Diary Entry 1

Hubbles Space Telescope

The Hubbles Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope that carried into earth orbit by the space shuttle in April 1990. It is named for American astronemer Edwin Hubble Although Hubble was not the first space telescope, it is one of the largest and most versatile, and well known as both a vital research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy. The HST is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, and is part of NASA’s Great Observatories series, with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Space telescopes were proposed as early as the 1940s. The Hubble was funded in the 1970s, with a proposed launch in 1983, but the project was beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the Challenger disaster. When finally launched in 1990, scientists found that the main mirror had been ground incorrectly, severely compromising the telescope’s capabilities. However, after a servicing mission in 1993, the telescope was restored to its intended quality. Hubble’s position outside the Earth’s atmosphere allows it to take extremely sharp images with almost no background light. Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field image, for instance, is the most detailed visible-light image of the universe’s most distant objects ever made. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as accurately determining the rate of expansion of the universe.

Diary Entry 2

Origin of the Universe – The Inflation Universe Theories
The Big Bang Theory provided an atheistic explanation for the origin of the universe, but its obvious simplicity was subject to multiple attacks. As a result, the original theory is no longer the dominant scientific explanation for the atheistic origin of the universe. While the original Big Bang Theory is now “dead,” from its ashes have emerged the various Inflationary Universe Theories (IUTs). Starting with Alan Guth in the late 1990’s (The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins), the scientific community has now proposed roughly 50 different IUT variants. Scientists hope that one of the current IUTs will sire an accurate reconstruction of the birth of our universe, though it is universally acknowledged that all of the current IUTs have their problems. It seems the only way to get realistic calculations to match an IUT model is to make assumptions that are poorly justified.

Origin of the Universe – The Big Bang Theory
So began the effort to propose an atheistic mechanism for the origin of the universe. Enter the Big Bang Theory and Darwinian Evolution. The original Big Bang Theory seeks to explain the sudden appearance of everything from nothing, while Darwinian Evolution seeks to explain the origin of complex life forms from their supposed simpler ancestors. The premise of the Big Bang is that the entire universe was compacted into a teeny tiny little ball, which, after randomly coming into existence for no apparent reason in the first place, exploded into all space, time, matter and energy in an instant. Yes, that’s the theory. No Ph.D. required.

Origin of the Universe – Theism vs. Atheism
In general, theists attribute the origin of the universe to some sort of transcendent, intelligent Designer. Atheists envision a natural, undirected process by which universes spring into existence spontaneously. Prior to the 20th century most atheists believed the universe was eternal. This changed however as discoveries throughout the 20th Century rendered that view untenable. Einstein’s theory of gravity (which has been thoroughly validated by extensive experimental confirmation) and Hubble’s astronomical observations preclude an eternal universe. We now know beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe began at some point in the finite past.