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Wednesday, October 07, 2015

Ben Carson's Scientific Ignorance - The New Yorker

"His central claim—that the second law of thermodynamics rules out order forming in the universe after the Big Bang—is a frequent misstatement made by creationists who want to appear scientifically literate. In reality, it is completely false. Local order in parts of the universe is always possible at the expense of heat and disorder dissipated to the external environment. The human body is one example: we take in energy from our environment to build up complex molecules that help power our bodies, and, in doing so, we release heat to the world around us. A snowflake is another beautifully ordered example of what simple natural meteorological processes can produce. Stars form by gravity, collapsing into spherically ordered structures that can remain in this form only if they release tremendous heat energy into the environment. Carson elides these physical realities by creating a straw man: he says that scientists believe that, after the Big Bang, the universe was “perfectly ordered.” But no such claim has been made by scientists; instead, we describe how local order, including galaxies, stars, planets, and life, developed over time."

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