Did you know that science has discovered that gravity doesn’t exist in space, just like the Bible says?
Tell that to Newton. I wonder what keeps satellites in orbit, or the earth zipping around the sun, if they are hanging on “nothing”.
There’s more! Ray has attempted to cover his error.
There is invisible gravity in space
, but the earth…it hangs on nothing!
What a maroon.
It’s not even good Biblical scholarship. That’s Job 26:7.
Aaand I misread that 6 as an 8. That’ll teach me to post at four in the morning.
Bet that will shut Albert Einstein up.
So empty space isn’t nothing, and it isn’t hanging from that either. Other than that, yeah, sure, it’s totally amazing how thousands of years ago they got everything wrong. Job has just been such a useful resource for astronomers throughout the ages that we can set aside petty quibbles like that….
Why just quote the last part of Job 26:7? Take the whole phrase…
“He spreads out the northern skies over empty space;
he suspends the earth over nothing.”
So, we’ve been up to empty space. Did we see the northern skies spread above it, or not?
Comfort is so good at reading the facts behind the metaphors in the Bibble. Yet he claims he reads it literally that only heathens call it, “metaphorical”.
Are we supposed to take his surname literally? Comfort makes me very UNcomfortable. Heathen me, I guess.
.
Comfort, while the Bible may tell you all about Science, you must be interpreting it wrong. Gravity *is* Nothing; it is just the shape of the timespace continuum caused by the presence of mass. Where does the Bibble teach us that? Is the Bibble where Einstein stole the idea, and stuck his own name on?
Comfort splutters: “. . . .that science discovered that gravity doesn’t exist in space.”
Considering the depth of the man’s ignorance about most things, this statement is amazing. I think it may be the most monumentally stupid thing that he has ever said. The blazingly self-confident ignorance on display by poor Ray is breathtaking.
Ray, do you have the faintest idea why the Earth revolves in orbit around the Sun? Hint: It ain’t angels that keep it there.
I guess there’s no point in telling him that he’s 500 years off on the date of the book as well.
Thanks to Ray, I’ve been inspired to write a book to help clear this issue up.
It’ll be called Basic Facts We Should Learn Before We Turn Twelve.
It should be illuminating.
His depths of not-even-wrong are impressively awful. So nothing orbits anything else … galaxies don’t spin … or form spirals … it’s a bit frightening really.
Is this the same person who thinks if the earth were a few feet nearer to or further from the sun there could be no life, therefore (his flavour of) god?
MM:
Only for people who understand how light behaves (people ignorant of basic scientific knowledge has called to mind the nitwit a few months ago that didn’t understand how light works).
Shhh … (whispering) … I work for a secret corporate entity that manufactures the invisible strings that mimic the supposed properties of the non-existent space gravity. Deep in the federal black budget is a line item that pays for the thousands of miles of our invisible string necessary to keep all those satellites in their correct orbits.
A little known fact is that most satellite failures blamed on radiation, micrometeorites, and fuel exhaustion are really a simple case of the string getting tangled. And that Apollo -11 mission save, that was us. Good thing that we had insisted that they bring an extra string so they would have a second way home. On the other hand that story about the lander crashing into Mars because they screwed up the units in calculating the orbit … that was also us. That wasn’t a miscalculation of the orbit, we cut the string too long. Bernie, the guy who does most of the cutting, and brother of the founder, is getting old and dozed off for a few seconds.
Lest anyone thinks the depths of ignorance have been plumbed, remember that he has at least one student (ie, “person with adequate space in head to be “educated” by Comfort) in Kirk Cameron.
Knowing that, I’m just sitting here waiting for a pronouncement on the absence of quarks in apple pie because Mom’s recipe doesn’t list them, or that Jesus’ empty tomb disproved the whole Schroedinger’s cat thing, or whatever.
Fucking gravity, how does it work?
With the exception of the statement made a few weeks ago by some teabagger politician that the temperature on Mars is the same as that on Earth, this is the most profoundly stupid utterance made about a basic scientific fact I have ever heard. I swear these people are becoming more stupid with every passing day.
I’m convinced that Ray is an atheist plant in the creationist camp of bat-shit crazydom (dumb?)
Tell that to Newton. I wonder what keeps satellites in orbit, or the earth zipping around the sun, if they are hanging on “nothing”.
Didn’t you get the memo? It’s all Satan’s trickery to turn you away from the Lord!
lorn:
Apollo 13.
The Apollo 11 landing was 45 years (plus a few days) ago. I has multiple sads about that fact.
Moggie @18:
Seems Bernie isn’t the only one getting old.
I was unsure that Ray Comfort could be that stupid so I had to go check his FB page for myself. He had corrected that mistake when I found it. It now reads:
“It wasn’t until thousands of years later that science discovered that gravity doesn’t exist in space (as it does on earth)…”
Clears everything up. I didn’t think Ray Comfort could be so Ray Comfort.
I seem to recall that Newton’s explanation for the stability of the Solar System (it wasn’t supposed to be according to his calculations) was that God regularly sent angels to guide the planets with the tips of their wings.
As I recall, in describing gravity, physicist John Wheeler said something like: “Matter tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells matter how to move.” Except in Ray Comfort’s solar system, of course, where the sun is propelled by farting angels around a flat earth.
I am trying to work that around to see if it is any better than his previous statement, but no it isn’t. If Comfort means that gravity is stronger on the surface of Earth than in space then he is still wrong. Gravity here is one ‘g’ but any space near the sun is more than one ‘g’. His attempt at corrections is very amusing.
Citation fecking needed.
Newton may have indeed realized the solar system isn’t stable — it isn’t — but the rest of quoted recollection rather surprises me for someone who, despite having some mystical / mythological inclinations, also mathematically derived Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion.
Re @24;
Don’t know about the angel’s wings, but Newton did believe that God had to intervene periodically to keep the planets in their orbits. Laplace was the one who extended Newton’s conceptions to show how that was not needed, and indeed this is actually the backstory to the famous “je n’ai besoin de cette hypotheses” story with Napoleon.
And here’s the link:
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/16/there-is-no-need-for-god-as-a-hypothesis/
He has finally managed to say something more ignorant than the banana thing. That there is a special kind of stupid. Apparently, I had a better understanding of gravity after my 4th grade field trip to the local science museum than Ray has managed to acquire in 65 years.
Amphiox, Thanks! I knew Newton didn’t apply (or realize?) the full scope of his work — for instance, he didn’t agree with Halley’s famous predication about the comet (Newton thought comets were just some sort of an atmospheric phenomenon) — I cannot say I knew he thought the intervention of an outside agency was needed.
Just another example of how ignorant Comfort is about basic science.
I have a (vague) recollection of some people misunderstanding “weightlessness” as being caused by a lack of gravity — and to avoid that somewhat understandable misconception is a(? the?) reason for the use of the term “microgravity” — so I wonder / speculate bananaman is just extrapolating the lack-of-gravity-causes-weightlessness nonsense ?
And if bananaman’s recent updating (the addition of “as it does on earth”) is a misunderstanding of “microgravity” ?
I take it you haven’t read his lucubrations on the subject of evolution:
blf @30
You are right, he was confusing weightlessness with lack of gravity. He has admitted as much on his Facebook page, and even apologised: However the humility didn’t last long, he’s back to attacking evolution in the same post.
https://www.facebook.com/official.Ray.Comfort
From his “correction”
How does one even begin…?
In a trivial sense, there’s no gravity in space. There’s only the uncanny experience of the way lumpy objects in space appear to get slowly larger in your eyes until you splatter into them. You feel no forces acting on you until that moment. God moves planets in mysterious ways (to Comfort).
Lofy #34
Uh. There’s no sensual experience of gravity, but it’s still there in what, when I were knee-high to a nibbet, was known as free-fall. You’re merely not feeling the effects you would when resisting it by, for instance placing a planetary-sized object between your feet and the centre of mass.
On the other flipper…
It’s wrong to refer to Comfort as a child. It’s true that I’ve often thought of his understanding of science as child-like, but there’s an important difference: kids love to learn, while Comfort – worse than incurious – seems to go out of his way to actively avoid learning. He’s worked hard to be this ignorant, and he’s proud of it. That’s a pretty adult trait.
The latest from Ray: My apologies. I was wrong about gravity not existing in space. According to scientists at Yale university ………
Takes a big man to admit he is wrong however I would have thought that a little bit of research (and looking at the evidence) before he made a fool of himself would have been a better strategy.
It seems he has spent his life ignoring the evidence and we can take comfort from his “own goal”.
B..but Ray, the Solar System exists, so does the Milky Way…
Oh wait, I know how you think those work and it’ll depress me-forget it!
Moggie, it’s a Biblical reference. [Link]
Daz @35
Yes, I know. But space engineers will still talk about a zero gravity environment to confuse the Comforts of this world.
“invisible gravity in space”,
While gravity here on Earth is visible?
I like the passive-aggressive notpology.
Newton was the guy who realized that gravity does exist in space. The apple story isn’t true, but he did figure out that the same force that pulled the apple down was pulling the moon in towards Earth. The illustration of a cannon on a mountaintop was used to explain orbits, and the moon is in orbit, due to gravity.
Newton had no idea what the frak gravity actually is, but he figured out what it did, and he wrote out the rules. Those rules included planetary motion, Ray.
Einstein figured out what gravity is, and showed where Newton’s rules were bent, but he had no luck explaining it to the rest of us. I am currently reading up on the subject, and finding some mixups. Best I can currently say, mass makes space, and the shape of that space is gravity. There is no space without gravity in it.
Now, if you get far enough away from everything, and turn loose, you may think that there is no gravity. But, even if you were about to crash headlong into Jupiter, you would still be thinking that there was no gravity, if you were busy Tweeting instead of looking out the window. Gravity is everywhere.
When we are on the surface of a planet, we feel weight. Out in space, freely falling with the prevailing gravity, we do not feel weight. If we were up on a very high tower, watching the weightless astronauts go by, we would still feel weight.
NASA’s use of “microgravity” is just wrong.
One must be careful. While Bugs Bunny often referred to Elmer Fudd as a “maroon” and some believe this was a malapropism of “moron” the actual meaning is “a member of any of a number of black communities in the West Indies and Guiana formed by fugitive slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries” sometimes also as defined as “a black warrior” (particularly when used as a school mascot). It is not clear what the intended meaning was in the original cartoon when racist comments were not viewed in the same context as today. Certainly there is no dispute that Ray Comfort is a moron.
1. The earth “hangs” in “empty” space, for sufficiently loose definitions of “hang” and “empty”
2. Ray Comfort’s skull is full of empty space
3. Ray Comfort’s god is all in his head
4. The Bible says “The earth hangs upon nothing.”
5. God made the earth
6. The Bible is literally true, praise Jesus and cuss out fig trees!
If you eat the right plants, or so I’m told.
Menyambal #42
Thank you! I thought I was alone.
If you use the surface of the spaceship as a ground frame, you need to treat gravity as more or less nonexistent to get a locally correct force balance.
It is better to make a facebook post and have people believe you a fool, than to make an asinine notpology and remove all doubt.*
Not helping yerself there, Ray. Maybe slide over and let Kirk give it a whirl. Can’t be worse.
(Well, yeah it can. But it’s Saturday night and I need some entertainment.)
*My apologies to Mr. Clemens
Well, acceleration is usually measured in Gravities, where one G is equivalent to the force we feel while at rest on the surface of the Earth. Going over the top in a roller-coaster gives us Zero-G, spinning around in the spinning-around thing puts us up to 3 Gs, and slamming into a bridge abutment on the way home gives us 13 Gs in the face.
So, in that sense of the word “gravity”, an astronaut goes blasting up on a rocket at 7 Gravities, and when the rocket gets up high enough and the engines cut off, is suddenly at Zero Gravities of acelleration. And will be at “zero gravities of acelleration” until the rockets fire or the ship hits atmo. So yes, a free fall through space, whatever the orbit or part thereof, can be said to be zero-gravity. But that doesn’t ever mean that there is no gravity, just that the ship is going along with the gravity.
Of course there’s no gravity in space. How else would the PYGMIES + DWARFS(?) be restricted to just the earth?
Menyambal @42:
Never come across that before. Where did you read it? Certainly the presence of mass affects the geometry of spacetime, but you seem to be saying more than that.
He thinks the earth “hangs” in space? Does he think the entire universe is a diorama?
Sir Isaac Newton is the one that so wisely noted:
You can see why someone might like that. And at the time, how could you answer it? Atheism could be called senseless because understanding development and evolution were still more than a century. Saying the same now has become a lot more ridiculous.
NASA’s use of “microgravity” is just wrong.
Ray believes in microgravity but not macrogravity.
(BTW, I believe Comfort just got his knuckles rapped for linking to IFLS, without realizing what “F” stood for.)
Never fear. No one escapes the rapotorialeica legs ofKwokacuras! Not at any range! He’ll find you! At that range! Yeah! He’ll find you at range. Get it? I’m subtle.
But the Kwokacuras is not subtle! You will never escape it! At least not without giving up an M7.
carlie @ 52
“He thinks the earth “hangs” in space? Does he think the entire universe is a diorama?”
NASA, ESA and the other space agencies conspire to photshops it out of pictures of Earth from space but actually there’s a gigantic eyelet screwed into the North Pole suspending the planet from a huge mobile…
“photoshop” of course!
Gravity is invisible in space, that’s why the view is so much better up there.
“space-time flies like a banana…”
But it was visible in the theaters.
Rob Grigjanis @51: “Mass makes space”?
I should have said that matter creates space.
Yeah, that was my best understanding of a short book written by Lorentz (the contraction guy) explaining Einstein in simple terms. I backed that up with a couple of Wikipedia articles on space-time, that seemed to say the same. I am working my way through _Elegant_Universe_ by Brian Greene, and doing well enough to think I see when he could be clearer. I am also reading Einstein, in a non-math edition, but just started that.
I may have picked up an old concept by Ernst Mach, and got it wrong.
I guess/think that matter IS energy taking up space, gone wonky somehow instead of running free and dimensionless, and that the space aspect extends outside the matter as what we call gravity, which is really space. (It helps me keep up to imagine this shit, as my maths skills suck.)
The earth is embedded in spacetime, so it certainly does not “hang upon nothing”
It hangs. Ain’t goin’ nowhere, yo. Just chillin’.
See, global warming is a myth! *sigh*
You’ve probably seen pictures of lakes with extremely clear water, to the point that objects floating in it seem to be “hanging on nothing”. So by Ray’s uninquisitive logic we might as well conclude that you’d need blind faith to believe that the object is actually floating on water, since water being really clear is such a hypothetical concept that it’s basically just scientific gibberish.
There’s just doesn’t seem to be any limit on how much pride Creationists take in being willfully ignorant.
Mr. Comfort must be right. If there is invisible gravity in space, God must have hung the Earth from nothing, because otherwise it would fall down due to gravity. You science-believers, if you have one, try to suspend your petty plastic globe, weighing almost nothing in midair by hanging it from nothing and you can’t because you are not God! Yet the entire Earth with cities and mountains and everything just hangs from nothin. Imagine that! Quod erat demonstrandum, you puny devilworshippers, God exists, gravity is invisible in space and evolution is wrong.
A common analogy to explain orbits to children is the stone whirling on the end of a piece of string. Gravity is as tangible as a piece of string, and it holds the Earth in its orbit around the sun; hardly “hanging on nothing”. Therefore the bible is wrong?
Yeah well @66 dahduh, easy to say that, but in the Newtonian scheme there are no strings visible or invisible at all, the principle being: F = G∙ m1 ∙ m2 / r² which is translatable via via to the duration of one orbit around the sun: T = √ 4π² R³ / G∙M + nothing, where R is average distance of Earth to Sun (=1AU) and M is de mass of the Sun. You see? No strings in there, but you can add nothing to the equation.
Ray “How can you get something from nothing?” Comfort is now saying the Earth hangs from nothing, meaning that nothing is actually something.
When your definition of “nothing” includes “something”, then it’s not nothng anymore.
Ray should update his “gotcha” question to:
“How can something come from something? (Checkmate Atheists!)”
@Jafafa Hots #59:
“Fruit flies like a banana; time flies like an arrow.”
See, Mr Collins, I did learn something from all your physics lessons!
I figured it was a silly mistype or thoughtless comment that Ray said there is no gravity in space. But his correction clearly shows that he really thought there was no gravity in space.
Which raises the simple question of “What exactly does Ray Comfort think gravity is?”
Any basic understanding of gravity would say that it is everywhere. It’s almost like Ray Comfort thinks that “Gravity is the thing that goes down.” What childlike wonder!
As I understand things the Earth is not “hanging” in space, it is falling freely through space/time. Due to the nearby mass of the Sun (largely) the geometry of local space/time is such that the geodesic along which the Earth freely falls just happens to be a closed ellipse.
However the Sun and Earth as a system are freely falling together along another geodesic which happens to be a closed orbit about the local galaxy, which is of course also falling freely along a geodesic which may or may not be closed about the local cluster of galaxies, which of course is also…
As to “microgravity”, I think the term is apt. Any two objects falling freely near each other experience a gravitational “force” between them. Two astronauts in the I.S.S. will thus be attracted to each other by a gravitational “force” which, however, will be so small as to not be noticeable. So there is a very small and unnoticeable by our unassisted senses gravitational attraction between objects aboard the spacecraft. “Micro” seems an apt prefix for this to me.
I cut Ray a lot of slack. There is something profoundly wrong with his brain. I suspect in a few years, Ray Comfort will be institutionalized. He will be confined to a room where he can smear his face with his own feces. Confined because if he is out in public, there is a chance he will strip off his clothes and start masturbating. Not the activity appropriate for public consumption.
Instead of contempt, I can only feel pity for Ray.
michaelvester #72
Please don’t make “jokes” about mental health issues, real or imagined.
@doublereed:
“The enemy’s gate is gravity?”
All I gots to do is find the corners of gravity and a helmet store and I’m totes going to be a champion.
But it’s turtles that go all the way down.
That’s that solved then. Dark matter = turtles.
Okay, Al Dente/Daz win the internets.
I hope you provide better service than comcast.
@ Larry #15
re the Senator from KY quote in the post from Jul 7, you mentioned: he may have gotten it from here.
http://exopolitics.org/whistleblowers-claims-he-served-17-years-at-secret-mars-military-base/
@vereverum:
In particular, you’re talking about this?
Yeah, maybe this explains Brandon Smith, but the scientific illiteracy of that paragraph still gets my goat.
Ray Comfort – friendly but phoney ie pretends to know things he doesn’t and also pretends that those who do know things don’t.
Pshaw. This theory of strings you posit? It’s just a theory.
@Menyambal
Which would still be at least misguided.
Without matter, spacetime would (probably) just be flat, Minkowskian spacetime, at least according to Einstein’s theory. (If you put in a zero stress-energy-tensor, there is no curvature of space-time, but spacetime is still there.)
What matter does is to curve spacetime (in the geometrodynamic interpretation that is most popular). However, it is possible to interpret the general theory of relativity without relying on curved space time, as put forward in the books of Weinberg and Feynman (Feynman Lectures on Gravitation).
For a nice account on all things Einsteinian, I recommend
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/
@79:
my goat?
Anyone? Anyone?
Do I have to do everything around here? I swear I’m going to get myself a laugh track.
sonderval @82:
If you mean a spin-2 field on a Minkowski background, my understanding is that you end up with a curved spacetime anyway, and the original metric is unobservable. See here.
sonderval @82:
That depends on whether you have a cosmological constant term in the field equation. If you do, then a vanishing stress-energy tensor gives curvature following the sign of Λ.
Larger point: I don’t agree with Menyambal’s ‘matter creates space’, but the situation is more complicated than ‘Minkowski space with stuff living in it and distorting it somewhat’.
Oh, fuck. Aries is the Ram, isn’t it.
Sigh. Sorry everyone.
CD
Nice try though.
Mind, I’d think it should be Ares, not Aries, base. Clearly Captain Kaye’s testimony is, therefore, not trustworthy. He’s pulling the wool over ours eyes. Or possibly kidding.
Also, the other end of his point is plain wrong – that “the earth rests on nothing” could only have come from God.
Ancient sheep and goat herders, on those long nights taking the flock to far grazing under moonlight, would have had plenty of time and opportunity to do what Ray Comfort can’t or won’t, and actually observe the physical universe. And it would be become readily apparent that not only are the Moon and Sun going down in the west and coming up in the east, but the entire fixed star field seems to be rotating as a whole, raising the question of where it goes beyond the western horizon in order to emerge unchanged in the east. Thus, it is almost inevitable that ‘the earth rests on nothing’ would be constructed as a legitimate hypothesis based on actual observation. This is also consistent with the ‘firmament’ cosmology in which the stars are holes in a large sphere, through which starlight shines and rain falls. Testable predictions of these theories would of course need to wait for better instruments.
So, it seems the ancient goat herders are better at science than Ray Comfort.
Things I enjoy about this post:
1) The attempt to discredit scripture using a man’s error (even though scripture uses imagery [“hang,” “nothing”] to describe the REALITY of earth’s unconnected suspension in space and yet regulation of its orbit and path). #redherringfail
2) Typing PZ Meyer’s commented reply TO Ray–which Ray HIMSELF included in the FB post and YOU included a pic of in YOUR post–VERBATIM as though it was your own idea. #plagiarismfail
3) Saying Ray attempted to cover up his error when he CLEARLY wrote that he was wrong in a follow-up post, which you ALSO included here… again. #infofail
4) Your hyper-focus on Ray’s attention to the invisible nature of gravity (have YOU ever “seen” gravity?) and how scripture confirms this, but you seem to think that gravity as a law is actually a tangible thing the earth “hangs on??” #literalismfail
5) You insult Ray by calling him a color… (Maroon is a color, moron is a stupid person, so…) #spellingfail or maybe #knowledgefail
And thereby insult yourself a LIIIIITTLE bit more than him. “Wisdom is proven by her deeds.” Have a nice day!
Nope, PZ showed both you and Ham don’t have any understanding of reality, and your and Ham’s fallacies start with your imaginary deity and thinking your book of mythology/fiction is inerrant.
Proper attribution is there. Your failure to evidence your claim.
*Bugs Bunny voice* Eh, what a maroon! */Bugs Bunny voice*
Wow, David, did it really take you almost 3 weeks to formulate that response?
Hate to break it to you dude. It wasn’t worth the wait.