PSYCHE! Rapture is ACTUALLY 5 Months From Now!

Harold Camping in 2011. Photo by ChristReturns2011

But seriously you guys, THIS TIME it’s totally 100% absolutely positively gonna happen!

That’s me paraphrasing the disgraced (at least she should be) Harold Camping, the ass-dick who has bilked people of their life savings promoting the end of the world.

It was supposed to happen on Saturday, May 21. But SURPRISE! Nothing happened!

After spending a day in hiding, Camping came out today to reveal what he had done wrong (besides being an ass-dick),

Saturday was “an invisible judgment day” in which a spiritual judgment took place, he said. But the timing and the structure is the same as it has always been, he said.

“We’ve always said May 21 was the day, but we didn’t understand altogether the spiritual meaning,” he said. “May 21 is the day that Christ came and put the world under judgment.”

Ok, so he wasn’t totally wrong, he just wasn’t totally right. That’s completely understandable!

Gah! Sorry about all the sarcasm folks, but this guy is pissing me off.

Bad enough that he has ruined people’s lives with his bullshit, one woman even slit her children’s throats AND her own because of this shit, but now he is actually going to keep doing it for another 5 months!

And what is gonna happen 5 months from now when the world doesn’t end? AGAIN???

Why he’s just gonna come up with some new reason he was not totally wrong but not totally right, and he’ll have a brand new judgment day to promote.

It makes me sick to thing not only of the millions of dollars stolen from gullible-but-still-innocent people. But I think of all of Camping’s money that he has spent on this cause and how it could have been donated charity and done some ACTUAL good in the world.

So while this is not surprising, it is still infuriating. Hopefully a few of Camping’s disciples realize he is full of crap and start saying so.

So Its The End of the World…

Photo by Bart Everson

As you are no doubt aware, tomorrow is the rapture.

Yes, Jesus is going to return to Earth tomorrow to take all the good people with him to heaven. This has been predicted by a multi-millionaire radio station owner named Harold Camping.

How did he make this prediction? I’ve actually seen a couple derivations from Camping on this, but an excerpt from FamilyRadio.com states:

Holy God reminds us that one day is as 1,000 years. Therefore, with the correct understanding that the seven days referred to in Genesis 7:4 can be understood as 7,000 years, we learn that when God told Noah there were seven days to escape worldwide destruction, He was also telling the world there would be exactly 7,000 years (one day is as 1,000 years) to escape the wrath of God that would come when He destroys the world on Judgment Day.

Seven thousand years after 4990 B.C. (the year of the Flood) is the year 2011 A.D. (our calendar).

4990 + 2011 – 1 = 7,000

Amazingly, May 21, 2011 is the 17^th day of the 2^nd month of the Biblical calendar of our day. Remember, the flood waters also began on the 17^th day of the 2^nd month, in the year 4990 B.C.

God is proving to us that we have very accurately learned from the Holy Bible God’s time-plan for the end of the world.

So there you have it, irrefutable proof that the world is ending tomorrow.

Sorry :(

So what will become of the sinners? Well we are going to be left behind to think about what we did…until October.

On October 21st, the world will actually be destroyed by fire.

Now, at first I thought that I might be able to escape judgment. I mean, I’m not a bad guy. I donate to charity, I’ve helped old ladies cross the street, and I’ve never murdered anyone.

But then I realized how horrible a person I really was. I eat meat on Fridays. I don’t go to Church every Sunday, and I’ve been spending the past 5 years living in sin with the love of my life.

Not only that, but I believe that homosexuals should be allowed to get married! What was I thinking?!? Camping has clearly pointed out that it is the gays who are to blame for this horrible upcoming Judgement.

Camping says God will punish America and the rest of the world for Gay Pride and same-sex marriages, just as Sodom and Gomorrah were punished with fire and brimstone in the Old Testament.

I should have known better.

So now the only question is: What am I going to do with my last night on Earth before Jesus metaphorically (or perhaps literally) bitch-slaps me?

A good question. I should probably get drunk. But then, it is May 2-4 long weekend, so that was probably going to happen anyway (for my non-Canadian readers, May 2-4 is the colloquial term for Victoria Day, a national holiday in Canada).

I could repent, but that somehow feels like giving up.

I could sell all my possessions and spend it all on strippers and drugs. But then, I might catch a nasty disease and have to spend my last few months on Earth suffering more than I should.

Well I guess I will be getting drunk. If I wake up tomorrow before Jesus arrives, I will blog again. Otherwise, this may be the last time you hear from me. Thanks for being such loyal readers!

How will you all be celebrating Judgment Day?

“There’s Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.”

That’s what was postered on the side of buses in Toronto, Calgary and Montreal last year. And they are planning to do it again.

The Centre for Inquiry (CFI) is launching a campaign which would see similar ads on the sides of buses in Toronto starting in January, pending final approval from the Toronto Transit Commission. This  year’s campaign is “Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence”, and compares the belief in God and Allah to the belief in Bigfoot and Tarot reading.

Photo From Centre for Inquiry

The campaign’s website says:

Why is belief in Big Foot dismissed as delusional while belief in Allah and Christ is respected and revered? All of these claims are equally extraordinary and demand critical examination

Assuming they get approval to run the ads in Toronto, the CFI hopes to move the campaign into other major Canadian cities. 

Justin Trottier, national executive director of the Centre for Inquiry said about the campaign

 

I’d love it if everyone saw the ads and know the point of the campaign is to emphasize not the kind of knee-jerk debunking to anything suspicious but that we’re interested in a genuine debate, a conversation about so-called extraordinary claims. We’re not here to mock people who believe in these claims

 

But of course, there is mixed reaction from both the religious and atheist communities. Many religious leaders felt that the ads were designed to ridicule people’s faith. Others felt that their beliefs can stand atop the belief in Bigfoot, so a discussion on the topic would be welcome.

 

Some in the scientific and atheist communities felt that the ads were too confrontational, and that this was not the proper way to elicit a discussion on these topics.

 

My opinion is that extraordinary claims certainly do require extraordinary evidence. Bigfoot, psychics and the like all need proof before we can accept them as facts. But religion is built on faith; the belief without proof. I maintain my right to believe in a God or not, just as the rest of the world should. Challenging those beliefs on a bus is not a proper forum for this discussion.

 

Furthermore, if people want to worship a God I do not believe in, it is not my place to challenge them about it. They have as much right to believe as I have not to believe. However, if religion starts to influence government policy, then it definitely becomes fair game to argue the proper place of religion in politics. Thankfully, this is not as big a problem in Canada as it is in the USA.

 

I’d love to hear what  you guys think about this issue, so please take a second and answer this poll below, or leave a comment.

 

One Step Closer to Finding the God Particle

The God Particle, or the Higgs Boson as its known in the Physics world, is coming closer and closer to being found. (I recently wrote an article  about the Higgs, you can check it out here for a bit of background info)

Experimenters at Fermilab, which is a particle accelerator laboratory in the United States, are competing with Europeans at the new-fangled Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

They are competing for the ultimate prize: finding the Higgs Boson, and experimenters at Fermilab just narrowed the search a bit.

I see this competition like a nerdy version of Rocky IV. Fermilab is Rocky, the hard-nosed American underdog (Fermilab is much less powerful than the LHC) and the LHC is the engineered Russian super-athlete.

Fermilab vs. LHC

One of the biggest problems with finding the Higgs is that no one knows exactly what its mass is (i.e. how heavy it is). But we do know that the mass should be between 114 and 185 GeV/c²

Oh, and  GeV/c2 is a unit of mass that particle physicists use. I’m not gonna go into a whole lot of detail, but for comparisons sake the proton is roughly 1 GeV/c²

So the Higgs boson is supposed be roughly between 114 and 185 times larger than the proton.

But Fermilab just released some results which showed that the Higgs is NOT between the masses of 158 and 175 GeV/c²

So this narrows the search parameters a little bit, and hopefully it results in finding the Higgs a bit sooner.

Of course, NOT finding the Higgs boson would just as huge a result. It would mean the Universe is a whole lot weirder than we already thought, and there are those who think we won’t find it.

So exciting times in physics world. But of course its ALWAYS exciting in the physics world! You can try and keep up with all the excitement by following me on Twitter

The (Simple) Physics of the ‘God Particle’

The ‘God Particle’.

Pretty catchy name. Its been in the news quite a bit lately. But what is it exactly? And why would they call it the ‘God Particle’? Especially since science and religion get along about as well as Frank and Estelle Costanza!

Well in this blog post, I’m going to give you a basic and (hopefully!) entertaining explanation of what the God Particle is, and why we should care. So let’s start at the beginning.

The ‘God Particle’ is also (and more accurately) known as the Higgs Boson. Described in a single sentence, it is believed to be the particle that gives mass to all other particles in the Universe.

Ok, that SOUNDS important, but its still a bit hard to understand, so here’s a bit more thorough explanation.

Everything in the universe is made up of particles. And there are several different kinds of particles.

All the matter in the universe is made up of atoms. Atoms are made of a nucleus, which is found at the center of the atom and has neutrons and protons in it. Surrounding the nucleus are electrons, which are much smaller and fly around the nucleus in a circle, or an ‘orbit’.

Groups of atoms can get together and form molecules, and big groups can get together to form rocks, trees, and Maria Sharapova.

So thats 3 particles we have already described (protons, neutrons, and electrons). These 3 particles have mass; this essentially means that they weigh something.

But there are other types of particles out there too. For example, there is the photon.

Photons are are basically light. They are tiny packages of energy that make up a beam of light. They also make up radio waves, x-rays, and gamma rays (the stuff that gave the Fantastic Four their powers).

But photons are different from, say, protons, because they don’t have any mass. They carry light energy from the sun, for example, to the Earth. Or they can carry radio messages from the radio station to your house. So photons are like messengers; as such, they are sometimes called “messenger particles”.

A “messenger particle” is also called a boson. Bosons are really cool because they actually DO something. What do I mean by that?

Well, if you remember high school physics or chemistry class, you know there are 4 forces in nature. Gravity is one of them, and it is the most familiar too us. Its what keeps us firmly planted to the ground. Electromagnetism is what makes electricity, light beams, radio waves, and magnets work.

You Can Visualize a Magnetic Field with Iron filings and a Bar Magnet

The other two forces are a little less familar. They are called the Strong nuclear force, and the Weak nuclear force. These two are basically what holds the nucleus of the atom together, and make it behave the way it does.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well remember bosons are messenger particles. The photon carries the electromagnetic force “message”. The other forces in nature have bosons as well that carry their “messages”. Gravity has the “graviton” (which hasn’t been observed yet but we think its out there). The strong nuclear force has the “Gluon” (because it ‘glues’ the nucleus together). And the weak nuclear force has the “W” boson (it doesn”t get a cool name because its not cool).

Ok, now we get to the Higgs boson. So, since it is a boson, it must be the “messenger” of something right? So what is it the messenger of?

Well, remember I said that protons, neutrons and electrons have mass? But the photon does not have any mass. Why is that? What is it that makes one particle have mass, and the other not have mass? Even a couple of the bosons have mass! Thats just freakin’ weird.

So particle physicists (one of the named Peter Higgs, oddly enough) came up with a theory. They think there is some kind of a field in the universe called the “Higgs Field”. Its kind of like a gravity field, or a magnetic field. Just like a magnetic field will interact with some iron to pull it in one direction, the Higgs Field will also interact with particles. But instead of pulling at them, the Higgs Field gives these particles mass! It makes them heavy!

The theory also says there should be something called the Higgs boson: an actual particle that carries the Higgs field “message”. And thats what we are trying to find. The Higgs boson is the messenger particle of the Higgs Field, which is (theoretically) what gives particles their mass. If we do find it, then we know our theories about how the universe is made are on the right track. It would be HUGE breakthrough for physics!

One problem: the Higgs boson is supposed to be heavy! Well, for a particle its pretty heavy.

In fact, the only way to actually “make” one is by slamming together stuff like protons at close to the speed of light in what we call a “particle collider”. And we need to slam them together at a really BIG energy, so we need a BIG collider. Thats why we have the Large Hadron Collider.

The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland

Ok, so thats the explanation of what the Higgs boson is and why we should care. So why is it called the ‘God Particle’.

Well, a guy named Leon Lederman wrote a book called “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?” which was actually about the Higgs boson. Calling it the “God Particle” was a kind of grandiose name because it suggested we knew what it was that gave particles mass, what made they heavy or “real”. Very “god-like” I suppose”.

The term “God Particle” also showed up in Dan Brown’s novel “Angels and Demons”. In the book some claimed that the discovery of the particle would prove the existence of God.

Finding the Higgs would be great, but would hardly prove the existence of God. The use of these terms is largely to increase media interest.

Phew, well there you have it. If you want to hear more about Physics news as it happens you can follow me on Twitter! Or you can follow the Large Hadron Collider on Twitter!