highly desirable for a hunter-gatherer way of life. Not surprisingly, these are the very elements we see repeated endlessly in both calendar art and in the design of public parks worldwide.

Source: Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology

Or see Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution by David Rothenberg

No, you certainly don't seem arrogant to me. I wouldn't assume just because someone has a different opinion on such matters that means he or she is arrogant. Nor do I downvote people just because their views don't match my own as I noticed someone did to your comments.

One of the reasons I visit reddit is to expose myself to others' viewpoints so that I can, hopefully, learn from doing so.

Lots of people are going to say 8" dob, Z8 specifically, and I have nothing but good to say about that. For a lot of people that's the only answer necessary.

However, let me offer an alternative case in favor of OneSky telescope by Astronomers Without Borders.

Three reasons for this recommendation:

SIZE The OneSky is a collapsible tabletop reflector. It is quite modestly sized when collapsed. It will fit in the front seat or trunk of a car and can easily be carried by even a child. Size ultimately is the thing that keeps a telescope indoors. There have been several nights this year where I've had 20 minutes to sneak a peek out at a beautiful crescent moon or something, but haven't, because I knew it would take me 20 minutes to set up my telescope and I would have no observing time. Plus all the work of lugging the heavy parts from my shed to my front yard. With a tabletop scope there's none of that. It takes 2 minutes to set up and requires no heavy lifting.

You will never miss an observing session due to the work of setting up the telescope, and you will never have to leave the telescope at home on a trip. An 8" Dob is going to show more simply because it's a larger scope, but the OneSky is going to show more than an 8" scope in the shed.

COST With a budget of $400, you will be able to afford some killer accessories after getting the $200 OneSky. Turn Left At Orion is the ideal book for a new telescope owner. A wide-field eyepiece like this one will give really good views of clusters like the pleiades and large nebulae like the Great Orion Nebula. A 6mm, 66 degree eyepiece will allow excellent, comfortable viewing of planets and smaller objects like binary stars. In addition you will be able to afford a comfortable stool to place the scope on, and a nice chair to sit on.

If you buy an 8" scope you will not be able to get all that stuff and stay in your $400 budget.

COMMUNITY The OneSky is well reviewed (review 1, review 2 under the Heritage 130 name) and has an active community of fans who have a lot of ideas about how to improve the performance of the scope for very little money/effort.

Troubleshooting this telescope is a breeze and the community is favorable. Even among seasoned enthusiasts the OneSky is popular.

>The song is a wave of vibrating air molecules

The "song" is not a vibrating air molecule. I can sing the same song back to you and it would be different vibrations, but the same song. The song can sung be a different person, but it is still the same song. The song can be stored as a series of 1's and 0's but when played will still be the same song but the vibrations of the air molecules will be different because it was stored digitally.
Songs and words can be represented physically, but this does not mean they are physical themselves. Is the "law" is a physical object? Are "crimes" physical objects? Can you point out where scientists have discovered the crime atom? Concepts, abstractions are not physical and it is childish to pretend they are.

>Beauty is mathematical patterns loosely related to the golden ratio.

Wow, and people say us scientists are cold and unpoetic. There's really no way for me to go here if you truly believe this.

>It is called "materialism"

Materialism does not dictate that abstract concepts must be physical. What materialism does say is that there is only nature. There is no supernatural or unnatural. What exists exists. The physical universe is entirely physical.

>However, what you're talking about is not abstraction. It is closer to the theory of the "universals."

A 'universal' is an abstraction. Just as a word is not a physical object neither is a property of such a word.

>I do not have a belief on this matter.

If you honestly can't comprehend the difference between something real and something abstract then you do have a belief on the matter and my arguements will fall on deaf ears since they presuppose abstractions.

>No, you are not. If you were taking your information straight from the OT, you would know that you speak absolutely nonsense.

It is helpful to point specifically what I said was wrong rather than just declare it. Did god or did he not flood the earth? Was this a real flood and not a 'metaphorical' flood? Were Noah and his family the only human surivors? Simple yes or no questions.

>Anyway, prove your statement that God had to break the laws of physics to cause the flood.

You need to answer what the flood is first. I can ask this question to a hundred different christians and get a hundred different answers, which version are you subscribing to?

>Yes, but it is not my job to figure out how God did it.

You can start by telling me what he did first, then we can deduce the possible ways of doing this.

>I don't know what you mean by clear exchange of mass

Electrons have mass. Also energy is mass.

>No. The word 'universe' is defined to encompass all that is physically real,

Then you and I and astrophysics are using different definitions. The universe is defined to be everything that exists.

>Your argument falls flat on the fact that many scientists defend (and are attempting to prove with good chance) the existence of the multiverse,

The argument doesn't fall flat because scientists are not infalliable. Also, good luck to them searching for a multiverse (though it would be undetectable by definition), Copenhagen interpretation FTW.

>it is certainly not a strange idea for science that something outside of our Universe exists.

It is a strange idea precisely because there is no evidence for it. Even the string theorists have yet to make an experimental prediction. They are like the aetherists of yesteryear.

>Aging is measurable. If they are not aging, then they are immortal. It is verifiable.

And what if they are aging so slowly that it cannot be verified above uncertainty that they are aging? Better to put a hard limit on it, say 500 years?

>No more hunger and preventable diseases...

Well this is your version of utopia though it hits pretty close to any mark that I would measure to be a good interpretation. One world government though? I doubt tea-party activists would call that utopia.
But whatever it's a workable definition. I don't think it'll ever be achieved, not because there is no supernatural but because of human nature. Maybe we could do it with a bigger planet and a lot of robots. Or mind control, would that count?

>Yes. I do not consider it true resurrection because we have very little control over the outcome

We'll have very little outcome over the football results but it's still football. Certain techniques make the outcome more likely, but there is no such thing as certainty and it certainly isn't random that using, say, a defibrillator has a better chance of starting someone's heart than not.

>I want an absence of time-limit.

We'll we've advanced to the point of minutes.

>As long as there is a body left, in reasonable condition, it should be doable 100% of the time.

The devil is in the details, define 'reasonable'. Right now a limiting factor is nerve tissue damage which is currently impossible to reverse.
Still though, the techique is only getting better.

>Supernatural souls do not exist. It is greek pagan mythology.

So there are no souls or spirits in christian mythology? If your body doesn't go heaven then what does?

>As long as it is not a machine.

Details, devil, what is a 'machine'? If a machine is that which is created by man then the task is impossible by definition.
Would you allow a new form of bacterial life created artificially in a lab as an acceptable result?

>They are achievable and measurable. They are not easy.

They are getting close to being measurable, clearly defined conditions need to be stated from the beginning or else these definitions could change and we could never acheive the result.

>This has been found multiple times. And whenever it happens, they find an excuse to why the dating doesn't match.

This can't be true. There is a nobel prize out there waiting for anyone who can disprove along standing scientific theory. Einstein got one for disproving Newtonian physics.
If I had such evidence that evolution was false I would be shouting it from the rooftops because it would be one of the greatest discoveries ever and would advance our knowledge.
If by 'excuse' do you perhaps mean 'reason'? Show me the best three pieces of such evidence.

>No, it is not true, sorry

Roman examples aside. Do we not celebrate winter solstice? Have we not named our days of the week after Norse and pagan gods? Do you have a starsign?
Our culture is a melting pot of those that came before it.

>Your argument is basically, "if something doesn't exist already, then it cannot ever exist."

Not something, but basically yes as applies to time and space. You cannot say there was nothing and then there was time because 'then' is a temporal concept that cannot exist without time and you may as well say 'always'.

>Citation needed.

Well you can start with Gravitation is you want the details, or you could probably find it all in some of Hawkings pop-sci books

>No. Answer the question. By 'evolution' you mean M.E.S. or the basic premise of the theory?

You're confusing two arguments here. I was using evolution as analogy for something you know to true, this was before I knew I was talking to a creationist.
So instead of biology lets use geology. Just to double check, you know the Earth is an oblate spheriod yes? OK, imagine you are talking to a flat-earther and he demands absolute proof that the Earth has no edge, what do you say to him?

>...there is demonstrable evidence that M.E.S. is wrong.

Another topic for another day.

>It is the Bell's Theorem.

Just Bell's theorem not 'the', and it is a rival idea to the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics so hated by Einstein. In every experiment so far, QM holds perfectly. Though there are some limitations on what experiments can be done and it will be interesting to see if anything comes of this.
(Here's](http://www.springerlink.com/content/r23275410u4p5q72/) a good paper on the incompatibility will non-local realism theories like Bell's and QM

>I wouldn't go as far as saying that such important premise of QM 'doesn't make any sense.'

What doesn't make sense is something being both non-local and non-casual in the same experiment at the same time.

>Virtual particles are only demonstrably non-causal if locality is assumed to be true. The problem is that locality is independently demonstrably not true.

Yes, and non-locality depends on classical causality being true, which it demonstrably isn't at the QM scale.

>First, it is possible to prove a negative.

You can never prove the non-existence of something, you can only show where it doesn't exist

>You should not attempt to prove him wrong. You should request of him the proof that he is right.

Yes!

>There is a wall behind me.

I never said how far behind you, or how large the elephant was, or whether the elephant can go through walls. Here is the problem in proving a negative. All you can say at this point is there is no visible evidence of an elephant behind you, but is absense of evidence really evidence of absense?

>Virtual particles only violate causality is locality is assumed as true, as far as I know. Unfortunately I don't have access to the journal.

Well this is splitting hairs a little. Newtonian physics only works if you assume locality is true or causality is true (and you usually assume both). Virtual particles exist, they do not on their own violate locality but they do violate classical causality.

OK, one of my favorite topics.
First of all, do you live in a city? Light pollution will play a big role in what you can see.

Now, my advice in chronological order:

• Buy a Planisphere
  
• Buy a copy of Nightwatch
  
• Get some decent binoculars. If you don't have any, aim for something with a magnification of 8-10x (don't go bigger!), and make sure that the objective is at least 5 times the magnification. In other words, you're looking at 8x42 or 10x50, something in that sort of range.
  
• Spend a year looking up at the sky with your books and planisphere. You'll fall totally in love.
  
  When you get a telescope, here are some crucial factors:
  
  
• Magnification is (mostly) irrelevant.
  
• Diameter = brightness, and thus better deep-sky viewing.
  
• Diameter = weight, and a huge telescope that you never use is a big waste of money.
  
• Decent optics are surprisingly affordable. A good mount is essesntial
  
• Electronics are nice, but not necessary.
  
  Refractors are long, expensive (for the diameter) and have great sharpness and contrast when done well. Fantastic for planets, the moon, etc.
  Reflectors are cheap, and when mounted on a Dobsonian mount, are the cheapest scopes per inch out there. That makes them great for deep sky viewing. They tend to be big and need more maintenance (i.e. alignment) though.
  Cats, of various forms are moderately expensive and that is exacerbated by the fact that they're usually on nice motorized mounts. Great scopes though, and fantastically compact. Ideal for photography, if you're so inclined.
  
  The general advice for a first scope is to spend a year getting to know the sky, and then get a 6" dobsonian. It's small enough that you'll actually use it, large enough to get a good amount of light, and simple enough that you don't have to spend any time setting it up. Just plunk and go. 8" may be OK, but don't go larger than that for a first scope - you won't use it.
  
  Be aware that you won't see the rich colours you're used to seeing in pictures, though - you're more likely to see a barely-visible veil for a nebula. However, you can see gorgeous things already with your little scope. Look for the open clusters - the double cluster, the Pleiades, the Beehive, and so forth. Look for Andromeda, and the Orion nebula. They're all naked-eye objects from a sufficiently dark area, and that much better with a low-power scope (or binoculars).
  

>"Hawking says in his book "The Grand Design" that, given the existence of gravity, "the universe can and will create itself from nothing...It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the universe going." he writes.

Reference: Stephen Hawking: God didn't create universe

Or perhaps the cyclic model applies as envisioned in the Rig Veda. In Hindu cosmology, the universe is created by Brahma and then, much later, destroyed by Shiva to be followed by a new universe, which matches the cyclic model for the universe.

Perhaps we are living in Brahma's dream.

>There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but a dream of the god who, after a hundred Brahma years, dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him - until, after another Brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the cosmic dream.
>
>Meanwhile, elsewhere, there are an infinite number of universes, each with its own god dreaming the cosmic dream. These great ideas are tempered by another, perhaps greater. It is said that men may not be the dreams of gods, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.

~ Carl Sagan in Cosmos

Also see The Conscious Universe

You say "my respects to the one who made it." But is that Allah, Brahma, Hunab Ku, or another creator deity?

Is it Enki from whom the Old Testament god, Yahweh, was likely derived?

>Joseph Campbell believed that the serpent in the Eden story was lifted directly from either the Sumerian God Enki, God of Water and Wisdom, or his son Ningizzida. Both of them were identified as Serpent Gods, among other things. Enki was possessed of the food and water of life as well as the tablets of wisdom. Ningizzida was Lord of the Tree of Truth. These gods may have been carried into Canaan with the Israelites after they left the Sumerian/Babylonian city of Ur, or absorbed from their eastern neighbors at a later time. (Much of the Hebrew Bible was compiled, edited and rewritten after the Hebrews were conquered and exiled in Babylon in the 6th century BC.) Virtually all of the first 11 chapters of Genesis are rewritten from the much older Sumerian tales. In them, Enki rather than Yahweh creates humans from mud, and saves the prototype of Noah from the flood by teaching him to build an ark.

Source: Asherah, Part II: The serpent’s bride

Mankind has many creation myths and has long created gods as an explanation for what we don't understand. And usually those gods, which are credited with creating mankind, are made in man's image.

I guess it really depends on how familiar you are with the night sky - but there's one book that's literally invaluable for astronomers of all levels - Turn Left At Orion - there's no finer book, quite frankly, and the authors are an inspiration to me. If my books were anywhere near as good as theirs, I'd be very pleased and proud.

(Get the larger, spiral bound edition - http://www.amazon.com/Turn-Left-Orion-Hundreds-Telescope/dp/0521153972/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414368749&sr=8-1&keywords=turn+left+at+orion)

I would also buy Astronomy Hacks - there are a TON of tips and tricks in there and, again, it's aimed at astronomers of all levels.

(http://www.amazon.com/Astronomy-Hacks-Tools-Observing-Night/dp/0596100604/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414368782&sr=8-1&keywords=astronomy+hacks)

I had an Orion XT 4.5" Dobsonian and loved it. Celestrons are also excellent and both companies have equipment that are reasonably priced and well suited to amateurs of all levels. I'd start with something relatively small, like a 4" or 6" reflector and then go from there.

Beyond that, I would highly recommend joining a local club or, at the very least, ask a question here on Reddit or join a group in Facebook.

The two I like the most are the Telescope Addicts (https://www.facebook.com/groups/telescopeaddicts/) and Astronomy 4 Beginners. (https://www.facebook.com/groups/astro4beginners/)

I hope this helps. Feel free to email me at astronomywriter@gmail.com at any time. At some point in the nearish future I'd like to write an astronomy book for suburban astronomers (especially beginners) but I'm not sure when that might happen!

(In the meantime, have a look at my other book, 2015 An Astronomical Year - the Kindle version has a lot of graphics and text highlighting the best naked eye sights throughout the year - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LVEUJI2/)

Clear skies!

>"Don't be so quick to put us (theists/spiritualists) all in the same boat. There may be many more like me than you realize. Unfortunately, the more close minded, irrational among us tend to be the more vocal."

Also, more numerous: http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx

>"Yes I realize that the latter hold place in certain historical religions, but I really don't care about them, as they don't have anything to do with my beliefs. I do get that you are making the point that my beliefs now, ultimately, are just as fictional as those beliefs then. But I would say that it is a false equivalency, a slippery slope, to compare them. Any belief must be tested and judged on its own merit."

It's not so much "Dead religions are untrue, so currently relevant religions are also untrue" as it is "If you exhaustively study other religions you will see pervasive shared themes and implied psychology that the "somewhat smart" mistake for proof that all religions are divinely inspired and that the slightly more clever realize is proof that they were all authored by human beings."

Part of judging a belief system, in particular a holy text on it's own merits is giving it a read-through without the a priori assumption that it's correct on some level. Look at it instead as an anthropologist and psychologist, it is very revealing.

>"In fact, I'm suggesting that contemplation of this other realm is purely optional, that you don't need it for fulfillment in this realm, and that any conclusions about this other realm should not fly in the face of what we know about this realm."

In an ideal world. But what you've said is another way of saying "Don't treat it as if it's true, and it won't create problems". Other sincere, devout religious people you try to convert to this approach will sense that about it right away, like a cow catching a whiff of the slaughterhouse it's being led into.

>"Who am I?"

A mostly hairless self aware primate, part of a thin film of primates currently coating the globe for however long the oil holds out.

>"Why am I aware of myself?"

You have a sufficiently complex brain.

>"Where does my experience as an individual come from?"

The fact that your brain is physically separated from others and does not exchange information with them except by speech and writing.

>"How did the universe begin?"

Spontaneous particle and antiparticle separation events in an endless sea of quantum potential. "Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." -Richard Feynman

>"Why is there something instead of nothing?"

Nothingness is maximally ordered. Collapse into somethingness was guaranteed by entropy. As for why entropy still applied back then, see the Feynman quote above.

>"I don't think science can answer these questions."

It's actually explained most of that and is working hard on the rest. I recommend picking up a copy of http://www.amazon.com/The-Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/055338466X

>" It only simply gets at the fact that belief in a spiritual....something....may well satisfy certain philosophical questions that science can not. "

But does it? Simply offering up a story is not the same as explaining something. An explanation which cannot be shown to be true is not an explanation, it is a story. If you need to know a big bang occurred I can show you pictures of the lingering background radiation from it. If you need to know that matter and antimatter can spring from nothingness (insofar as we can tell at the moment) I can show it to you in a particle accelerator or at the event horizon of black holes in the form of Hawking Radiation. There's such a wealth of provable explanations on offer from science that the idea that some people take a story and treat it like an explanation because it's religious in origin is profoundly frustrating.

>"But I don't think these questions will ever be answered in any quantifiable, measurable way."

Even if that were true, it doesn't make a story legitimately equivalent to an explanation. Treating the story as true just because we don't have an explanation yet ignores the other, more sensible option of simply saying "we don't have it all figured out yet, and may never". I'll admit, "We don't know" is not satisfying. But that doesn't justify replacing it with pretend-knowledge.

>"But for those who chose to contemplate them, they must be answered spiritually. At least for now."

If, indeed, what they are doing can truthfully be called 'answering'.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I was just starting to get interested in philosophy. I took an unusual route, but I can sure recommend some good books that will change how you think!

• This might be above your level, but Evolutionaries by Carter Phipps will certainly change the way you look at the world! Many concepts are explored. It's a great jumping off point to any of the books he references.
  
  
• While this is more pop-philosophy, Richard Brodie's Virus of the Mind is great for your age level. Highly recommended!
  
  
• I'm a huge fan of Nietzsche, and his Beyond Good and Evil is profound and influential. It can make you question some of your most basic assumptions.
  
  
• More science-y but The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene is truly an amazing book that demonstrates just how strange and non-intuitive the universe really is. Natural philosophy at its finest.

It's not a terrible scope but it's not really a good one either as you might expect given the low retail price. The good news is that you might have an okay time with it being as you're under dark skies. Dark skies and a cheap scope trumps light pollution and an expensive scope any day and twice on Tuesdays.

The best thing through it will, of course, be the moon.

You should be able to see Jupiter as a bright white disc with the 4 main moons visible as tiny stars beside it. If you're really really lucky, you might see the two highest contrast belts through this scope, but I wouldn't bank on it with this scope.

Saturn will be visible as a small disc with a blurry line representing the rings... something a bit like this

You'll be able to make out the brightest deep sky objects such as the great nebula in Orion, and the Andromeda galaxy as fuzzy gray "clouds". Clusters such as the Pleiades will look great, because they look great through just about anything :-)

I'd recommend you grab a copy of Turn Left at Orion, it's your indispensable guide to viewing and to your next telescope upgrade.

Just to note the 4mm eyepiece that comes with the scope is way too powerful for its aperture, not worth using really, but stick to the 20mm and you'll see some stuff.

Happy viewing!

Don't trust everything you read online, either. Books are still generally your best bet, because people who might not know what they're talking about can't edit them while you're reading them.

Obviously I'm not saying all books are better than all internets, but find some credible ones and you're much better off.

I'm not a scientist by training, but I can suggest a few books that will provide a pretty good counterbalance to what your mom will be teaching you. (A few of them have quasi-religious-sounding titles, too, so if she happened to find them lying around she might not get too angry.)

The Chosen Species: The Long March of Human Evolution

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

A Brief History of Time

I can recommend more if you'd like. These ones are pretty broad surveys of the topics of (in order) evolution, more evolution, the role of science in society, and the physical nature of the universe. If you're homeschooled, I'm assuming high school-level? None of these books is technical - they're all 'popular science', intended to explain broad concepts to non-scientists. They're very, highly interesting, though, and it's easy to find recommended reading lists once you discover some specific topics that interest you. The Chosen Species itself has a lengthy and detailed bibliography and recommended reading section at the end.

I hope I've been able to help! Good luck!

I was in your position just a couple of years ago, here's what I did.

Start with a mechanics course if you haven't already, it's crucial that you have a solid understanding of physics before you try to learn the advanced stuff.

Learn calc all the way through vector calc. A great resource for this is Professor Leonard (this is calc 3, but he has all of them).

Here's where I learned physics Electricity and Magnetism, I also learned special relativity and basic quantum mechanics at this point (QM is optional, but fun)

I learned linear algebra and diff eqs at this point. I used Khan Academy for this, though I'm not sure it's the best resource out there.

Next, I would recommend trying to take a class on mathematical proofs, when you are reading papers rather than watching videos you will appreciate it. I watched this series because I'm a comp sci major, but if you aren't a comp sci person, just look for a methods of proofs class.

Now it's time for the fun stuff.

Tensor Calculus is what General Relativity is founded on, I found this series to be helpful

So now it's time to get into GR.

This series from PBS Space Time is a great introduction into accurate GR. Their other stuff is great too.

This video from DrPhysicsA steps through the thoughts behind each part of the EFEs and is not the best video, but it helped me.

And that's where I couldn't find any more videos, so I used some text resources.

The book gravitation is the most commonly used textbook for GR as far as I know.

I found this article on wikipedia to be ENORMOUSLY helpful in understanding how to work a general relativity problem. It took me a few times going through it to follow it all the way, but it is great.

Where you go after this really depends on what you are trying to do with GR, personally I find Kaluza-Klein theory to be very intriguing and that leads down the road to string theory.

Good luck

I highly recommend science oriented books. Science is no "Maybe, perhaps, whatever", it is clear: facts are true when they are proven as such, and wrong when proven as wrong. There are theories everywhere but no one relies on them before they aren't proven right nowadays.


For a good summary of science, I recommend „A Short History of Nearly Everything". It really is about everything that regards progress in science: From Physics and chemistry, over geology and cosmology to anthropology and evolution. It is a pleasure to read, very well written and researched.


For more detailed, yet very accessible physics and explanations of the universe, there is "Big Bang".


Then there are things that - in my eyes - are beyond anything that TRP touches. Medical conditions which impair your sensory organs or rather the areas of your brain that process those sensations: Complete failure of a brain area, malfunctions in processing, illnesses. Those are very interesting stories and will make you think outside of your box. What would you do if this happened to you? How do people build a life around this? What does it feel and look like inside an affected persons head? Oliver Sacks has written a few books about those conditions/cases. He has a very pleasant and personal style of writing down his stories about the patients or even himself.

Quite analogue to that I recommend the series "Dr. House" if you are interested in that topic.


I can only recall those two from the top of my head. Of course, there are other topics which are interesting as well:

Philosophy (see: Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Platon), ancient poetry (see: Vergil, Homer, Alighieri) [because this indeed is for the most part fictional, you learn a lot about the spirit of the times], psychology, economy, paleontology, anthropology, etc etc.

Also, you shouldn't miss out on reading up about how cars/car engines are built and how they work (there are great animations of this on Youtube), this can come in handy if you want to repair one or get an idea of what features are worth your money. Same goes for computer technologies, household equipment. Basically I recommend to read up on every technical or even economical topic to be up to date.


As well, you can do researches about daily things. The internet is great at getting you those informations. But be sceptical, everyone on the internet can write articles about anything.

Often times it's the things we don't notice that have the most impact: linguistic (the history of bascially all languages is very exciting), where resources come from (nuclear plants - on this topic I found a well researched article/book on reddit regarding
Chernobyl -, coal power stations, wood clearing, purification plants, oil producers, mining, opencast mining, fishing, farming, animal breeding), the many climate zones of the globe and which one you live in, flora and fauna of the globe, the sea and especially the deep sea.


You get the idea. Turn your head around 360° and look under the surface of things. Lift a rock to see what is underneath, there is a lot to discover.

Regardless of the OPs eventual interests there's a reason we start with Newtonian stuff in most 101 type courses. I think its reasonable for OP to start there if they are serious, my recommendations are:

IF OP WANTS TO LEARN PHYSICS

• go through this Classical Mechanics course. While I haven't used this one in particular I can vouch for the quality and clarity of Walter Lewin's teaching.
  
  
• Make sure you use the associated problem sets with any course you choose. The importance of solving actual problems can not be over emphasized.
  
  
• When you find yourself struggling with the math (I promise that you will eventually) make sure you take the time to go learn some of the mathematics, if you like the MIT courses I think their math department also has lots of resources online.
  
  
• Stick to a study schedule. Physics is fun but treat it like a sport, you can do it for fun but you won't get anywhere if you never practice
  
  IF OP IS WANTS TO LEARN ABOUT PHYSICS
  
  
• Feynman Lectures are a great middle ground between a rigor and accessibility. I highly recommend these for a fun way to learn the basics
  
  
• Hawking's books are great reads
  
  
• Cosmos was a wonderful series
  
  
• If you want flashy and motivating, check out Brian Greene's stuff.
  
  
  
  From there, op can look at different fields, biophysics seems like it would be the most likely candidate in which case OP might also want to brush up on organic chemistry and learn how to use MATLAB.

Luna and Jupiter will look fantastic.

With Jupiter you should more than be able to see all four moons pretty well and the bands should be faint but visible. Give your eyes time to adjust and make sure you're in a nice dark place. I'm sure that goes without saying but it can't hurt to reinforce the concept.

That is a great starter scope. Get yourself a good star atlas, I really recommend NightWatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe as a starter (http://www.amazon.com/NightWatch-Practical-Guide-Viewing-Universe/dp/155407147X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1324071016&sr=8-2). It has good seasonal star charts and lots of practical info about viewing the sky.

I really hope you enjoy the scope and please do post a follow up on the performance and your experiences.

I notice you said you are in CST Time Zone. Where are you located. If you are in the Houston Area we should get a little star party set up with fellow redditors.

I'm assuming you're looking for things geared toward a layman audience, and not textbooks. Here's a few of my personal favorites:

Sagan

Cosmos: You probably know what this is. If not, it is at once a history of science, an overview of the major paradigms of scientific investigation (with some considerable detail), and a discussion of the role of science in the development of human society and the role of humanity in the larger cosmos.

Pale Blue Dot: Similar themes, but with a more specifically astronomical focus.


Dawkins

The Greatest Show on Earth: Dawkins steers (mostly) clear of religious talk here, and sticks to what he really does best: lays out the ideas behind evolution in a manner that is easily digestible, but also highly detailed with a plethora of real-world evidence, and convincing to anyone with even a modicum of willingness to listen.


Hofstadter

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: It seems like I find myself recommending this book at least once a month, but it really does deserve it. It not only lays out an excruciatingly complex argument (Godel's Incompleteness Theorem) in as accessible a way as can be imagined, and explores its consequences in mathematics, computer science, and neuroscience, but is also probably the most entertainingly and clearly written work of non-fiction I've ever encountered.


Feynman

The Feynman Lectures on Physics: It's everything. Probably the most detailed discussion of physics concepts that you'll find on this list.

Burke

Connections: Not exactly what you were asking for, but I love it, so you might too. James Burke traces the history of a dozen or so modern inventions, from ancient times all the way up to the present. Focuses on the unpredictability of technological advancement, and how new developments in one area often unlock advancements in a seemingly separate discipline. There is also a documentary series that goes along with it, which I'd probably recommend over the book. James Burke is a tremendously charismatic narrator and it's one of the best few documentary series I've ever watched. It's available semi-officially on Youtube.

I'm also an xt6 owner.

For software, you can't go wrong with Stellarium. It's free, and it lets you choose your location as well as time and date. Very handy.

For reading material, these two books have served me well:

Nightwatch: contains loads of stargazing tips and general astronomy information. Also contains star charts, and detailed charts of select constellations.


Binocular Highlights: I find myself using this one all the time. Its focus is on binocular astronomy, but you can use it with a telescope as it's a sort of "best-of" of the night sky. Each object has a detailed, zoomed-in map and a brief description. Contains star charts for every season, with every object in the book marked on the charts.


For photography, you'll only really be able to take decent pictures of the Moon and the brighter planets. As others have pointed out, you'll need some fancier equipment to take good pictures of deep-sky objects.


Just for fun, here are some of my favorite objects:




The Orion Nebula (M42): under the heavily light-polluted skies of my backyard, still fuzzy and nebula-like. Glorious under dark skies, when the dusty arms and finer details become apparent.

Andromeda Galaxy (M31): Looks like a big hazy smudge through the eyepiece. Its companion (M32, I think) is also visible in the same field of view.

Ring Nebula (M57): Even under light-polluted skies, I can pick this one out pretty easily by star-hopping. Looks like a small, blue donut.

Double Cluster: absolutely brilliant collection of stars in a single field of view.

I. Sure, some forms of theism are coherent (Christianity is not one of those forms, for what it's worth; the Problem of Natural Evil and Euthyphro's Dilemma being a couple of big problems), but not all coherent ideas are true representations of the world; any introductory course in logic will demonstrate that.

II. The cosmological argument is a deductive argument. Deductive arguments are only as strong as their premises. The premises of the cosmological argument are not known to be true. Therefore, the cosmological argument should not be considered true. If you think you know a specific formulation of the cosmological argument that has true premises, please present it. I'm fully confident I can explain how we know such premises are not true.

III. There is no doubt that the teleological argument has strong persuasive force, but that's a very different thing than "being real evidence" or "something that should have strong persuasive force." I explain apparent cosmological fine-tuning as an entirely anthropic effect: if the constants were different, we wouldn't be here to observe them, therefore we observe them as they are.

IV. This statement is just false on its face. Lawrence Krauss has a whole book about the potential ex nihilo mechanisms (plural!) for the creation of the universe that are entirely consistent with the known laws of physics. (Note that the idea of God is not consistent with the known laws of physics, since he, by definition, supersedes them.)

V. This is just a worse version of argument III. Naturalistic evolution has far, far more explanatory power than theism. To name my favorite examples: the human blind spot is inexplicable from the standpoint of top-down design, but it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution; likewise, the path of the mammalian nerves for the tongue traveling below the heart makes no sense from the standpoint of top-down design, but it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution. Evolution routinely makes predictions that are tested to be true, whether it means predicting where fossils with specific characteristics will be found or how fruit fly mating behavior changes after populations have been separated and exposed to different environments for 30+ generations. It's worth emphasizing that it is totally normal to look at the complexity of the world and assume that it must have a designer...but it's also totally normal to think that electrons aren't waves. Intuition isn't a reliable way to discern truth. We must not be seduced by comfortable patterns of thought. We must think more carefully. When we think more carefully, it turns out that evolution is true and evolution requires no god.

VI. There are two points here: 1) the universe follows rules, and 2) humans can understand those rules. Point (1) is easily answered with the anthropic argument: rules are required for complex organization, humans are an example of complex organization, therefore humans can only exist in a physical reality that is governed by rules. Point (2) might not even be true. Wigner's argument is fun and interesting, but it's actually wrong! Mathematics are not able to describe the fundamental behavior of the physical world. As far as we know, Quantum Field Theory is the best possible representation of the fundamental physical world, and it is known to be an approximation, because, mathematically, it leads to an infinite regress. For a more concrete example, there is no analytic solution for the orbital path of the earth around the sun! (This is because it is subject to the gravitational attraction of more than one other object; its solution is calculated numerically, i.e. by sophisticated guess-and-check.)

VII. This is just baldly false. I recommend Dan Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" and Stanislas Dehaene's "Consciousness and the Brain" for a coherent model of a materialist mind and a wealth of evidence in support of the materialist mind.

VIII. First of all, the idea that morality comes from god runs into the Problem of Natural Evil and Euthyphro's Dilemma pretty hard. And the convergence of all cultures to universal ideas of right and wrong (murder is bad, stealing is bad, etc.) are rather easily explained by anthropology and evolutionary psychology. Anthropology and evolutionary psychology also predict that there would be cultural divergence on more subtle moral questions (like the Trolley Problem, for example)...and there is! I think that makes those theories better explanations for moral sentiments than theism.

IX. I'm a secular Buddhist. Through meditation, I transcend the mundane even though I deny the existence of any deity. Also, given the diversity of religious experience, it's insane to suggest that religious experience argues for the existence of the God of Catholicism.

X. Oh, boy. I'm trying to think of the best way to persuade you of all the problems with your argument, here. So, here's an exercise for you: take the argument you have written in the linked posts and reformat them into a sequence of syllogisms. Having done that, highlight each premise that is not a conclusion of a previous syllogism. Notice the large number of highlighted premises and ask yourself for each, "What is the proof for this premise?" I am confident that you will find the answer is almost always, "There is no proof for this premise."

XI. "...three days after his death, and against every predisposition to the contrary, individuals and groups had experiences that completely convinced them that they had met a physically resurrected Jesus." There is literally no evidence for this at all (keeping in mind that Christian sacred texts are not evidence for the same reason that Hindu sacred texts are not evidence). Hell, Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Christ" even has a strong argument that Jesus didn't exist! (I don't agree with the conclusion of the argument, though I found his methods and the evidence he gathered along the way to be worthy of consideration.)

-----

I don't think that I can dissuade you of your belief. But, I do hope to explain to you why, even if you find your arguments intuitively appealing, they do not conclusively demonstrate that your belief is true.

How the universe was made?

I think the real crux of the question you're asking is how can something come from nothing? (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; I don't want to speak for you) Let me just start off by saying there is no definitive scientific answer to this question... yet. However, there are very prominent research scientists who have tackled the question and come up with very cogent theories (backed up by current mathematical models).

I won't pretend to understand most of these theories as I'm a biologist, not a physicist. There is one recent book written on the very topic called A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss (he is a published theoretical physicist and cosmologist). He posits that particles do in fact spontaneously come into existence and there is scientific proof and reasoning for how and why. I haven't gotten around to reading it myself (it was just published this year), but I've been told it's good for the layman on the topic.

Now let me move on to some of the problems with this question. Perhaps you yourself don't have this supposition, but the supposition many theists make with the question (where did the universe come from?), is that if it can't be answered than God must have done it. This is a logical leap that defies rational reasoning, and is a leap theists have been making for millenia. What makes the tides go in and out? We don't know; must be God. What causes disease? We don't know; must be God. Where did the universe come from? We don't know; must be God?

It's what's known as a God of the gaps; wherein anything that can't be explained is conveniently claimed to have a divine explanation. Until a rational scientific answer comes along and religion takes a step back. There will likely always be gaps in our knowledge base (most definitely in our liftetimes). That doesn't mean we should make the same mistake as our ancestors and attribute these gaps to God. It's okay to simply not know and strive to understand.

Another huge problem with your question is that the theist answer only serves to further complicate the original question.

1. How can something come from nothing?
   
2. Well it can't right? So God must have created that original something.
   
3. God is something. Go back to step 1.
   
   Theists tend to skip that third step, or explain it away as God just always existing. Yet the universe always existing is something that is logically unacceptable to them. If anything, throwing God into the equation only makes it more complicated. A sentient being capable of creating the initial state of the universe would be more complex than what it is creating (meaning God is more complex than the universe). Trying to explain than how God came into being is more complicated than the original question, so nothing has really been answered or solved.
   
   If you're really trying to stump atheists, the best common theist argument I've seen is the cosmological constants one (how are they so fine tuned?). No doubt there are answers, but that's one of the better arguments out there. I won't go into it here, just search for it.

You should start with using your finder scope, so make sure it's aiming correctly, this is very important and will save you time later! I would also highly recommend a book like Turn Left at Orion. Its a great book to teach you how to find things, plus its a great guide on the best things to find year round.

For finding things you can't see, you use finder stars, starting with a star you can see and using the finder scope to jump from star to star on a path to your target.

However, you mentioned wanted to view planets, most of those will be visible to the naked eye during different parts of the year, Jupiter in particular is lovely and bright right now. Stellarium is an excellent tool to find out whats visible in your area at any time.

Of course, things are more difficult if you live in an urban area with loads of light pollution, this link might help you more with that.

If you have more questions, /r/telescopes or /r/Astronomy might be able to help you out more than I can.

Good Luck and dark skies!

It can be explained, though not simply, nor accessibly. Luckily, I'm not just an atheist, I'm also a theoretical physics student. Keep in mind that this of course can not be demonstrated empirically (science is the study of our Universe, so we obviously can't study things outside it in time or space).

Lets go back to before the Universe exists. Let's call this state the Void. It's important to note that no true void exists in our Universe, even the stuff that looks empty is full of vacuum fluctuations and all kinds of other things that aren't relevant, but you can investigate in your own time if you want. In this state, the Void has zero energy, pretty much by definition. Now, the idea that a Void could be transforms into a Universe is not really controversial; stuff transforms by itself all the time. The "problem" with a Universe arising from a Void is that the Universe has more energy than the Void, and it there's not explanation for where all this energy came from. Upon further investigation, we'll actually see that the Universe has zero net energy, and this isn't actually a problem.

Now, let's think about a vase sitting on a table. One knock and it shatters, hardly any effort required. But it would take a significant amount of effort to put that vase back together. This is critically important. Stuff has a natural tendency to be spread out all over the place. You need to contribute energy to it in order to bring it together. We're going to call this positive energy.

Gravity is something different though. Gravity pulls everything together. Unlike the vase, you'd need to expend energy in order to overcome the natural tendency of gravity. Because it's the opposite, we're going to call gravity negative energy. In day to day life, the tendency of stuff to spread out overwhelms the tendency of gravity to clump together, simply because gravity is comparatively very weak. There's quite a few more factors at play here, but stuff and gravity are the important ones.

Amazingly, it turns out that it's possible for the Universe to have exactly as much negative energy as it does positive energy, which means that it would have zero total energy, meaning that it's perfectly possible for it to pop out of nowhere, by dumb luck, because no energy input is required. Furthermore, we know how to check if our Universe has this exact energy composition. And back in 1989, that's exactly what cosmologists did. And it turns out it does. We can empirically show, to an excellent margin of error, that our Universe has zero net energy. Think about that for a second. Lawrence Krauss has a great youtube video explaining the evidence for this pretty incredible claim.

The really incredible thing is, given that our Universe has zero net energy, it's not only possible that it could just pop into existence on day, it's inevitable. It's exactly what we'd expect. Hell, I'd be out looking for God's fingerprints if there wasn't a Universe, not the opposite.

If you want to read more about it, by people who've spent far more time investigating this than I have, I suggest The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, and A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. Both go into detail about the subject, and don't require any prior physics knowledge.

tl;dr The Universe didn't need a "first cause". PHYSICS!

For Quantum Physics I cannot recommend Quantum Physics: A Beginner's Guide it has enough maths to make it worth reading, but the equations etc. are in supplemental boxes with explanations and investigations so you can ignore all the maths if you want. It tends to focus on the applications of quantum physics in semiconductors, superconductors which is good to learn about as it is easier to comprehend than the really tricky philosophical implications.

I would also recommend The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, because it has more philosophical stuff in it, and although it is broader and not just about quantum physics but includes relativity and stuff too, it is an awesome book and you won't regret reading it.

For evolutionary biology I would recommend The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, it is a Science book so don't worry if you don't like his aggressive atheism as if I recall correctly it doesn't rear it's head in the book at all. It is especially good if you enjoy Computer Science as he makes some analogies between life and programs which are obviously easier to appreciate if you have some experience (Dawkins was a programmer for many years).

I don't know what paleo-anthropology is so unfortunately I can't recommend anything there, but I would be extremely happy if you could enlighten me and perhaps recommend some texts. (Not terribly helpful, I know :P )

Answering your edit, time dilation does occur at the speed of light. So much so that at exactly the speed of light, no travel in time occurs. To a photon, this means it "feels like" it was born and dies at the same instant, if we're going to anthropomorphize here, even though to us we can see it existing in time.

EDIT: as u/Aliudnomen points out, "a frame traveling at c is not a valid inertial frame", which means it's not precise to say that time dilation is happening at the speed of light. Got a bit carried away with the explanation here :) You see infinity time dilation at the speed of light, but that's because the denominator trends to 0, which is a place that inertial objects can't get to. It doesn't really mean that time dilation is infinite, but rather nonexistent. This is why it's often said information is the only thing that can appear, to us, to travel at the speed of light: anything with an inertial reference frame can never get to the speed of light.

With you being in 10th grade, I'll use an analogy/projection that I find helpful. Imagine a Cartesian set of axes (the normal kind), where the y axis is time-velocity and the x axis is space-velocity. Draw a big circle of radius the speed of light, we'll call that "1 unit". Now, you need to replace the idea of "speed of light" (which implies movement of light in the space velocity coordinate frame) with c, the celerity constant: celerity means "rapidity of motion", but it was chosen specifically because it can mean speed in the 4 dimension coordinate system of spacetime. In other words, you can travel in space or you can travel in time, and both of these will be measured, not with mph, but with some fraction of c. With me so far?

OK, what relativity is saying here is that we are always traveling on a circle with radius c. If we don't travel along the space-velocity x axis (we're at rest), we travel along the time-velocity(y axis), and whenever we travel along the x axis, we rotate our point from (0, 1) around this circle clockwise toward (1, 0).

To see this, we can rearrange the time dilation equation:

t' = t / sqrt(1 - (v/c)^2) Original equation
t' / t = 1 / (sqrt(1 - v/c)^2) Move the t in the numerator over
t' / t = 1 / sqrt((c^2) - (v^2)) Multiply the guys under the sqrt by c^2
(t' / t)^2 = 1 / (c^2 - v^2) Square both sides
1 / (t' / t)^2 = c^2 - v^2 Invert both sides
1 / (t' / t)^2 + v^2 = c^2 Add v^2 to both sides
t^2/t'^2 + v^2 = c^2 Square under the first term denominator and invert.

This is an equation of a circle with radius c: the axes can be chosen so that the y axis is "ratio of time", which is what I'm calling "time velocity" and the x axis is "space velocity".

We are always traveling at c, and so we're always somewhere on this circle. This is why it's a constant: nothing in the universe travels faster or slower than this celerity, we can only change which coordinates add up to get us there. If we're perfectly at rest in the space-velocity dimension (x = 0), all of our travel is along the time dimension (y = 1): we're at (1, 0) on this point of the circle. With me so far?

This is what "spacetime" means: right here we're dropping the fact that space is 3 dimensional and considering all velocity to be along the one axis, but if you add in higher dimensions, this is spacetime: x, y, z, t all involved in the same equations. Events - which are used to describe "something that happens somewhere in spacetime" - always travel within a 4 dimensional hypersphere that relativistic folk call the light cone.

Back to our 2d example. As you start to increase your x dimension - that is, start moving - your celerity starts to rotate around the circle. When you travel half the speed of light, where x = 0.5, you can imagine the line drawn from the origin to the point on the circle that corresponds to this x coordinate slanting up and to the right, which happens to be solved by (x^2 ) + (y^2 ) = c^2. Solving for y, we get 0.866 - that is, we're traveling at 0.866 the normal rate of time flow.

Keep increasing space velocity, and you'll plot points like (0.6, 0.8), (0.7, 0.714), (0.8, 0.6), (0.9, 0.435), (0.95, 0.31), (0.99, 0.14), (0.999, 0.045), (0.9999, 0.014)

You see, we're putting more and more of our celerity into the space-velocity coordinate and taking it from the time-velocity coordinate. This is time dilation.

Finally, anything with mass requires energy to convert its travel in time to travel in space. As you keep attempting to get closer to (1, 0), it requires more energy to shift the angle around the circle, until the last little bit is infinite. This is why only massless particles (like photons) can travel at the speed of light.

You can also, then, intuitively grasp the other parts of this circle: what does it take to make time slow down? Well, we would have to move from the 1st quadrant (the top right quadrant) to the 3rd and 4th quadrants (the bottom quadrant). We don't really know for sure how to do this, but we do know that it seems possible that more exotic particles could behave just like matter, except progressing backwards. In other words, at rest, their velocity is (0, -1). What does it take to get from matter going forward in time to backwards? Well, you can't do it by increasing your space-velocity alone: no matter how much you increase your velocity, you can only ever get to almost (1, 0) with something that has mass. This is the "tachyon" idea: a massive particle that travels so fast that it loops around the coordinate frame into quadrant 4 (bottom right), that is, think about moving so fast that you move faster than the speed of light (perhaps you became massless for a second, then gained mass as you somehow started traveling in the negative time direction. This can't happen, AFAIK, because you'd have to travel through infinite energy to loop around, but you can imagine the symmetry here). Real particles can't do this, but it's theoretically possible that particles do exist that travel "faster than the speed of light", but only in a way that breaks what it means to have velocity: they're traveling backwards in time, so their motion is some fraction of c to them; they're not moving faster than the speed of light. To us observing them, they're moving faster than we can achieve with our motion on the x coordinate: their motion backwards in time makes them seem to us as if they're moving faster than c. They're not, remember: all of us are always moving at c.

If something has anti-mass, however (that is, antimatter), it seems possible to have it traveling at (0, -1) all on its own! It's hard to jump on something that has anti-mass, though, so this is still theoretical in many ways. That is, the equations say it should be moving backwards in time, but what that actually means is far more complicated: it maths out that way, but it's not like causality is broken (that is, when we create antimatter in particle accelerators, they don't appear "before" the collision, but they do get "younger" before they annihilate. What does "younger" mean to a particle? How do you define "younger" when it's getting "older in negative time"? What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Also interesting is the idea of time dilation with negative velocities: the 2nd (top-left) quadrant. What does it mean to move "backwards" in space? Does that even have a meaning? I mean if I walk down the street, I'm moving forward in a direction, but if I walk the opposite way, I'm moving forward in the opposite direction. I'm not aware of anything discussing "negative velocity", but that's just my ignorance: perhaps someone else can chime in if they know more.

Finally, Carl Sagan here to describe what life looks like as you approach the speed of light. You can start to see from his example what it would be like to travel so fast that no time passes for you at all.

Finally, one of the most accessible books I've ever read is Stephen Hawking's a brief history of time. If you're at all remotely curious about either relativity or quantum mechanics, this guy, along with being just about the most brilliant mind in these fields, has a fantastic way of explaining the concepts while still staying true to the equations involved.

I haven't a clue there. I've just built stuff on Earth haha and know plywood and siding square footage adds up pretty quick for a structure which would be the similar case with a mold.

Personally I've always imagined something inflatable for living areas at first like Bigelow is testing on ISS. Once we had a good handle on excavating and manufacturing some sort of concrete or brick from local materials I'd imagine buried barrel vault type construction like Zubrin seems to like in some of his books, although I did some math on that once (in this sub I believe), I'll see if I saved it.


Edit: hmmm I can't seem to find it but here's a comment along the ideas

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https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/4qg9i9/bill_nye_warns_about_problems_colonizing_mars/d4sv0r5/

> I never see the lack of a magentosphere getting brought up.

It's not an issue. You aren't going to be living/temporarily living in clear nylon inflated bubbles. Yes, you'll absolutely pick up more rads if you are living in an unshielded habitat but shielding it is going to be quite easy if you have even modest mechanical means of moving regolith.

Worst case for a non permanent mission, the areas of the habitat you spend most of your time in have the water stored in the walls and ceiling.

Quick shielding for more permanent living you take a strong, but light, material like Nylon 6 with you ultra-light metal poles. You place the poles around the habitat you then weave the material between them (think 'under over') and then spend your first few days using modestly powered Martian wheelbarrow to scoop and move regolith between the material and the habitat with the exception of shielded doors. Again, have some of the water stored in the top of the modules for the hours the sun is overhead. OR make a simple machine that fills sandbags, the sandbags would require more material (fabric/plastic) but would likely be quicker than carting regolith around.

More long term shielding, your habitats are largely underground OR you use regolith as a component for making bricks and stack bricks around the hab modules.


For a short term mission I'd do something like what I laid out here with LEGO with the modules being inflatables then I'd come in with poles, sheeting and loose regolith to get in-hab rad exposure similar to what you'd get on Earth. For fun I have about 18.5 m2 of PV panels displayed in the model which would provide about 1415w at high noon and the tanks are actually landed ahead of time largely empty containing ISRU units to generate/capture usable things from the atmosphere. Probably WAVAR for one of the ISRU units which upon landing could quickly be used for starting soil washing experiments and/or hydroponics, if near the northern polar region you could take your time harvesting water ice for melting, you could also have some of the water from the WAVAR going to a second ISRU purely to make oxygen and hydrogen, you could also have one making monopropellant hydrogen peroxide for the return mission and/or return samples.


As far as atmospheric depletion, exactly what /u/Pimozv said

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Edit 2: another relevant comment of mine

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https://www.reddit.com/r/Colonizemars/comments/551o13/as_much_as_everyone_hates_burning_man_man_he_had/d88fg39/

> and sending builders?

Companies might. A lot of the habitats are likely going to be inflatable in nature at first. If you can assemble a tent you'll likely be able to assemble a habitat. Later you can relatively easy make bricks from local materials (almost entirely from the regolith) and build vaults/bunkers under ground and then cover with regolith, pressurize them and they'll eventually seal themselves off thanks to the temperature... moisture from exhalation and what not will seep through any cracks and ultimately freeze You could also go in and paint some sort of sealant. Above ground you'd use a sealant or put an inflatable inside the brick structure. I suggest reading Zubrin's books The Case for Mars and Mars Direct: Space Exploration, the Red Planet, and the Human Future and his fiction, but scientifically accurate book, How to Live on Mars which is a guide written in the future for those that are on their way to Mars. His fiction book First Landing is also worth reading, it came out before The Martian and involves an entire crew trying to scrape by on Mars.

If you want a post-graduate level of understanding, it will be hard to learn the math past calculus that you will need with no instruction. Maybe impossible unless you are very gifted or studious. You'll need to learn more advanced math (taylor expansions, more advanced integration methods not always taught in calc I, multi-variable calculus, ordinary differential equations and linear algebra for starters). A layperson's understanding wouldn't require that much (maybe reading Sagan and Co. would be enough?), but it sounds like you aren't content with that. Maybe it would be good to start reading some journal articles and seeing what you can glean from them (introductions mostly), especially reviews of subjects you find interesting. If those are opaque, check a local university library for textbooks like Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, Padmanabhan's astrophysics I-III, Binney and Tremaine and things like that. There are text books more focused on specific subjects as well, but that's more a matter of personal interest. For me, Lewin and van der Klis is good, and so is Accretion Power in Astrophysics and the "CV Bible." You might notice Cambridge Astrophysics publishes quite a lot of quality astrophysics textbooks.

None of those are going to be legible without the math, though. There's not really anything between the "popular science" and "so you're taking a graduate course in astrophysics..." level texts that I've seen.

A little more than ELI5 but worth the effort, Kip Thorne, the physicist who consulted on the film, wrote a fantastic book that covers this question in depth.

You can read it here.

I recommend reading the entire Prologue since it's relatively short and pretty fascinating, and will give you the background to why it must be a very large black hole, but the part directly relevant to your question is the section entitled Gargantua on page 41. (Also relevant is the establishing of the problem on pp. 34-35)

If you like his writing, buy his book Black Holes and Time Warps. The link above is just some random PDF I found on a search.

To sum him up though, a super-massive black hole will have negligible tidal forces at its "surface" (event horizon). You therefore could hover just above it and not be spaghettified. Once you cross the horizon, you'd still be okay for a while, but now no amount of force could keep you from falling ever closer to the center. As you approached the center, tidal forces would increase exponentially until eventually you would be pulled apart. So yes, it would be gentle. At first. But once you go inside, spaghettification is inevitable, though not necessarily immediate.


TL:DR A big size to make it more gentle? Yes. Possible to enter without spaghettification? Temporarily yes, ultimately no.

Of course! :)

Here are a few of my favorite youtube channels that cover our universe.

These guys do a good job of giving excellent and creditable facts while keeping the video short and sweet.

https://www.youtube.com/user/scishowspace

This channel covers more than just space, but again they give good facts while still keeping the videos not too lengthy.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt

And of course, nothing gets more credibility than the big guys themselves, NASA. These videos are a bit long, but are just loaded with a ton of real world space Q&A's.

https://www.youtube.com/user/NASAtelevision/videos

The few magazines I have lying around my house right now are all related to space, and they are a great read for any of my guests! Heres a link for the planetary society (main source of my reading material)
http://planetary.org/

and here are a few books that every curious mind should take a good long glance at when it comes to our universe.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pale-blue-dot-carl-sagan/1103141155

https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

(this one is a MUST READ!)---> https://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne/dp/0393351378

The main podcast I listen to is Star Talk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He has a plethora of different guests on at all times talking about new and fascinating topics. Here's a link for his show

https://www.startalkradio.net/

And when it comes to articles, most of them come from Reddit! I am subscribed to a ton of different space related subreddits which post countless numbers of interesting articles all the time. Here is a small list just to name a few

r/space r/astronomy r/astrophysics r/astrophotography r/science r/spaceporn

I hope this helps!

> I mean from what I know scientifically is the big bang theory and that in itself is pretty questionable.

That couldn't be further from the truth. The Big Bang Theory is one of the most widely accepted theories in science because the evidence to back it up is too strong. Did you know that the theory made very specific predictions about what we would find if we looked for very specific data, and then we looked for it and turns out we would out exactly what the Big Bang Theory predicted we would? That's why scientists accept it as better than other theories. Because it makes good testable predictions, we have tested this predictions, and they every time, they confirm the Big Bang. In fact, the Big Bang Theory used to be widely discredited by scientists for many decades in favor of other theories, until we finally found actual evidence to support it. Then everyone changed sides. So it's not like scientists just believe on the Big Bang out of thin air. They accept it because it's by far the best theory we have today with the most evidence behind it.

You're making the classic mistake of confusing a "theory" with a "hypothesis". In science the word "theory" is not arbitrary, you can't call whatever arbitrary idea in your head a "theory". It has to go through meticulously high standards to be able to even be considered a theory. One example, is that it needs to make new observable predictions, or else, it's just a hypothesis, not a theory. "A wizard did it" is a hypothesis, Big Bang is a theory. A theory is necessarily always better than a hypothesis. And one theory can be better than others, one might have more stronger evidence to back it up. In the case of the Big Bang, it has a lot of very strong evidence.

> theres no scientific explanation for an actual starting point where nothing existedm just vaccuum.

Actually there is. That's part of the Big Bang Theory. It's not a simple explanation as it requires advanced modern scientific understanding. Basically "time" is not an infinite constant as we used to think centuries ago. Time is variable depending on speed and it has an actual starting point where there's nothing before that. That starting point is the Big Bang. The Big Bang is the beginning of time itself. So it doesn't make sense to ask what was "before" it, because there was no time for anything to be before about.

"Asking what was there before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the north pole." -- Stephen Hawking

It's also not "nothing existing just vacuum", it's the exact opposite of that. It was everything, not nothing. Literally the whole universe was in just this one spot called the singularity. That's far from "nothing".

You might be thinking "that sounds crazy, do we have any evidence of that?". Yes we do, a lot of it actually. For one example, the GPS in your phone would not be working if this theory wasn't true. Because the calculations to determine the position of satellites were predicted by the same theory, turns out they work. If you want to, you can read about it directly from the person who came up with the explanation and its predictions in the first place. Stephen Hawking explains the beginning of the universe on his book Grand Design:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/055338466X

No. A survey of the world's oceanic life is already underway; mapping the ocean floor is not terribly useful or important, and most mapping techniques aren't precise enough to detect small artifacts of the sort that ancient tribes would have had.

NASA, on the other hand, is trying to develop technologies which will make it easier for us to explore and later colonize other planets.

It is almost inevitable that humans will colonize Mars at some point in the next few hundred years (to make a very conservative estimate- it would actually be possible to send a manned mission to mars using a combination of Apollo technology and 1800s industrial chemical reactions to make rocket fuel from the atmosphere of mars).

Space is the final frontier- a frontier with almost limitless potential for expansion. History shows us that nations which are expanding along a frontier show far more innovation and far less stagnation; an example is the American frontier, which gave America a huge boost of innovation and corresponding world power for centuries. Once humanity takes the leap to exploring and colonizing space, it's quite likely that the challenges of that task will unlock a huge wave of technological progress for our entire species.

At the moment, the problem with NASA is that everything in its budget is subject to review by Congress, even though most Congressmen know nothing about what NASA does. This has created a small project centered culture at NASA; groups of scientists lobby for NASA to change its overarching goals in order to justify their individual projects, instead of NASA creating a long term strategy on the lines of the Apollo program which individuals would then adjust their projects to support. Because of this, very little useful gets done, and NASA wastes massive amounts of time and money sitting in the space station doing this test and that test without actually going anywhere.

If you really want to make NASA useful, it should have a set budget (higher than it is now) and a long term plan of action which is controlled by the NASA director, not one which changes every time a new president is elected.

If any of that interested you, The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin is a great read on the subject of NASA and what we should be doing with our space program.

2 good books to get you set:

1. 'Nightwatch' by Terence Dickinson :
   This will get you oriented with everything astronomy.
   
   http://www.amazon.com/NightWatch-Practical-Guide-Viewing-Universe/dp/1552093026
   
   
2. 'Turn Left at Orion' :
   This book will show you how to actually find nebulae, double stars, and galaxies in the night sky. It will also show you what each looks like through the eyepiece of an amateur telescope.
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Turn-Left-Orion-Hundred-Telescope/dp/0521781906
   
   *You can probably find the e-book version of each of these online if you look. But then again, having a physical book in front of you is 10x better.
   
   
   
   
3. Software
   
   Stellarium :
   Pretty much a software planetarium thats free. All you have to do is type in your location and it'll show you exactly whats in your sky at the moment. Three useful keyboard buttons: 'pg up' = zoom in, 'pg down' = zoom out, 'n' = shows deep sky object locations.
   
   http://www.stellarium.org/
   
   Last but not least:
   Try to get yourself a used dobsonian telescope (8 inch or 6 inch). You can definitely get one for $200 used. Its a good investment b/c its something that lasts a lifetime and it retains its value extremely well. Remember astronomy is about actually seeing and experiencing the sky, and not just learning about it from a book.
   
   Hope you get hooked on astronomy like I did last year.

Well, one of the books I read that really got me started in cosmology and physics is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. I think it is his best book and talks a lot about the fundamentals of our universe. Brian Greene studies string theory and those bits are interesting, but just know that the theory is far from complete or proven. This one is definitely the most physics heavy suggestion.

Another book that I really enjoy is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It is essentially a history of science, and he covers a lot of topics. Many of which I knew almost nothing about when I read it. It puts into perspective how all the things we know came to be.

The next two recommendations are not books, but they still have a lot of great information in them. This first is a Youtube series called Crash Course Astronomy. The host is Phil Plait, one of the programmers involved with the Hubble Space Telescope. There are a lot of videos, so it would keep you busy and learning for a while.

The last recommendation is as close to the upper level undergraduate astronomy courses that I have taken without actually doing any math. It is a bunch of class lectures from Ohio State University that were recorded and released as a podcast about stellar astronomy and planetary astronomy. I found the lecturer's voice a little whiny at first, but I soon got past that because the content was so good. I kid you not, I listened to this ahead of my ASTRO 346 Stellar Astronomy class at my university, and I felt like the class concepts were almost a review.

All of those recommendations require you to do no math, but you only get a glimpse of the concepts that way. If you want to dive in more, you'll need to take a class or read a textbook on your own.

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions about astronomy as a subject or as a course of study in school :)

Check out the Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism.

Check out a copy of the books The Greatest Show on Earth or Why Evolution is True from a library. You can also get one of them for free on Audible, but you will miss out on the citations and diagrams.

See if you can watch or read The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking. I watched the miniseries, it's pretty good. It used to be on Netflix but no longer is.

Cosmos is great, and is on Netflix. If you want to watch videos about Cosmology just type in one of the popular physicist's names, Brian Greene, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss (his Universe from Nothing book is really great, so are his lectures about it), Sean Carroll etc.

Let me know if you want to talk, I'm always up for it.

To put this in a slightly different light than other commenters, there's one simple answer: the laws of physics should work no matter what you're doing (this is what Einstein focused on). You can't go exactly the speed of light, but even if you blasted off from Earth at 0.999c (very close to it!) your spaceships headlights, disco ball, and christmas light would still beam light away from you at the speed of light. Whaaat? Why?

Speed and velocity are relative. In this case, your ship is moving relative to Earth, and off to Neptune or some dank, misty moon like Titan. If you're in empty space and a spaceship goes floating by, it's difficult to tell if she's the one whizzing past, or you. Inside you're own ship, like when you're in a smoothly cruising car, it's almost like you're standing still. Hence, when you turn on a flashlight, or your headlights, they work just like normal and the light travels at the speed of light. If this seems weird - it is a bit weird! It's where all the cool stuff that happens in relativity comes from (twin paradox time dilation, E= mc^2). To learn more, I seriously recommend checking out shows like Cosmos or books like "The Elegant Universe." Hopefully they will blow your mind like they did mine. :)

Which god?

If we're talking about Yahweh, then consider that those who claim he's all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful believe in a god that is logically impossible. See Problem of Evil.

Aside from that, we all have plenty of evidence that gods (including Yahweh) were made by humans. See A History of God part 1. We have historical and literary evidence that Yahweh used to be one of many gods worshipped by Hebrews but that members of the cult of Yahweh took steps to cement Yahweh as being the only god.

On top of that, there's no credible evidence to suggest that gods need to exist. Our understanding of the natural universe so far does not require the existence of a god to explain anything. So far it appears that the universe is capable of being as it is without the intervention of any supreme being. Consider reading Lawrence Krauss' A Universe From Nothing. Youtube talk by Krauss here.

On top of that, people who believe in a god have yet to present credible reasons or evidence for a god. This is how the burden of proof works: people who claim something are required to provide evidence to support that claim. Consider that, if such reason or evidence were presented, you'd never ever hear a Christian say "you just have to have faith" ever again.

So I'll ask you: why do you believe, since it seems there's no good reason to?

The Z10 would be a great scope. I have the Z12, and I love it. It's a lot to handle though. The Z10 would give you some more mobility and wouldn't take up too much space. A 10 is still a great light bucket and will give you wonderful views of lots of fun objects.

There are myriad resources to get you going on what to see and when to see it. You can check out earthsky.org for a day-by-day update on what's happening in the sky. Telescopius is another great resource. Also, grab yourself a copy of Turn Left at Orion. It'll help you get acquainted with the night sky.

The Bahamian sky should treat you quite nicely. Just be patient with the equipment and the hobby. Learning takes time.

Well... Not really? I'd probably word it more as experiencing the passage of time faster/slower as opposed to moving through time faster/slower, as the latter (at least to me) seems to imply time as an absolute, but that may just be a wording issue on my part.

Honestly we're moving toward areas I don't feel as confident explaining, but I'll give it a try. As far as I understand, basically if two observers are at rest with respect to each other in the same inertial reference frame, they will experience the same passage of time. If the two observers are in motion with respect to each other (outside of a major gravitational field), each will observe the other's clock as going slower than his own. Each observer's experience of his own passage of time also never changes.

Clocks near significant gravitational masses also move more slowly than those farther away, which isn't reciprocal like the relative velocity time dilation. An observer farther away from the mass and one closer will both agree that the farther away observer's clock is moving faster and the closer observer's clock is moving slower.

If all this fascinates you and you want to read about it from someone who actually knows what they're talking about, I'd recommend Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time". You can also check out the Wikipedia pages on the theory of relativity and time dilation, but I think it helps a lot to have a whole book to explore the ideas rather than just a couple Wikipedia pages. Also, Hawking is really good at explaining all of it in a way that normal people like us can understand while still keeping the ideas intact.

A good book that is fun to read and has tons of anecdotes about scientific history is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

In a similar vein, you can ponder the more mind-bending aspects of our Universe with Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time

Other than that you may find some interesting things in the works of Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins (I personally recommend Dawkins's The Selfish Gene)

If you are sick of scientific titles you can also check out Freakonomics or The Worldly Philosphers

These Books are all written for a general audience so they go down pretty easy.

Deciding which major in College can be tricky - I was lucky since I knew exactly what I wanted to study before I left High School, but maybe some ideas in these books will pique your interest. My parents always told me to go to school to study something I love, and not to train for a job. I'm not so sure this advice carries through in "recovering" economy. You may want to factor in the usefulness of your degree post-college (but don't let that be the only thing you consider!).

Good Luck, and enjoy!

I use printouts and books much more than apps. Printouts especially are great because you can mark them up and plan what you want to look for.

I mostly use http://www.skymaps.com/downloads.html to get the map of what's up this month, and it includes locations of the planets. Easy two page printout. Of course, planets are bright enough that you don't even need dark skies to find them, so you can try pointing your funscope at them right now.

Currently, the planets are coming up later at night, with Jupiter coming up after mindight, mars after 2:00am, and venus at 4:00am. So if you want to see them, I'd recommend getting up early in the morning. I'd recommending practicing finding them in the sky with an App before you leave. They are super easy to find once you've done it a couple of times, and follow the path of the sun.

Since your scope and binoculars are relative low on magnification, you'll probably want to look for big bright nebula's, star clusters, and galaxies. If you've never seen any of them before, look for the bright ones: the Orion Nebula and Andromeda galaxy are huge and going to be high in the sky in the evening. They are both bright enough to see a little bit of even in light polluted skies, so I'd practice finding them before you leave on vacation.

For traveling recently, I just brought binoculars and a tripod. I have cheap sets of 7x50 and 15x70. Your funscope has a 76mm mirror, about the size of my big binoculars.

Personally, I think it's a great idea to bring both the scope and the binoculars. You'll get a feel for what you like to look through more once you're out there.

I am not an expert on taking pictures through telescopes, but I do know that if you don't have a tracking equatorial mount, it's really tough to get anything in the sky because you have to take brief pictures. And the funscope doesn't have a parabolic mirror, which makes goop pictures very difficult, too.

If you're just starting out and want to get into the hobby, I really recommend the book Left Turn at Orion. Truly a great guide to getting started when you have no idea where to start in this hobby. And it's the best guide for finding stuff for the first time.

I've always heard good things about Edgar Rice Burrough's The Land that Time Forgot though I've sadly never read it myself. And, hey, it's free!

As far as science non-fiction, I consider A Short History of Nearly Everything to be absolutely essential since it covers so very much in a tremendously entertaining way. Also, if you are interested in physics but don't have any background in it I recommend any of Michio Kaku's books such as his latest Physics of the Future. He writes in an accessible manner that distills all the things that make the ongoing developments in physics exciting. I credit reading his books many years ago with getting me started in the sciences. Lastly, for learning about the universe, you can never go far wrong with Carl Sagan's Cosmos. It is easy to see from reading it why he is considered one of the greatest of the science popularizers.

> If there isnt a creator then how did all this life get here?

Abiogenesis is our best working guess for now, but there's a lot of work left to be done. The key thing here though is to be honest and admit that we don't have all the answers rather than wave our hands and say that it was a magical sky faerie.

> I under stand the big bang, at one point all the matter in Universe was compact then it all expanded outwards, well from school I learned that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. How did all that compact matter get there in the first place? I dont know.

It's ok to not know - that's honesty. This excellent book by Lawrence Krauss is fascinating. If you don't have access to it, there's also a talk he gave a few years back.

> I guess I'm getting old enough where my own opinions are forming I'm just trying to decide what I want those opinions to be.

Remember that ultimately our opinions are just that - opinions. The universe is as it is regardless of what we may wish to be true and what we may believe.

I agree. :-) I figured I'd pick a fairly strong example of easily shot down attributes. (On the other hand, the fact that at least 1/3 of the voters in my country agree with the easily shot down version is quite scary, but that's a rant for another day ;-)

The reasons I reject Christianity as a whole are much larger, and not really applicable here, but since you brought it up:

I was born and raised an evangelical Christian, and remained so for ~25 years after my decision at 7 to accept Jesus's death as atonement for my sins and follow him with my whole life.

I am no longer for many reasons, starting with accepting evolution and the lack of an historical Adam, moving into biblical criticism and archeological study, studying other world religions and cultures and their similar claims to Christianity, studying cosmology, psychology, sociology, and cognitive science of religion, and ending at philosophy and specifically epistemology. I tried really hard to maintain my faith, but there is no grounding for it that I can find, and I gave it up with much grief.

Christianity is in no way exceptional to all the other religions. In that way I agree with Spong's 12 points of reform. If you don't know why Spong talks like that, his book Why Christianity Must Change or Die speaks at least as strongly as the atheist polemics. In addition, as I understand the reasons for apparent teleology and cognitive basis for religion which arose by co-opting the social mechanisms of our brain given by natural selection, and think there is a rising case for the universe spontaneously springing out of a quantum foam which is a much less problematic thing to pre-exist than a conscious, changeless entity of incredible knowledge, power, and perfection. Not to mention the issues of causality and intentionality existing in such a creature outside space-time and the entropic arrow of time, without which causality is incoherent. It is for this reason that much of the most interesting theology in the journals these days is on time issues.

Because of all these things we now have much simpler answers for than a supreme being, I see absolutely no reason to posit even a panenthesitic, pantheistic, or deistic god. The later two, even if existant, would by definition have absolutely no impact on my life, and the first no measurable impact.

In the end, if all religion can possibly discover is that we should to be nice to each other and feel awe of the universe and love, I'll take other moral theories that give me the same and yet come from grounding in the observable universe, thanks. Desire utilitarian theory is one of the more interesting ones.

I think the Atheist's Guide to Reality linked above is perhaps the most important book I've ever read which argues strongly goes against the typical arguments of the apologists, and I'm anxious to see more people critique it. Krauss's book linked above is one of very few I've ever pre-ordered, as his video with the same title was quite interesting. If he has a good basis for his claims, it might be the most important scientific theory since Darwin in relation to understanding ourselves.

For a more in-depth look at String Theory I recommend The Elegant Universe.

You undoubtedly already know the part of the theory that posits everything boils down to these fundamental "string" objects, and the way they vibrate (both in terms of the typical wave vibration, but also the way where the whole object moves back and forth) determines how it behaves in the universe. And that's influenced and constrained by the type of space in which the strings can move, etc.

But how might that help resolve QM and GR? Well, because strings have a little bit of length.

When we think about particles, we treat them as points with zero dimensions. That works all right in the framework of QM, but when you apply the equations of GR to those points, you end up with some fun, indeterminate divide by zero issues. Any nonzero length at all, like something on the scale of the Planck Length, can bridge the connection and produce a meaningful result.

Now, that's not to say that's all there is to it or everything has been solved (far from it), but that may shed some light on why it's an attractive theory to pursue. There are then many types of String Theory, which may just be different facets of one larger one, but finding connections between them is difficult. And experimental confirmation of strings is completely out of reach of our current technology. So, much remains to figure out.

Nothing about your claims of "self-evidence" is true in my case.

> These beliefs are ones you cannot help but believe; for example, the belief that you exist.

Descartes? "I think, therefore I am?" That's evidence, not self-evidence (though it is evidence for self.) I find it convincing; but then I have a strong bias. This isn't about sufficiency of evidence though; it's about evidence vs. self-evidence.

But how do you take it beyond that? How do you extend it to observations, to the universe, to reality? There are two choices there:

> Most of us also posses pragmatism as a self-evident belief.

"Most" people don't think about it at all. "Most" people are content to think their smartphones are magic. Scientists aren't most people. I'm no most people. And if you're thinking about this topic enough to have this conversation, you're not most people in this respect either. So let's look beyond the pragmatism of "not thinking about epistemology and empiricism won't get me eaten by a tiger, so why bother" and get on with the conversation.

I do consider the possibility the universe is a simulation, or that I'm a brain in a jar being fed stimulus (Actually it's hard to distinguish that testably from surfing reddit, but I digress.) Why not? But those avenues of thought don't lead very far; I feel I've considered them sufficiently. They haven't lead to useful insights yet (saving perhaps the holographic principle), but I remain open to the possibility. Pragmatism has it's place; you can't philosophies if you don't pay attention to things like not dying, but that's evidence for its necessity, not its sufficiency. Think further.

> Why is the sky blue? Because you see it as blue. How do you know that it actually is blue? You don't, but you [presumably] find it self-evidently more rational to assume that what you see is representative of reality, via pragmatism, or a similar philosophy.

And this is where I differ vastly from your preconceived notions of me. I believe the sky is blue because, when I was nine, I built a crude spectroscope and measured it (It's actually mostly white, by the way, with a small but significant increase in the intensity of blue light over what is expected of black-body radiation. Not counting sunset of course. And neglecting absorption lines - I was in third grade, the thing wasn't precise enough for that!)

So that's evidence the sky is blue (and that I was an unusual kid), not "self-evidence." Although in this case, actually observing the sky with your eyes is still evidence; our eyes may be flawed in many ways, but they are sufficient for distinguishing between at least a few million gradations between 390-700 nm wavelengths. That's quite sufficient for narrowing it down to "blue."

That's exactly what I mean about what people consider "self-evidence" actually being evidence they've seen so often they've forgotten it's evidence. You note the approximate visible wavelength of the sky many times a day; it's actually quite well established by repeated observation that (barring systematic errors in our visual processes) it's blue.

> But, if someone did not share this self-evident belief, they would find it quite irrational to assume that the sky is indeed blue in reality, as opposed to merely in your perception of it.

So let's say this happened - let's say someone said the sky was green. Well, there are two possibilities, and we can distinguish between them by showing them other objects with similar emission or reflection spectra. One is that they see these other purportedly blue objects as green. No problem! They simply use "green" to mean "blue." Half a billion people use azul instead, so this is no big deal.

The other possibility is that every other blue thing we can test looks blue to this person, but they still insist the sky is green. This again leads to two possibilities. One is that the sky really is green just for this individual and most of what we have determined about reality is false. The other is that this person has a psychological condition that makes him believe the sky is green. Do we have to accept that the sky is simply self-evidently green to him? Nope! Science!

Put him in a room, and through one slit allow in natural sunlight, and through another match the spectrum of solar light with artificial light as closely as possible. Vary which slit is which. Can this person regularly identify the "green" sky? (specifically compared to control groups?) If not, we can conclude he sees the sky as green due to a psychological condition, not something indicative of reality. This is surprisingly common - just read up on dowsing for instance. There are people convinced they can detect water with sticks, but every one of them fail in tests to do so at rates above random chance. (Dowsers got away with this in old days because when you dug a well, you'd only have to hit a state-sized aquifer.)

The alternative, if he can regularly identify the sky slit as green, and assuming that other possibilities have been excluded, is that reality really doesn't work the way we think it does. Maybe he's a separate brain in a separate jar. Maybe light waves like certain people better. Maybe what we thought were photons were just faeries and they're screwing with us for fun. Whatever the case, though, we'd now have evidence for it. Not "self-evidence" but actual evidence.

Now, you can argue that maybe reality doesn't matter - maybe that person's psychological condition that makes him see a green sky is just as important as the blue sky. Maybe it makes him happier or donate to charity more or whatever, so we should leave him alone. All fine arguments, but they would be separate discussions.

From your other link:

> I also concluded that by logic, existence itself is uncaused.

That remains to be seen. Well-tested theories still leave open other possibilities; though obviously we haven't yet tested these possibilities. But since your basis for belief, according to the other thread, was on the necessity of an uncaused creation in violation of natural laws, I thought you might be interested to know that there are some hypothesis regarding said creation that fit within those laws.

English.
Cosmos is written By Carl Sagan. Amazon sure has it.
If not, google it. It's pretty popular/famous book.
 
I guess you're pretty young because you didn't recognize Carl Sagan.
Carl Sagan was american researcher, astronomer and educator, very famous in public because his involvement as host/narator for Cosmos TV Series.
The new Cosmos TV Series is being hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson btw.
 

If you have finished Cosmos, read his sci-fi Novel "Contact"
Really good.
Ridiculously good.
Same book was adapted to movie with same title :
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/
Starring Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey

 
Interesting trivia:
Carl Sagan is also the one who design/head committee of Voyager Golden Record.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
His legacy literally will go on forever, unless it bump into celestial object :)

 
I'm glad you found the beauty in old literature.
Huge fans of Agatha Christie myself.

 
edit (add Amazon link):
https://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Carl-Sagan/dp/0345331354

If you want to go the self teaching route there are some great books you can get. A nice introduction is: http://www.amazon.com/Astronomy-Self-Teaching-Guide-Wiley-Guides/dp/0470230835/ref=pd_sim_b_1

Beyond that there's this book: http://www.amazon.com/Astrophysics-Easy-Introduction-Astronomer-Practical/dp/1852338903/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367595032&sr=1-1&keywords=astrophysics+is+easy It gets way more in depth. This book will leave you with a really great understanding of the universe.

It looks like about.com has a free intro to astronomy course: http://space.about.com/cs/astronomy101/a/astro101a.htm

I haven't gone through this course but poking through it it looks like it covers a lot of information.

Something I do to stay on top of current astronomy issues is read Sky and Telescope magazine and check out space.com and universetoday.com, sometimes I'll run into concepts that I'm not very familiar with and that's where wikipedia helps out.

Let's say you read an article talking about how old a star in a globular cluster is and you're like "what the hell is a globular cluster?" and you haven't read about it in one of your intro to astronomy books, well, bam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globular_cluster

The books that are regularly considered the best introductions to skywatching are:

Nightwatch by Terrence Dickinson

Backyard Astronomer's Guide by T. Dickinson
and

Turn Left at Orion by Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis (you must get this book if you buy a telescope)

Below are some other great books that get much more in depth on the astrophysics side of things.

http://www.amazon.com/Briefer-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553385461/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367595413&sr=1-1&keywords=a+briefer+history+of+time

http://www.amazon.com/Cosmology-Short-Introduction-Peter-Coles/dp/019285416X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367595478&sr=1-2&keywords=cosmology

There's a lot of fun and interesting physics and astronomy that can be understood with little more than solid algebra skills. Add a little bit of introductory calculus, and there's a lot to keep you busy. If you're brave enough to dive into calc, I recommend this book.

Since you expressed particular interest in Astronomy, I would suggest using that as an anchor point. Get a good Astrophysics text like An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Carroll and start there. Inevitably, you will come upon concepts that you're shaky on-- luckily this is the age of the internet! I find HyperPhysics is a great resource (which appears to be down at the moment).

If you find that Newtonian physics is tripping you up, I recommend Basic Physics: A Self-Teaching Guide to fill in the gaps.

Audio Books are your friend, like seriously pick up something to listen to.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman


The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

"What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character


The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene


The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene


The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene


Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration by Michio Kaku

Einstein's Cosmos: How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time: Great Discoveries by Michio Kaku


The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind (This one I recommend on the highest degree, personally I have read it 3 times)


A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe by Stephen W. Hawking


Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan


Contact by Carl Sagan


Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

All these books I've listened to or read, and I recommend all of them some more then others, I have tons more about Quantum Mechanics, Physics, Biology, Cosmology, Astronomy, Math etc. But I'm to lazy to list all of them here.

"An elegant universe" by Brian Greene is a good read. It leans more towards string/superstring theory. "The science of interstellar" also touches on some concepts related to quantum mechanics.

I know that you asked for books but "PBS Spacetime" is a YouTube channel that does a great job explaining quantum mechanics. "Veritasium" is another great channel with a few videos explaining phenomena as well. I posted links below. Physics is dope. Happy hunting!

An elegant universe:
https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Universe-Superstrings-Dimensions-Ultimate/dp/039333810X

The science of interstellar:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393351378/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502885214&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=the+physics+of+interstellar&dpPl=1&dpID=41Ii8OmMy0L&ref=plSrch

PBS Spacetime:
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g

Veritasium:
https://m.youtube.com/user/1veritasium

I'm a physics student excited to take astrophysics this fall semester. We're using the Big Orange Book (Intro to Modern Astrophysics by Carroll and Ostlie, 2nd ed.), which, according to many around here, seems to be a great text. My copy came in the mail today but I'm wondering if I got a counterfeit.

There are a few reasons I am suspicious. The cover is a faded and uneven shade of orange, the print appears low quality on close inspection, the binding is glued, and the overall feel of the book falls short of most textbooks I've used. Additionally, the book shipped new, from Malaysia (with a customs value of $25).

I bought the book from Abebooks (specifically not an international edition) and am hoping for a refund. Just to be sure though, would anyone be willing to take pictures of their copy for me to compare? I am specifically interested in color, the binding as seen while the book is closed, and how well the print on the cover aligns with the spine.

I'm hoping this is a book I keep for a while, so I want to make sure I have a copy that will last! Thanks for your help!

> I know counter points to the popular atheist verses

Umm, are you talking about the bible? Those are biblical verses, not atheist verses, unless you're saying god inspired atheist verses!

Anyway, that sounds like a challenge:

So, okay, what's the counter point to Luke placing the birth of Jesus^[1] at least a decade after Matthew did^[2]

[1] During the claimed (but nonexistent) Census of Quirinius - Quirinius wasn't governor of Syria until at least 6AD

[2] During the reign of Herod, 4BC at the latest

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius

I'd love to know.

I have a bunch of others (some tougher), but that one will do.

---

Your reasons for lacking belief in a god are sound - and actually shared by a very large number of people here.

> However I don't feel like any of the current scientific creation theories have any merit.

Which theories are those? (Edit/hint: the big bang is not a 'creation theory')

You might find this book interesting reading, however. It does touch on ideas that are relevant.

> doesn't want to be an atheist.

What do your desires have to do with anything? Unless you're magic, what's true doesn't conform to your wishes.

Amen.

But seriously, I grew up going to a Grace Gospel church and reading Chick tracts till the age of 13. I was steeped in holy logic, but was always a smart kid with good parents than encouraged me to read...

I discovered Michio Kaku and started reading voraciously on the Straight Dope message boards around age 16. It was a pretty fast dawning on me that there was much more to the universe than what was explained by the christian bible.

To this day, it still bothers me to write words like 'god', 'bible', and 'gospel' without capital letters... But through it all, I credit the internet (non-caps) with the reason that I'm now an agnostic skeptic who set aside a traditional degree in favor of a philosophy major. Now I'm in medical school and interviewing for jobs next summer... haven't met god yet, just people with real pain, love, ignorance, and desire to just feel good in life.

No particular order:

Blind Descent by James M. Tabor. It is a great book about cave exploration and the race to discover the worlds deepest supercave.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Are you interested in the universe and how it all happened? This gives some pretty insightful answers.

From Eternity To Here by Sean Carrol. A really interesting view on the nature and concept of time and how it relates to the us and the universe. It can get a bit deep from time to time, but I found it fascinating.

Adventures Among Ants by Mark W. Moffet. It's about ants. Seriously. Ants.

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. A first hand account of the ill-fated Scott expedition to the south pole in 1911-1912. Even after reading the book I cannot imagine what those men went through.

Bonus book: The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. Human intelligence and how it evolved. Some really interesting stuff about the brain and how it works. A very enjoyable read.

I actually see a lot of parallels between your situation and where I found myself at your age. It was 14 or 15 that I really developed an interest in science, because before that I hadn't really been properly exposed before that. Fast forward 6 or 7 years, I'm now a third year university student studying physics and I love it; I'll be applying to PhD programs next fall.

Like you, astronomy (by which I broadly mean astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, etc.) was what really caught my attention. In school, I liked all the sciences and had always been good at math (calculus was by far one of my favorite high school courses because the science can be pretty watered down).

If you're interested in learning more about astrophysics, I would recommend any one of a number of books. The first book on the topic that I read was Simon Singh's Big Bang; I read a couple Brian Greene books, namely The Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos; I read Roger Penrose's Cycles of Time, and finally Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Also, I bought a book by Hawking and one by Michio Kaku that, to this day, sit on a shelf at my parents' house unread. I would recommend Singh's book as a nice book that should be at your level, and in fact it was the one recommended to me by some professors who I bugged with questions about the universe when I was around your age. Also, Bryson's book is a good survey look at a lot of different scientific topics, not just astrophysics/cosmology specific; I enjoyed it quite a lot.

As far as reaching out to people, I would recommend trying to connect with some scientists via email. That's what I did, and they were more responsive than I expected (realize that some of the people will simply not respond, probably because your email will get buried in their inbox, not out of any ill-will towards you).

At this point, I'll just stop writing because you've more than likely stopped reading, but if you are still reading this, I'd be more than happy to talk with you about science, what parts interest(ed) me, etc.

Hmm. Well, I really like Codyslab on youtube. He has some intersting stuff. Vihart uses to make some creative math videos back in the day.

If you want books, Richard Feynman wrote a bunch that are great. My favorite is "Surely you must be joking, Mr Feynman!" Which covers such adventutes as cracking the safes of the Manhattan project, sleeping on a bench the first day of his professorship, and his eureka moment with quantum electrodynamics!

A good textbook for a little light reading is the Big Orange Book, or the BOB. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Astrophysics-2nd/dp/0805304029 It is a good intro to all different subjects on astrophysics, and if you take it in college, this may be one of the books you need to get. Some solutions can be found online for it too ;)

Some here will disagree, yet I think your cause is a noble one.

My suggestion would be to keep encouraging her to be a freethinker, question everything, and learn all she can about science. If she can be at a point where she understands that "science is more than a body of knowledge, it is a way of thinking" (Carl Sagan), if she can fall in love with the wonders of the creation of the universe and the evolution of life on this world, then you'll be done, as those things will show any thinking person the absurdity of religion as a moral compass.

If she likes to read, here are some books you might consider getting for her:

• The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. An amazing argument for the use the scientific way of thinking in every aspect of our lives.
  
  
• A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. How math and science can fully explain the creation of the universe, and a powerful argument against the universe needing a creator.
  
  
• The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. The subtitle is The Evidence for Evolution. Meant as a book for readers your sister's age. Big plus is that if she likes it, she may want to read The God Delusion and/or The Magic of Reality.
  
  Edit: grammar

Go slow. There are some good resources available to help you out. For your personal experience level etc, I can't recommend the book Nightwatch by Terrance Dickinson highly enough! It covers everything from basic astrophysics (like the scale of the universe, how big those stars really are out there, the life cycle of stars, some basics of why orbits are the way they are) to super basic star charts (identifying major constellations) and observing tips (what cool objects easy to find objects are in each constellation) to what the differences between telescope designs are. Nothing is above a 12th grade science level and it'd be really easy to slow things up for an 8y.o. + be a handy reference for her deeper curiosity for at least a while (I know I am a voracious consumer of knowledge... aka, a huge nerd, myself). You might even luck out and find a copy in your local library! My tiny rural college town's local library had a copy.

There is also a nice little youtube series called "Eye in the Sky" which are little, entertaining 10 minute segments about what interesting objects are in the sky for this week.

Others have already mentioned it but join an astronomy club and download Stellarium. Here's a couple book suggestions:
Turn Left at Orion will get you familiar with some of the more interesting objects to look at in the night's sky. This is definitely a good place to start. You also want to pick up a star atlas to help you navigate the sky and find some of the dimmer objects in the sky. A favorite is Sky and Telescope's Pocket Star Atlas. Another favorite for new astronomers is Nightwatch which will educate you a bit more about astronomical bodies and the night sky.

We're delighted to announce that r/SpaceX will be hosting an AMA with Dr. Robert Zubrin! The event will take place in its own dedicated thread this Saturday, November 23rd at 12:00 Pacific Time, which is 20:00UTC. As you may already know, Dr. Z's book The Case for Mars was a significant early influence on SpaceX's Mars colonization plans. His recent IAC2019 Mars Direct 2.0 presentation generated some good discussion here.

This is happening for real! We've been in contact with representatives of the Mars Society and Dr. Zubrin himself. We are very thankful to everyone involved for giving us their time and attention.

We'll collect the top few questions from this thread and repost them in the dedicated AMA thread on Saturday. Everyone will of course be welcome to ask their own questions in the AMA thread as well. Dr. Z will probably stick around answering questions for a few days.

Just to reiterate, this is NOT the actual AMA thread! That will be created a few hours before the AMA begins on Saturday.

>You seem to be saying entirely different things each time you comment on this point.

I am saying the same thing. Philosophers, particularly before the advent of modern science, have often become so dedicated to concepts that they make faulty assertions about the natural world. Concepts derived from a limited understanding become impediments. Grand metaphysical systems of the past may impress with their internal consistency and complexity, but they do not describe the natural world with the accuracy or usefulness of modern scientific theories.

>but rather whether it is sound.

Soundness implies truth of the propositions used as premises in the argument. How would one test the premises of metaphysical arguments about prime movers and such? While I admit that such arguments may be interesting or internally consistent or even valid to the extent that they do not violate the rules of deduction, they are still built on definitions that do not allow for testing against the natural world and are thus not sound.

>No, physics doesn't suggest anything like this.

Lawrence Krauss would disagree.

>The ontological argument...

Depends on the definition of 'great' and whether such definition does or does not include existence. Descartes' goes on to include 'clear and distinct' ideas of supreme beings. These are very muddy concepts and to say 'well I guess god exists because this proof is valid' just seems silly by the standards of modern science. Grenlins exist because I have defined them as the 'greenest thing' and it is greener to exist than not to.

>science of course relying on the methods of logic.

Science relies on observation. Such observation has at times shown a world that does not conform with traditional notions of logic. It is the strength of science that it adapts to what is observed rather than attempting to squeeze the data into an accepted dogma.

>you seem to regard the meaning of time as being limited to physics

The OP asked about time in regard to cosmology which I believe is best dealt with by physics for reasons stated. If you mean by the 'meaning of time' how one experiences time, how it relates to human affairs, etc., then 'yes' other disciplines, from art to sociology, may have something to say.

Find a used version of Carroll & Ostlie and read it cover to cover. Bits of it might get too in-depth depending on your experience, but then you can branch off and find other resources for those areas that interest you. The NED Knowledgebase is also fun to read and I recommend AstroBites to keep up on current literature until you feel comfortable delving directly into publications. Have fun! :)

Nice! Well, I would definitely recommend he read some Carl Sagan (Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot) and Steven Hawking (Brief History of Time, The Grand Design, etc.). Looks like there's a really good book out since 3 days ago called, The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne. This would be a really good book to get him. I picked up a pretty old Astronomy textbook a while ago for a really cheap price that I'm going to look over a bit, but I don't know of any specific ones to recommend. Here's an awesome PDF I got from a redditor who was offering an eBook and PDF of his book for free to anyone who asked: http://docdroid.net/kyjz

This is - in dept - a difficult question for me to answer. Time itself is very hard to define as an isolated concept and books, like for example written by the great mind of our time Stephen Hawking, are written about it. This is a quote from the book 'Ibn 'Arabi - Time and Cosmology', (page 24):

>"...time is one of the most fundamental issues in philosophy and cosmology, since the whole of existence is nothing but consecutive series of events in time. Everybody feels time, but most people do not question it because it is commonly experienced every day in many things and is so familiar. However, it is far more difficult to understand the philosophical nature of time and its characteristics.

>Throughout the history of philosophy, many opposing views have emerged to discuss and describe the different aspects of time, and some novel hypotheses have eventually emerged in modern cosmology. However, it is still the dream of every physicist to unveil the reality of time, especially since all modern theories have come to the conclusion that time is the key."

When I would try to explain the concept of time to anyone, I would first of all state that we humans have our limitations. We do not know, other than that what we perceive. I would not have known that time is relative, if it were not for Einstein and Hawking to back-up their theories. Note that we are still scratching the surface, since I try to answer your question, without going into matters like what CERN does and what the effects of their assumptions and conclusions will have on widely accepted theories in modern day science, or for example the Higgs boson (he named it the 'God particle') and what this means for our basic understanding of concepts like cosmos and time.

I think that your question originates from not understanding the concept that Allah is not his creation. So everything that we observe, is within the creation of Allah and it is very hard (it would seem impossible, if not for the mercy - of knowing him - that he send down upon us) to define anything that is outside of his creation.

A chemistry professor in Stuttgard, which is a converted Christian himself, said about time: "Allah creates all of his creation again in every small instant". The same professor said that modern western scientists only recently made a shift in thinking about time, while 'Ibn 'Arabi (which I mentioned earlier) expressed such theories in his time already. The professor could make this conclusion, because he is an active member of fora where his peers post, discuss and promote the newest theories, and for example the papers they write, on these subjects.

> Especially considering my limited knowledge on physics, but I would like some kind of introduction to string theory.

Okay, the first thing you should do is read a classic in the field on a level you can understand now. I recommend The Elegant Universe. After that I would read books like it until you have taken some calculus and linear algebra.

After you have learned some calculus and linear algebra, I think you could work through this book which to be honest is the most approachable string theory book out there. You learn a lot of complex topics written so that anyone with the basic math skills I described could work through them. Literally every step in derivations and examples are spelled out or you with explanations.

After that, I recommend David Tong's lectures that are as advanced as any graduate text but are much more readable than any other graduate text.

Square one...

You should have a solid base in math:

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis, Vol. 1 by Courant and John. Gotta have some basic knowledge of calculus.

Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Mary Boas. This is pretty high-level applied math, but it's the kind of stuff you deal with in serious physics/astrophysics.

You should have a solid base in physics:

They Feynman Lectures on Physics. Might be worth checking out. I think they're available free online.

You should have a solid base in astronomy/astrophysics:

The Physical Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy by Frank Shu. A bit outdated but a good textbook.

An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Carroll and Ostlie.

Astrophysics: A Very Short Introduction by James Binney. I haven't read this and there are no reviews, I think it was very recently published, but it looks promising.

It also might be worth checking out something like Coursera. They have free classes on math, physics, astrophysics, etc.

If you want a rigorous basic understanding of astrophysics, you need a couple of years of college-level math and physics. If you are the sort who can learn difficult material on your own, they have textbooks at libraries. These topics go into it:

Math: Presumably you had the full track of algebra and trigonometry, so then you need single and multivariable calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra.

Physics: Newtonian mechanics, heat and electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics.

You also need statistics, which I would advise learning the basics of before trying to learn quantum mechanics. Chemistry is nice to have too, but isn't essential except for certain topics.

Once you have this background, there are introductory astrophysics textbooks you can read. In fact, you might just want to browse through one at a library just to see what it's like. The one I learned from in college was pretty great:

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Astrophysics-2nd/dp/0805304029

Even without completing the entire background knowledge, you can pick up some fascinating things reading a book like that.

• Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan is a great overview of the science of statistics, without being too much like a lecture. After reading it, you'll have a better understanding of what statistics are just silly (like in ads or clickbait news) and what are actually important (like in scientific studies).
  
  
• You on a Diet by Roizen and Oz is touted as a diet book, and it kind of is. I recommend it because it's a great resource for basic understanding the science behind the gastrointestinal system, and how it links to the brain.
  
  
• All of Mary Roach's books are excellent overviews of science currently being done, I've read Stiff (the science of human bodies, post-mortem), Spook ("science tackles the afterlife"), Packing for Mars (the science of humans in space), and Bonk (sex), and they are all very easy to understand, but scientifically appropriate. I'm sure "Gulp" is good too, although I haven't read that one yet.
  
  
• "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming" by Mike Brown is a great, accessible overview of exactly why Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet, told by the man who started the controversy.
  
  
• "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking is a little denser, material-wise, but still easy to understand (as far as theoretical physics goes, at least!). Hawking explains the history of physics and the universe, as well as the future of the discipline. While there is a bit more jargon than some pop-science books, I think an entry-level scientist can still read and understand this book.
  

You can't go wrong with a Dobsonian in the 6"-8"-10" range. At the lower end they'll be less expensive and more portable, but at the higher end you'll be able to see more.

http://www.telescope.com/Telescopes/Dobsonian-Telescopes/Classic-Dobsonians/pc/1/c/12/13.uts

I have an Orion 8" Dobsonian. They also sell Intelliscope models that will assist you in finding objects. I like finding things on my own, by star-hopping, but it takes a little patience and experience. These books will help:

http://www.amazon.com/Turn-Left-Orion-Hundreds-Telescope/dp/0521153972

http://www.amazon.com/NightWatch-Practical-Guide-Viewing-Universe/dp/155407147X

I recommend getting one with at least two eyepieces, or at least one eyepiece and a Barlow, so you'll have a choice of magnifications.

And whether or not you get a telescope, a pair of binoculars is a good thing to have. 7x50s are nice and easy to use without a tripod. 10x50s will show you a little more but are a little harder to hold steady. Anything larger and you'll probably want a tripod for them. I have 10x50s and am considering getting these:

http://www.amazon.com/Celestron-SkyMaster-Binoculars-Tripod-Adapter/dp/B00008Y0VN

Start here.

Then go here.

When you're ready for the real thing, start reading this.

If you want to become an expert, go here.

Edit: Between steps 2 and 3, get a physics degree. You need to understand basically all of physics before you can understand anything properly in General Relativity. Sorry...

Edit 2: If you really want a full list of topics to understand before tackling general relativity, the bare minimum is special relativity (the easier bit) and tensor calculus on pseudo-Riemannian manifolds (extremely difficult). I'd strongly advise a deep understanding of differential equations in general, and continuum mechanics in particular. Some knowledge of statistical mechanics and the covariant formulation of electromagnetism would be pretty helpful too. It is also essential to realize that general relativity is still poorly understood by professionals, and almost certainly breaks down at large energy densities. I strongly advise just taking a look at the first two links I posted, since that will give you an excellent and non-dumbed-down flavour of general relativity.

Looking on their website it seems as if they do not let outside people borrow from their library, sorry :(.

I know many libraries have "partnerships" for the lack of a better word, where if you try to borrow a book from the library, and they don't have it, they will request it from somewhere else they are partnered with and get it for you.

Some ideas of books:

For my undergraduate astrophysics class I used - Foundations of Astrophysics by Ryden and Peterson, ISBN13: 978-0-321-59558-4

I have also used (more advanced, graduate level) - An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Carroll and Ostlie, ISBN13: 978-0-805-30402-2

There are plenty of other undergraduate text books for astrophysics, but those are the only two I have experience with.

Some other books that may be just fun reads and aren't text books:

A Brief History of Time - Hawking

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter - Feynman

Random popular science books:

Parallel Worlds - Kaku (or anything else by him Michio Kaku)

Cosmos - Sagan

Dark Cosmos - Hooper

or anything by Green, Krauss, Tyson, etc.

Videos to watch:

I would also suggest, if you have an hour to burn, watching this video by Lawrence Krauss. I watched it early on in my physics career and loved it, check it out:

Lawrence Krauss - A Universe From Nothing

Also this video is some what related:

Sean Carroll - Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time

Hope you enjoy!

Edit: Formatting.

Have you read The Case For Mars ?

It completely lays out an affordable, technologically feasible (not even any "moonshot"-level technological development required) plan to visit mars. A series of missions which would each cost less than the yearly NASA budget.

Why isn't NASA doing this already? I won't spoil it too much (you should read the book! PM me your email and I'll happily send you a kindle copy), but, Zubrin attributes most of the problem to NASA administrators being too entrenched and too set in their ways. NASA money is thrown around as the biggest pork-barrel by the congress because many congressmen see NASA as being worthless besides providing their districts with jobs. Very similar things happen with military spending where bases are kept open and projects (planes/tanks/etc) continue to be ordered after their useful lifetime and after it makes sense to do so, simply because congressmen fear the economic impact. Trump understands this waste and sees privatization as a path to correcting this issue. Helping the economic recovery will avoid this too, there's no reason to keep that NASA or military factory open making things we don't need anymore if the people can just go across the street and get jobs at the new Carrier AC factory, right :).

That leads well into my next point, keep in mind also, the only way we have money for expanded spending on things like mars missions is if we fix our economy. That said, any good leader understand the value of inspiration. I have no evidence to support this, and I'm not suggesting that I do, but I wouldn't rule out a moonshot-style proclamation from Trump. Its the type of grand vision that he has and its something amazing he could do that could actually HAPPEN (as-in, humans walking on Mars) before the end of his 2nd term.

I'm listening to the JFK speech now in the background and just chills. I (way) missed out on the moon shot race. I really do hope I get to see us (humanity) land on Mars and I would really love for America to have that kind of leadership again and be the one to do it.

Physics is very cool and awe-inspiring - I’ve always had a big interest in it as well! Since people have already supplied you with some answers to your question, I thought I’d give you a book suggestion: Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/dp/0375727205/ref=asc_df_0375727205/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=266033622375&hvpos=1o2&hvnetw=g&hvrand=2170571332209706386&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9019289&hvtargid=pla-436179468378&psc=1. This book changed the way I look at the world. Brian Greene does an incredible job at explaining complex topics in an understandable and exciting way (not like a textbook - actually feels like you are reading a story). And there is even pretty extensive notes if you want to take a deeper dive. His TED Talks are great as well - and so are his other books!

There are some amazing answers above me Calamitizer's being exeptional in my opinion but I thought I would try my hand at answering.

Given your discussion of black holes I want to point out that a black hole and other singularities are the ultimate barrier, the smallest 'point'. A Schwarzschild black hole exists theoretically as a point surrounded by an event horizon. The event horizon is what you would actually see and it would appear much larger, however this event horizon is just a visible boundary, it is the radius (from the black hole) at which the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light.

If you haven't read it A Brief History of time is a great book and explains black holes and their functioning in great detail.

I'm a pretty big chemistry nerd, and if my brother were to buy me another chem textbook, I'd thank him politely and then toss the book on my shelf. A gift in a similar vein might be A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. It is pretty short, but it is as close to "reading for enjoyment" as you can get when it comes to astrophysics.

If you're willing to not buy him a book, simplemathtome had a pretty good idea of a drink set. Besides buying the actual "lab themed" set, it isn't too hard to find relatively cheap pyrex lab glassware around. It is often expensive new, but you can find some pretty cheap. Craigslist/garage sales/thrift shops/ebay/amazon(seriously) are good places to start, over the years I've accumulated my own little lab setup, I have a few erlenmeyers (50mL for shots, 500mL for beers!), a volumetric flask, a couple beakers, a round bottom, and a florence flask, all Pyrex or Kimax. I got a few of them used from places where they were unsure of the previous owner, so those ones I use as flower vases / decorative / just cool to have. Something just feels wrong drinking out of lab glassware if you aren't absolutely sure where its been.

tl;dr I'd think it was way cooler if my bro bought me a pyrex erlenmeyer shotglass than a textbook.

I'm not qualified to make a recommendation on basic physics, but here are some of the best examples of science writing I've come across for the other subjects you've listed:

1. Scientific History and Chemistry - The Invention of Air, by Steven Johnson. This book is about Joseph Priestley, and his contribution to the discovery of oxygen. Priestley was incredibly prolific, and made a ton of contributions to completely unrelated fields. It also touches on why science started to really take off at this point in history, and the necessary conditions for good science to occur.
   
   
2. Natural Sciences - Why Evolution Is True. Jerry Coyne takes a college-level biology class on evolution, and condenses it into a single book. It is very easy to understand, even if you don't have a biology background.
   
   
3. Scientific History and Astronomy - The Big Bang by Simon Singh. This is probably the best popular science book I've ever read. A lot of these books will tell you how scientists think the universe works, and stop there. This book is different, it explains the reasons why scientists think the universe is a particular way, and lays out the history of how these ideas changed during the development of astronomy.

Lawrence Krauss has done ground breaking research on what may have initiated the big bang. I don't know what you are calling the "timeless unknown," but there are forms of energy beyond the outskirts of our universe that can cause "Big bangs." There maybe many universes beyond our ability and instruments.


https://smile.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468?sa-no-redirect=1

>Science is limited by the human mind and the senses through which the human mind perceives the universe.

Science most definitely is not limited to the human senses as our instruments have allowed us to observe much more. Much of science is actually quite contrary to our senses.

Sure it is limited by the human mind but there are many minds in history that have made amazing discoveries that the ordinary minds did not.

Also not a big fan of the word magical to describe things outside of fiction. It is very non-specific and has implications, whether you mean it or not. Very counterproductive in a debate forum.

>There is another way to explore and discover and this is the inner dimension which is ultimately non physical.

What's an inner dimension and what have you discovered about it? The human mind is quite creative and sees patterns where they don't exist and is quite capable of fabrication of whole worlds of things. How will you prove your so called, "inner dimension?"

Heavens-above.com is also a good website for getting star maps. A potentially useful book isNightWatch. This is the one specifically, I am not saying buy it from amazon, just to give you an idea. It has some good basic astronomy concepts as well as telescope basics. Also, look for local star parties. You'll be able to find a lot of people who know a lot of good tips. Enjoy and happy stargazing!

Things you'll want:
This book: http://www.amazon.com/Turn-Left-Orion-Hundred-Telescope/dp/0521781906/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324830331&sr=1-3

Teflon pads as it is likely the pads on your dob suck and will make moving it suck as well.

A high field of view set of optics. I recommend any of the following (I have an 8" dob, you want a good wide-angle eye piece as it makes viewing a pleasure. Magnification is far from all important, esp. with a small telescope).

• http://www.universityoptics.com/eyepieces.html
  
• http://www.optcorp.com/ProductList.aspx?uid=30-718-1044-1046 (Baader planetarium)
  
• When picking out eye pieces, consider the magnification you'll get with your telescope (equations found online), the eye relief (bigger tends to be easier to use, basically how far your eye needs to be from the lens to be in focus), and the field of view (just how much of the sky you'll see).
  
  You need to collomate your telescope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collimated_light. Basically, your telescope's mirror is likely very off center. A dobsonian like what you have is two mirrors, the main mirror (the big one), and the little post mirror that reflects light off the main mirror into your eye piece. You need a laser collomator that will shine a light from the eye piece into the telescope. If your telescope was properly collomated, the laser would bounce off of the post mirror, hit the dead center of the main mirror, reflect back onto the post mirror, and back into the collomator. Look online for more information.
  
  Lastly, you probably want a Telrad. It makes pointing your telescope very, very simple, and almost eliminates the need to use a finder scope. http://www.amazon.com/Telrad-Finder-Sight/dp/B0000ALKAN (you don't need any accessories for this. Its wonderful).
  
  Happy stargazing!
  
  Edit: feel the need to qualify why I suggest Teflon pads. your telescope moves around on two axises, up and down, and left and right. Unlike a "conventional" refractor telescope (the ones that we think of as a good "my first telescope"), a lot of weight is placed on those bottom pads. If you replace the pads that came with your telescope's base with teflon pads, it will make it a lot easier to move it along that particular axis, asthere is less friction.

My favorites are:
The Backyard Astronomer's Guide, http://www.amazon.com/Backyard-Astronomers-Guide-Terence-Dickinson/dp/1554073448

A Guide to Backyard Astronomy (I found this one at a 2nd hand bookstore, not sure if it's still in print. This is my absolute favorite because of some great starhopping tours they put in the back)
http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Backyard-Astronomy-Starhopping-Exploring/dp/187701933X

EDIT: Here's an example of one of the starhop tours in A Guide to Backyard Astronomy. http://imgur.com/a/enXLO
The icons clearly indicate whether the target is a naked eye, binocular, or telescope object.

Of course there's the ubiquitous Turn Left at Orion. I can't say much about it since I've never actually gotten around to reading it. http://www.amazon.com/Turn-Left-Orion-Hundreds-Telescope/dp/0521153972

Alternatively, check out http://eyesonthesky.com/
as well as Mr. Fuller's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/eyesontheskyDOTcom

The "Basics" playlists are damn good, and unlike a lot of other sources, the practical demonstrations on video make things super clear to understand.

I know this isn't what you're looking for, but I looked into this quite a bit when I used to go out stargazing myself. In all honesty apps aren't the best for this properly.

If the 2 of you are actually getting interested in the night sky then I would say buy yourself the Turn Left at Orion book.

Stellarium is an amazing free computer program that you can use to do your homework beforehand and see what you'll actually be looking at that night.

Some cheap binoculars and tripod would add a lot to the experience as well.

----------

As for the answer to the question you're actually asking:

Google Sky Maps is what you need for some quick and dirty casual sky scanning.

The other must have app is Astro Panel. It'll tell you when sky viewing conditions are good (it's pointless going out when conditions are terrible and not really seeing much)

-------------

If the trip is to go out and set the mood to make a move on a girl you like then all of this will only get in the way and there's a lot to be said for just going out with a picnic blanket and a warm blanket to look at the plain night sky to set the mood.

You could look up when there's a meteor shower to give you something to see without any equipment or sky map.

Carroll and Ostlie might work as a good starting point for you. It's introductory, covers a lot of material, and doesn't assume you've already done all the standard physics major's coursework.

An alternative to look at might be Astrophysics for Physicists, by Choudhuri.

There's also Essential Astrophysics, by Lang.

(Carroll and Ostlie is probably the "default" textbook, but I'd recommend either of the others more, if they suit your level.)

(A useful trick, for any topic, is to search for course notes on professors' webpages. You can often find really nice things out there. Here is an especially nice example. Even just finding syllabi can point you at textbooks and recommended references.)

If you enjoy video lectures, Caltech has courses at edx (astronomy/cosmology aimed at non-majors) and Coursera (galaxies and cosmology, introductory-for-majors perhaps?) Cornell has relativity+astrophysics at edx, though I'd say it's heavier on relativity. Australia National University has a series of four at edx, covering astronomy and cosmology. I'm not sure what's available soon through Coursera, but they've offered quite a few astro courses in the past.

>No, we're talking about the general idea of an intelligent creator. How come something came up of nothing?

Thats where you are ;dont want to call wrong; but have a different view. There needs to be a beginning, a backstory with an intelligent creator too if there is one right?

To begin with; the universe might not even need an intelligent creator. Human's universe and time perceptions might be different than what we are thinking right now.

http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-origin-of-the-universe.html

Its the same thing with myths; you think they are different but no. In the early history the science and technology wasnt this advanced. It was very, very basic life; sort of like animalistic. When there were lightning strikes people told eachother it was because they made the owner of the land(area, territory) angry.

2-3 thousand years ago people believed there is something like an intelligent creator, and earth is his backyard; a playspace.

Maybe 2 or 3 thousand years later people will look at us and laugh about our ideas/religions about universe and rest just like we find "lightning strikes" stuff weird, understandable; but not true.

I dont know how universe "started" for sure, there are theories about it but maybe they can change in the future; we dont know.

There is something missing in your wording too, its in grey area. Its just disbelief of religion and gods, no need to complicate it; it isnt necessarly an alternative theory to religion/gods. "Disbelief in something bigger" does not mean refusing to acknowledge anything about "beginning of universe, before the universe" stuff; its just disbelief of gods, creating creatures/testing them/punishing them/ kind of gods. And yes; gods can be your "something bigger" but also antimatter; big-bangs can be your "something bigger" in your wording. An agnostic tells me "you cant prove nonexistence of god"; but its just same like fairytales; i dont need prove to know that they arent true.

https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/about-atheism/

I also honestly dont have enough word/term knowledge to discuss these stuff advanced. You can look/search these.

https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/055338466X

I've never studied Physics beyond high school but I have the same interest as you. A few of the books I've read that might interest you include:

You Are Here - Christopher Potter

Physics of the Impossible - Michio Kaku

A Briefer History of Time - Hawking, really easy to read version

There was another one along the same lines I read recently that was pretty good too. If I remember it I'll list it later.

Hey Lawrence! Huge fan of you work, thanks for everything you do.

Here's a link to the new book he mentioned for anyone who wants to pre-order:

A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing

Well worth the $15 in my opinion, to learn about all sorts of cutting edge stuff about the nature and origin of our universe.

And here's the YouTube video to give you a taste for the content. It's a little long, sixty-five minutes total, but definitely worth it.

--

For my questions:

• What will the most important areas of physics to specialize in over the next ten-twenty years?
  
  
• What are some central debates that might be resolved in that time?
  
  
• How can we best further physics education in the US?

There's nothing really new here. Before anyone goes out and tries to use these points in an actual discussion, I just want to bring up the counter-points:

~0:18: How does it "shout" that there's a maker?
~0:21: Why does a beautiful creation necessitate a beautiful creator? (Also, define beautiful)
~0:26: Why should I listen to Einstein's assistant? Simply mentioning Einstein doesn't win any arguments
~0:30: Evolution through natural selection actually explains it pretty well
~1:24: "Before the big bang": There was no before, since the big bang was the beginning of time (I'm pretty sure Augustine pointed that out).
~1:28: See here
~2:07: He's defining the world as a "work" so he can say it had a maker
~2:45: It's not that 97% of the world is stupid, it's just that ~90% don't care
~2:55: "I don't know why there's a god instead of nothing." He's just punting the question one step down the line. What's the difference between saying you don't know why there's a god instead of nothing and saying you don't know why there's a universe instead of nothing? At least one can be studied.

I hope I don't get banned for the whole "no anti-Catholic rhetoric" rule.

NightWatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe

https://www.amazon.com/dp/155407147X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_zi5CybKCT39D1

One of my favorite books about stargazing and basic astronomy. A "must have" in my experience.

Another one as you get into binoculars or telescopes is "turn left at Orion" which is all about cool objects in the night sky, how to find them in binocs/telescopes, and what they're gonna look like. Plus lists of objects arranged by light pollution/size of telescope. It's awesome for the "what to look for tonight?" questions.

It's also suggest getting a sky chart, or sky chart software. Both have good versions available free, like Stellarium and Cartes du Ciel. Learn to set them up to mimic the sky you actually see in your area (stellarium does this by simulating light pollution, cartes let's you filter by star brightness). These will help you learn the constellations, which is how you find things up there.

Congrats on your first nebula! I'm always amazed at the ambivalence some people have about astronomical things. Years ago when comet Hale-Bopp was riding high, my ex and I had gone to visit another couple who lived in a pretty dark area. One of them knew my love of Astronomy, and asked about the comet. "It's up right now and spectacular!" was my reply.

We went outside to take a look... except for my ex, who complained that it was chilly and that she just wasn't interested. The other couple loved it, and we were out for a while looking and talking. When we went back in, my ex said "That took a while! How long does it take to look at the sky?"

BTW, you may be interested in my favorite book for small telescope owners: "Turn Left at Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope - and How to Find Them" by Guy Consolmagno.

Simon Singh explains.

edit: Hey, I didn't expect this to become the top comment. Neat. Might as well abuse it, by providing bonus material:

This is the same Simon Singh discussed in this recent and popular Reddit post; he is a superhero of science popularization. He has written some excellent and highly rated books:

• Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe
  
• The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
  
• Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem
  
• Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine
  
  (full disclosure: I have nothing to disclose, other than that I'm a fan of his work.)

Hello, fellow Sacramentan here.

Our light-polluted cities limit what we can see. But even a small telescope can bring out details that are completely invisible to our eyes. I assume by now you've looked at the Moon and planets like Jupiter and Saturn. They never cease to amaze.

The ETX-70 doesn't have a very large aperture, so it won't suck in the photons like a larger reflector or SCT. But you'll still be able to make out deep sky objects (DSOs) like the Orion Nebula, some globular clusters, Albireo, and some galaxies (faintly, on a good night).

Your scope is light and portable. Take it away from the city lights! Even a few miles outside the cities makes a huge difference.

Getting eyepieces to increase magnification doesn't always help. It makes the image larger, but also dimmer. They work better on planets and the moon, but for DSOs you want all the light you can get.

Get your hands on a copy of Turn Left at Orion. It's a fantastic guide to the night sky and includes details about what you'll be able to see through a small telescope.

Finally, think about attending one of the monthly star parties hosted by the Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society (svaa.org). They are up at Blue Canyon where it is very dark on a moonless night.

Nightwatch is a pretty good book for beginner level that I find is better for those that don't have a telescope or binoculars. Helps give you the basics.


Turn Left At Orion is another good book for beginners, but it is better if you have a telescope or pair of binoculars to get the full use out of this book. It is probably the most detailed beginner book IMO.


Sky and Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas is a very good star map to use, though it is only that.......star maps. So it is good to use once you learned the basics.

The star charts in the book "Nightwatch" are pretty good. Pretty likely you can get Nightwatch at the library, it's very common.

Google Sky (free) is really good if you have an Android Phone.

SkySafari ($3) is pretty good if you have any iOS device.

Stellarium is my favorite for PCs.

I read it a while ago now, but I really enjoyed Michio Kaku's Hyperspace, as it was beautifully written, allowing a layperson such as myself to understand what he was talking about in a very entertaining way.

Of course scientific discoveries come in leaps and bounds, so it might be a little outdated now, but I find his style of writing very informative and entertaining.

Sure.

The gold standard in intro astronomy is the Big Orange Book by Carroll and Ostlie (orange standard?). Probably not the first book to read, but if you're serious about astronomy it's essential reading.

I really like the podcast Space Time with Stuart Gary. He basically goes over recent papers, but at a level that is very approachable for non-scientists.

You may get a lot out of a non-major intro textbook. I believe that John Fix's book is the one we use at my university. There are a number of intro texts out there, I'm not an expert on which is the best. But make sure it's not more than 5 or so years old, a lot has happened in the last few years.

Also, don't let the math scare you off. You need to learn calculus, and it was hard for me, too. But, you can definitely do it.

I hope that helps!

awesome, I am currently reading The grand design and I love to go out, smoke a bowl, get to a [4] and then start reading. My mind just wanders about for ages thinking about stars and planets. It's awesome

Uptokes for you and your afternoon xD

This is an AWESOME book for beginners. It is full of information, available on Amazon (quite cheaply, I might add... at least when I bought it), and a lot of book for your money. The books contain a chapter on purchasing a telescope, but if you go with one of the older editions, just use their website for a more up-to-date telescope buying guide. The one thing it seems to lack is good star charts. Fortunately, this book is also readily/cheaply available on Amazon and is good for just that. I own both and they have been very informative. Good luck!

Wow I LOVE this!! Thanks for posting it.

I've been a fan of Tom Campbell for a few years now and I find his ideas quite compelling. His book trilogy, My Big TOE goes into great detail about these ideas. I've only been able to get through about 1/2 the first book and that was years ago. The ideas were just too "out there" for me at the time. Hmm.....maybe I should try again because it was all quite compelling.

Kinda coming late to this.

First- let me say that I have listened to this podcast on occasion, and usually enjoy it. In fact, I often find that when it does discuss women in history, it is extremely interesting because what is discussed flies in the face of a common perception of women in history (ie, that they were powerless and had no influence).

Because these particular episodes tend to be the ones most accurately described as "stuff I missed in history class"- they become the most memorable. If I were to describe the podcast to someone, I would probably mention that it often covered women in history. I wouldn't really write a letter of complaint, because... well, it would only really bother me if I felt that they were getting it wrong (and I am way too much of a history noob to really have that reaction unless we are talking about one of a very few things I have actually studied as an adult), or if I felt the presentation was deliberately partisan. It's not- and women featured in it are sometimes portrayed as protagonists, and sometimes antagonists- which makes it a somewhat refreshing take on inclusivity. In particular I remember some bit about the influence of washington wives in mid-18th century america that was none too flattering. Oftentimes I find that attempts to tell "herstory" paint women as a saintly underdog of history- always doing great things, never making mistakes. Sometimes you'll run into what seem to me to be strange emphasis effects (consider Pickering vs Leavitt. Variable stars are really cool, but somehow the context of their discovery as part of the process of nailing down the big bang theory is missing from wikipedia)^1. That's not what this podcast does.

When I hear "stuff you missed"- I assume it is going to be an examination of past events from perspectives not generally given the spotlight in history classes- which tend to focus on the stories of the famous and powerful, and the conflicts between them. The title of the show would lead me to expect to hear more about Leavitt than Pickering, because I would expect the history of nailing down the big bang theory to be prominent, whereas "Pickering's Harem" and the discovery of variable stars might be left out (although, I've really only read one history of the Big Bang theory, and that is where I first learned about Leavitt). "Pickering's Harem" is interesting outside of that particular bit of scientific history because it highlights how the conventions of the time (public discomfort at the impropriety of men and women working side by side at night under the light of stars) affected the professional opportunities available, even when you could pursue degrees in a field- especially if you've ever worked in an observatory and know how unromantic it is, and how little hanky panky you would expect in the freezing conditions that are required viewing things at night at high altitudes without introducing atmospheric disturbance.

I don't think I'd just write it up exclusively to implicit bias. Sexism exists, and there is resentment for ideologically-driven efforts in the area like this one. Historical innacuracy aside, detractors seem to derive far too much enjoyment from denigrating the woman who was incorrectly identified as the inspiration for Rosie the Riveter for only working a few weeks, or maintaining that Ada Lovelace was only indisputably the world's first technical writer to just claim that people just want accurate accountings of history. People seem to want history to reflect that people like them were important- and that people who aren't like them have their importance exaggerated. We expect some strange transitive property of history in which we seem to be tallying up what accolades we are personally worthy of, despite the fact that we had nothing to do with it.

1. Or maybe this is my own implicit bias operating. I'm not arguing that Leavitt deserves less attention- I'm saying that Pickering isn't getting enough at wikipedia, which is a little odd considering how important scientific writers like Singh find him.

I can not give you enough upvotes. I will also try to summarize the talk for those that are too lazy to watch the whole video.

Cosmologist are pretty sure that the right answer is the second one: energy came from nothing.

I'll try to explain it: we know that most of the mass of bodies does not come from quarks that form protons and neutrons, it comes from the empty space between them. We have theories that say that empty space is continuously bubbling with particles that pop in and out of existence, and experimental results confirm it. Actually, our best theory is accurate to 10 decimal places with experimental results, that is amazing.

So, what is the energy of vacuum space? Cosmologists calculated that and the answer was: energy of vacuum = 10^120 x mass of all the universe. That's scary, because if it were true, we wouldn't be here. So cosmologists knew that the answer was: the total mass of universe has to be zero (total mass is given by "normal" matter, energy and negative energy). And now we know that it is actually true: accurate measurements showed that our universe is flat, and that means that it was born from an exact balance of negative and positive energy. A flat universe is the only universe that can start from nothing, and our universe is indeed flat.

Dr. Krauss also wrote a wonderful book that I highly recommend: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing.

I'll try at ELI5 level.

Paper is a good analogy, but expand it to 3 dimensions. To see what flat means, you need to know what "not flat" means. Imagine a really large piece of paper covering the Earth. You mark an arrow on the ground then walk off in that direction, keeping in a straight line. Eventually you circle the globe and end up back at your arrow on the ground, approaching it from the tail of the arrow. You then pick a random direction and draw another arrow and do the same thing. No matter which direction you go, you always end up coming back to the same spot.

In this case, the paper is not flat; it is curved. Specifically, it is closed, meaning it loops back onto itself. However, locally it might look flat from any point you are standing. Imagine it on a bigger planet like Jupiter, or around the sun, or even larger. Locally you would measure it as being very flat, within a tiny fraction of a percent. So something that looks flat could actually be curved but with a very large radius of curvature.

But this analogy is only in 2 dimensions, covering the surface of a sphere of really large size. The curvature is in the third dimension in the direction of the center of the sphere (perpendicular to the local surface of the paper).

Imagine it now in 3 dimensions. You are floating in space at leave a real arrow pointed in some direction. You fly off in your rocket in that direction and eventually find yourself approaching the arrow from the tail end. It doesn't matter which direction you point the arrow, that always happens. That is a closed universe in 3D, meaning it is curved in a fourth dimension.

A flat universe would be one where the radius of curvature is infinite, meaning you'd never end up back at your arrow from the tail end.

I think this description is important because there is some disagreement on this. The measurement of the universe being flat within 0.4% does not mean that it is flat; it means the radius of curvature could be infinite (flat) but could just be very large. In fact, if you watch theoretical cosmologist Lawrence Krauss' talks on "A Universe from Nothing" or read the book, if you pay close attention you'll note a contradiction. At one point he jokes about how theorists "knew" that the universe must be flat because that makes it mathematically "beautiful", but then later describes how theorists "knew" the total energy of the universe must add up to zero as that is the only type of universe that can come from nothing, and yet also says that only a closed universe can have a total energy that adds up to zero. Hence is it closed or flat?

I attended one of these talks in person where this was asked and he confirmed that he thinks the evidence is strong that it is actually closed, but really, really large and hence looks flat to a high degree, and that the inflationary universe model explains why it would be so large and flat looking while being closed and zero net energy (and hence could come from nothing).

After going through all of what I know of the topic, including many other sources, I tend to agree with him that it makes the most sense that it is likely just very close to flat but is really slightly curved back onto itself at a very large radius of curvature. That also means our observable universe is only a very tiny percentage of the universe that exists.

> So, when we look at Andromeda through an ultra-mega-super powerful telescope - we are seeing something that is 3.5 billion years "old"?

Well, 2 million years old. That's how far away it is.

But the galaxy itself (not it's light) will collide with the milky way in 3.5 billion years. Sorry for combining those two facts in a confusing way.

But there are PLENTY of galaxies we can see today that are many billions of light years away. Which means what we see of them is how they were many billions of years ago, which is crazy.

I'm not really sure what I could recommend. I've been poking around and reading about space for a while just reading stuff I come across. If you aren't watching it I'd recommend the TV series Cosmos running right now with Neil Degrasse Tyson. I also really liked a couple books by Brian Greene (here's a link to one, and another.). The first one I really liked and it helped me to get a grasp on some things that always confused me.

Also, as a mod of ELI5 I'm not afraid to say ELI5 is an awesome source, and most any topic you can think about has been covered in depth here. Just type keywords into the search box and go to town. If there's something you can't find a great explanation for, post and ask and you'll get some great responses. /r/askscience is also great, although they are more sticklers for citation and aren't always as focused on layman explanations as ELI5.

he's not talking about the universe, he's talking about everything that's not the universe. only in our universe would the laws of the universe apply, the sequential nature of time being one of them.

look at it like this. our universe is on the lowest tier. one tier above that is god or gods or whatever. god(s) made the universe because everything has to have a cause and effect right? this is how it holds up in our universe so why wouldnt it hold up everywhere? with that same logic, something has to have created god(s) and something has to have created that god and that god and that god... until you get to a point where that god just has to exist. cause and effect wont hold up in his tier. if that doesnt, then how do we know that any of the laws of nature do on any tier that isnt our own? the universe wouldnt need a creator because there wouldnt need to be a cause for it. the universe just kinda is.

on top of all of this, this is only assuming that we are rational beings capable of drawing conclusions from what we observe around us. with what i wrote above we know that the laws of nature really only satisfy the small number of observations that is our universe (infinite as it may be, small in the grand scheme of things)

tl;dr pick up a brief history of time

We actually use the distances between really far apart things in the universe and make a "triangle" just like they were talking about on the surface of the Earth. The math is pretty complicated, but you might enjoy A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. It has a pretty good in depth but mostly understandable by mere mortals explanation of how these things are measured and determined.

Great question! The most direct method is by spectroscopy. This exploits the fact that atoms absorb and emit light at specific wavelengths. So, we can look at what wavelengths of light distant stars are emitting and absorbing, and infer what kinds of atoms are in its atmosphere. This is what lets us know what white dwarfs are made of, for instance.

There are also indirect lines of evidence. We can take well-tested theories describing nuclear reactions, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and others, and apply them to the interiors of stars. The most sophisticated models are supercomputer simulations that couple fluid dynamics models with statistical descriptions of nuclear reactions and electromagnetic interactions. They're tested both by ensuring that they're correctly applying theories tested elsewhere, and against actual astrophysical observations of stellar luminosity and spectra. (Side note --- as you might expect, these numerical capabilities have a decidedly terrestrial origin.)

Scientific advances along these lines often look like rasterizing, where the scientific community takes a very simple model and makes successive passes elaborating and refining it. For instance, you can look at the sun, measure its temperature, mass, and radius, and notice that it's mostly made of hydrogen gas. Then you can show that the kind of conditions that exist at its core necessitate hydrogen fusion. Once you've done that, you see that a hydrostatic equilibrium balancing energy produced by fusion with gravitational collapse accurately predicts the sun's radius and temperature. Then it's on to building more complex models to try to understand its inner temperature gradients, convection, solar storms, etc ...

(Source: Mixed graduate/undergraduate astrophysics was one of my favorite classes in college and I still keep BOB in a special place on my shelf.)

Start by finding some astronomy clubs in your area. That would be very helpful if you wanted to get into stargazing. Most people would be more than happy to let you try out their telescopes. If you're near a university or college, try finding some astro groups there as well. Even if you're not a student it would be good to check it out. If you want to get into more astrophysics/cosmology I found this book to be a very well written introductory text http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Modern-Astrophysics-2nd-Edition/dp/0805304029/ref=dp_ob_title_bk. It was the textbook I used in my intro astrophysics course. Other than that, there is always the popular authors that reddit likes. NDT, Laurence Krauss, Stephen Hawking, etc...

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Hyperspace "Wil Wheaton recommended" blow your mind with science!

The first atoms came into existence around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe’s temperature was low enough for electrons to become bound to free nuclei and thus form atoms. Every element heavier than lithium was formed in the cores of huge stars, so carbon and oxygen nuclei didn’t exist until around 100,000,000 years after the Big Bang at the earliest.

The Big Bang wasn’t an explosion, but rather a rapid expansion of space. It didn’t occur in one place, nor was it fueled by a chemical reaction.

Whether something came from nothing or if it even makes sense to talk about what caused the Big Bang — as a notion of causality presupposes the existence of time — remain open questions!

If this seems strange and confusing, don’t worry, it is strange and confusing! The conditions encountered in the Big Bang are extremely far removed from anything we experience in our lives today, so we have little frame of reference to fall back on for understanding the beginning of the universe in an intuitive fashion.

Don’t let this dissuade you, though! There is a huge amount of stuff one can learn about the Big Bang still and its strangeness only makes it more interesting and exciting to learn about, even if some of the concepts take a little time to wrap our heads around!

EDIT:

Here are a pair of classic books written for the interested layman that I think are good introductions to some of the topics at hand:

Big Bang — Simon Singh

A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking

Reported? For what? Baffling...

A Universe from Nothing

>One of the few prominent scientists today to have crossed the chasm between science and popular culture, Krauss describes the staggeringly beautiful experimental observations and mind-bending new theories that demonstrate not only can something arise from nothing, something will always arise from nothing.

Of course, that's nonsense and he's been taken to task for his definition of "nothing" – but, yeah, he thinks "the Big Bang started from literally nothing..."

I'm honestly baffled why citing a scientist who premiumsalad claims doesn't exist is a problem for this sub. But, yeah, this will certainly be my last post here. Cheers.

I just got Turn Left At Orion that everyone on here recommends from Amazon. It was on sale for only $17 and it was worth every penny for finding interesting things in the night sky. A good star chart is nice as well, learning where stuff is makes the sky that much easier to enjoy.

Good to hear! Might I suggest then An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics. You might be thinking, "well, that's just a general astronomy book", and you'd be right, but it also contains within the entirety of this book. I'd recommend it anyway, as it's the standard undergraduate astronomy text. It touches on pretty much every field in astronomy you can think of, however briefly, so many people keep it as a reference well past their undergraduate careers.

This may be a bit of a challenge to get through if you're at the Calculus 2 level. Some of the math goes quite beyond it, such as differential equations and Fourier analysis, but I'll trust you when you say that you have an aptitude for math.

the new stephen hawking book the grand design is pretty fantastic. it's a very interesting, easily readable explanation of modern physics as well as the history of physics. this book is where hawking finally comes out of the atheist closet in a very non-political way, basically explaining that while people can believe in a god our knowledge of physics doesn't have a need for it.

I have addressed every point you've made that wasn't complete nonsense. Buy this, and read it. If you need stronger fundamentals to understand it, buy books on those and read them too. You cannot spontaneously acquire pre-formed knowledge of physics, you must study it.

> If you define space as having structure, then what is holding that structure?

Space and space-time are already very well-defined, and this whole thread started with you simply denying that. Surely you don't doubt the existence of three spatial dimensions, commonly denoted X, Y, and Z. That is structure. The fact there are exactly three dimensions (plus time) in our universe in the first place is already pretty interesting in and of itself. Whether or not something exists to "hold" that structure or it exists spontaneously is also a fairly interesting question, but its answer is irrelevant. Space does exist, it has structure, and that structure can be described.

The structure of our space is the reason "left", "up", and "forward" are all mutually perpendicular, and it's impossible to point your finger in a fourth direction that isn't already composed of those three. It's the reason moving "towards" a black hole is the opposite of moving "away" from it, but this only holds true in flat space, and our space is only flat when it is "empty", or devoid of mass and energy. Whether something is an "object" or not is irrelevant, what matters is mass-energy. The presence of mass-energy changes the essence of directionality. Within the event horizon of a black hole, "away" ceases to exist entirely. Every possible direction points closer to the center, hence, nothing can escape, no matter how fast it goes, or whether it has mass or not.

Less intense gravitational fields behave similarly. Light always travels in a straight line, but the very meaning of "straight" changes in the presence of mass and energy. The structure of our space defines how distances are measured, and "straight" is simply the shortest path between two points. It doesn't always look "straight" in the traditional sense. So a photon will curve around massive objects as if it were pulled by gravity, despite having no mass of its own.

That's the question I was answering in the first place. Maybe space doesn't actually curve but light simply behaves as if it does for some other reason, as observed through the "sense faculties" which, incidentally, relies on light behaving in a predictable fashion. If whatever you are trying to posit as an alternative cannot account for that, then it is neither a meaningful nor useful distinction to make.

Going to try and post books that are related, but not actually "atheist".

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

The first one for obvious reasons. Sagan is the secular Jesus, and I'd say the second is an interesting read for anyone religious or otherwise, but I feel like it would be better received if you don't actually believe in Christianity. It's a great read though

As utterly retarded as the catholics are, I have to say they are pretty clued up on science. Instead of the typical USA 'tard evangalist denying the simple facts in front of them, the pope simply moves the goalposts and accepts what reality is, but makes out the "big-bang" is "god-diddit".

There is also a brilliant book for kids (and I admit myself too!) by the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno

There is no religious rubbish in that book and it is excellent. I would love to see a "tea-party" right-wing christian guide to the stars... hohoho...

(Atheist here BTW, but I don't have a problem with religious scientists who stick to the science!)

If this is a troll then it is excellent; I'm falling for it hook line and sinker.

However, if you are open to reading about why the reaction has been so negative (with all the downvotes) and want to read something cool instead Zubrin has a book called ["The Case for Mars"][1].

The book is not perfect (there are a few sections that could do with more recent information or more research input) but largely it's a good book that makes the wider points clear.

Or just read the much more approachable blog by Wait but why. Many people on this subreddit are here from that one post.

I promise this is usually a fun sub and people don't often get downvoted so harshly. :)

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Mars-Settle-Planet/dp/145160811X

> Many of these 'proofs' you mention are just oft repeated statements.

No, many of these "proofs" are agreed upon consensus from historians and biblical scholars. No offense but I'll take their word over some random guy/woman that IDK from the internet.

> I can find no references from historians or peer reviewed articles that support this view among new testament historians.

Really? Go read up on it. https://ehrmanblog.org/do-most-manuscripts-have-the-original-text/

>The manuscripts used to translate the ESV or the HCSB are wonderful translations directly from the earliest manuscripts. I honestly do not see any strange inconsistencies with the new testament.

Well, given that I've just recently finished up reading the ESV bible, I cannot understand how anyone, who's actually bothered to read the entire bible, can say that.

> The earliest manuscripts of Mark were written 7 years after the events of the gospel and I believe the parts that were in later manuscripts are true as well.

Again, not so. The consensus is that it was written ~30-40 yrs after Jesus's death.

http://www.bc.edu/schools/stm/crossroads/resources/birthofjesus/intro/the_dating_of_thegospels.html

>The thing we must all wonder is why? Why would these men die for something that they knew wasn't true.

This is a fallacy. Men will die for what they BELIEVE is true but that doesn't mean it is true. Happens all the time. 9/11 hijackers and Heavens Gate are two prominent examples. Just cause someone believes it true doesn't make it so. I use to believe Santa Clause was true. I had good reason to think so. Such as the yr we went away before Christmas only to come home and find presents under the tree. Even got into a fist fight over the whole "is Santa real?" discussion in grade school. Of course, it was later reveal that my parents had us simply wait in the car while they went back in the house to get something they "forgot". But I sure did BELIEVE that Santa was real.

>We have excellent historical accounts of these martyrs deaths and many many thousands more.

Again, not really. Only church tradition that I'm aware of. No contemporary accounts. If I recall correctly, the bible doesn't discuss their deaths either. But even if we did, that still doesn't prove their claims. And as far as "thousands" of martyrs, probably only in that it feed early christian's fetish for wanting to be like Jesus. There's actually no real evidence that there was this centuries long campaign to persecute christians. Hell, there is actual evidence that chrisitans DEMANDED to be persecuted. In one case, a group of christians went up to a Roman official demanding to be crucified only for him to basically say: LOL! Go home, you're drunk. There was another group (name escapes me) that would go on raids just hoping to be killed for Jesus. Very ISIS like. read up on by NT scholar Candida Moss.

> If you could get passed that you still can't explain the insanely fast spread of christianity from 12 men to millions in a few hundred years. No religion has seen such growth in so short a time.

Yea....'bout that...Doesn't seem to the the case. Islam spread far more quickly and rapidly than christianity did upon it's inception. And remember, christianity didn't necessarily spread out because of it's message but because of the sword. The Inquisitions, Crusades, Manifest Destiny, Salam witch hunts, etc. In some countries, like Ireland, it's still a crime to blaspheme Christianity. I think it was Seth Myers who was recently looking at 2 yrs in jail over there for that "crime". Hell, there was a kid just about 3 yrs ago that was basically brought up on blaspheme charges in Pennsylvania and sentenced for portraying himself receiving a BJ from a Jesus statue.

>My theory is that christianity especially in its earliest execution worked. It just worked. The miracles, the Holy spirit confirming, the whole thing worked, and people could see it for themselves.

I'll make you the same offer I make every christian who proclaims this. This is what Jesus allegedly said: He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” Matt 17:20 (ESV)

If I see you walk outside and command a mountain to move in Jesus's name and it magically lifts up and flies off, I will give away everything I own to your church, done sackcloth and cover myself in ash. I will then go proclaim Jesus to the world myself.

To date, I've not had any takers but I sure have had a lot of apologetics and excuses given.

>Atheism requires far far more blind faith to believe than christianity.

No...No....that's not what it is. It's simply a rejection of your position that there is a god. Hell, you're an atheist for every god out there but one. I just happen to be an atheist for all the gods.

>Atheism is a religion, one that believes in chance.

No, again that's not what being an atheist is. I don't worship anyone/thing. There's no dogman associated with being an atheist. No religious text or rituals.

>Do the math. Do you know the odds of a universe coming into existance out of nothing? It's zero. Out of nothing, nothing comes.

How did you determine this? How did you determine that the universe came out of "nothing"? Because, to my knowledge, no-one knows that answer. But the fact is that a universe can come out of "nothing" but "nothing" isn't what you think it is. Yea, it's complicated. I've listened to the book a
few times on Audible and I think I have a grasp of it. But it's a pretty bold statement you're making there and I'll challenge you to tell me how you know what the initial conditions were at that time. It's the same reason I disagree with Stephen Hawkings reasoning on why he doesn't believe in a god. In short, time began when the universe did so therefore, there was no time for a god to exist in. Now I don't pretend to be on his level of intellegence but I would LOVE to sit down and discuss it with him and I would ask him the same I'm asking you: How do you know?

That aside, improbable things happen all the time. For example, what do you think is the probability of a specific leaf falling off a tree on a trail out in the middle of the woods in central Russia and hitting me in the face on Oct 12th, 2032 at 2:34:43PM? I would argue that the probability is so low as to be zero. You surely wouldn't make a bet of it I'm sure. However, it CAN happen, correct?

>The chicken very obviously must have come before the egg.

Nope, the egg came long before the chicken ever evolved. Dinosaurs laid them. We even have some fossilized dino eggs.

>Causes do not come from effects.

Ok. So what caused your god to come into being?

Turn Left at Orion is often recommended. It seems to be great for learning about navigating and observing the night sky with binoculars or a telescope and what you can expect to see.

I have the Backyard Astronomer's Guide, which is extremely comprehensive and teaches just about everything such as navigating the night sky, information about the various types of objects, observing with the naked eye, binoculars, and telescopes, details about different types of telescopes and accessories and how to use them, and a few sections on astrophotography.

However, it is a bit hefty and not super cheap. And it doesn't include a detailed sky atlas (but it does talk about them).

Stellarium is a very popular planetarium program. It's awesome. And free!

That's a great scope you got yourself there, it'll treat you well. Check out the books NightWatch and Turn Left at Orion for great information on how to get started in Astronomy. "NightWatch" answers a lot of questions you might have where "Turn Left.." serves more as a guide and map to the night sky, and both serve as excellent resources.

>While something can be used to make something else, we can't make something from nothing. It ain't do-able. Some people think you can, but you really can't make something from nothing and this is both observable, (confirmable), and obvious. You can change stuff into other stuff, but you can't create stuff from nothing. This is fundamental, basic, and important because it means Big Bang theory is incorrect, in so far as it states the Big Bang was the start of everything.

That’s wrong actually, physics is not as simple as you think. Here’s a decent read for the layman https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468

”Krauss describes the staggeringly beautiful experimental observations and mind-bending new theories that demonstrate not only can something arise from nothing, something will always arise from nothing. With a new preface about the significance of the discovery of the Higgs particle, A Universe from Nothing uses Krauss’s characteristic wry humor and wonderfully clear explanations to take us back to the beginning of the beginning, presenting the most recent evidence for how our universe evolved—and the implications for how it’s going to end.”

You're welcome!

To be honest, I went out of my way to take courses in Tensor Analysis and Differential Geometry before I started learning GR, and I can't say it was that useful. It didn't hurt, but if your interest is just in learning GR, then most introductory GR textbooks teach you what you need to know. I'd recommend Schutz as a good book with tons of exercises, or Carroll ,partly because his discussion of differential geometry is more modern than that of Schutz.

A Brief History of Time, by Steven Hawking is a classic. I found it to be a little dense and difficult at times (I'm no expert in physics), but it's a pretty cool overview of some deep science questions (e.g. where did the universe come from?) for non-scientists.

James Gleick's biography of Isaac Newton is also quite good. My calculus professor recommended it.

I also liked The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios.

• Grab your copy of Stellarium
  
• Learn these astronomy basics
  
• Then look high at the brightest stars first, check their names,
  
• Find the story behind them (constellations got stories in greek, roman, american, asian mythology...),
  
• Ask yourself how big is that star, what temperature is it on surface, what's the difference between a blue star and a red giant star.
  
• Whenever you see an object in space, try to find what it is it made of, its distance...
  
• Find out the answers - many good websites provide this info.
  
• Don't try to locate as much objects as possible (forget about the galaxies for now). Discover them slowly. Aim for the moon/planets and the brightest stars first. One object per night.
  
• Plan your nights. Stellarium and here at /r/astronomy will help you.
  
• As you advance, read about astronomy actually... Turn Left at Orion and more books...
  
• Then it will be time to go deeper in space for the clusters, nebulae and galaxies. Fellow astronomers at Reddit are already recommending how to upgrade your equipment to a telescope.
  
  Welcome aboard.