Insulation and Cosmology

Gary Gibson's other weblog is at... http://www.Lulu.com/GaryCGibson

Some insulation installers just stuff the material in and perhaps hold it in place temporarily with string. Alternatively a plastic vapor barrier can keep insulation in place until the sheetrock or whatever goes up.

Most insulation installers don't use tin foil backed materials. If the width is cut rightly it will also stay in place until the wall material is completed.

Incidently, there is a good new book by Brian Greene from 2004 named 'The Fabric of the Cosmos'. It reviews the special and general theory of relativity following a review of Newton's classical mechanics, it goes on to string and brane theory and even loop quantum gravity.

One of the interesting points in recent speculation is that space-time may not actually exist. Cosmological theories generally require a 'background' of space-time in which the mass and energy happen. In some of the newer theories such as holographic cosmology what seems to be space-time may be just illusory.

I appreciated the parallels of some of the inflaton theory of creation to the order expressed in the first couple of chapters of Genesis.

Big Bang theory is now basically obsolete. It seemed like a bang in the late 20th century such as might happen in empty space, yet now it seems more like a ballon that inflated fast creating space-time with it simultaneously. After 7 billion years it was mostly formed, and then a fast cosmic accelleration resumed.

God of course rested after 6 days/time periods.

It is unknown what happened before the inflation...some believe a little corner of space-time experienced quantum jitters and a Higgs Field occurred (let there be light following the spoken word). It could be a Higgs Field that is again accellerating the expansion of the Universe. Or it could be that the Universe is just a 3-Brane appearance within an 10 dimensional Universe, and that vibrating stings or zero-branes carry the tune. God knows the score.

Perhaps if some aspects of developer greed had not pushed dwellings so close to the beach some lives would have been spared in the tragedy of the tsunami. If people lived a mile inshore perhaps the main force of the wave would have been spent before reaching the tourist ghettos.