Welcome to your Friday open thread. It doesn’t look too hurricane-y around here. I guess we’re getting a miss. How does it look in southern Delaware?
Physicist Stephen Hawking has a new book out and he’s sure created a lot of attention. I saw blaring headlines all day yesterday “Hawking: God did not create the Universe.”
God did not create the universe, the man who is arguably Britain’s most famous living scientist says in a forthcoming book.
In the new work, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity.
…
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” he writes. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
In the forthcoming book, published on 9 September, Hawking says that M-theory, a form of string theory, will achieve this goal: “M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find,” he theorises.
He did an interview with the BBC.
Despite what the headlines say, Hawking did not change his mind about God. I plan on picking up his book, I’ve always been interested in the Grand Unified Theory.
I don’t know who’s advising Sharron Angle (R), the extremist Senate candidate in Nevada, but those responsible for writing her talking points must be awfully frustrated. This week, Angle managed to argue — out loud, in public, and on the record — that unemployment benefits don’t benefit anyone.
Sitting down with conservative radio talk show host Heidi Harris, Angle once again addressed a topic that brought her a bit of political heat — including a hard-hitting ad from her opponent Harry Reid– not too long ago.
“People don’t want to be unemployed,” she explained. “They want to have real, full-time, permanent jobs with a future. That’s what they want, and we need to create that climate in Washington, D.C. that encourages businesses to create those full-time, permanent jobs with a future, and all [Rep.] Shelley Berkeley and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid want to do is put a band-aid on this by extending unemployment, which really doesn’t benefit anyone. What happens is of course that your skills stagnate. You become demoralized yourself, you know, feeling that I can’t ever get a job, and these are not the solutions to the problem. We have real solutions, but they won’t look at the real solutions.”
This isn’t necessarily surprising. Angle has already accused jobless Americans, struggling to get by in an awful job market, of being “spoiled.” It stands to reason, then, that she actually believes this nonsense.
Just think, if Christine O’Donnell wins the Republican Senate primary there will be a whole host of articles on the dumb things Christine O’Donnell is saying. Oh joy!