All this talk about this PhD. is much ado about nothing. The only reason I even cited the website is that someone complained about me saying the Universe will eventually burn out. They complained about me using the words burned out. I did a quick search of google and found 377,000 entries for the words (universe burn out). I chose the second site I came to because of his words "the universe will burn out" and I saw he was a PhD. I didn't even know he was a Christian until I went back to the site yesterday. Someone mentioned he was a Christian earlier but it was such a minor point I didn't even bother do verify it until yesterday. Much ado about nothing.
There are literally hundreds of sites that use the words the universe and/or stars will burn out. I could of used any of those sites to show that the phrase "burned out" regarding cosmology is very common.
Which is pretty much the entire point.
There are hundreds of sites that use those words. You provide a link to one, with absolutely no idea about the nature of the website (which is pretty darned obvious to any casual observer), and without checking the credentials of the author. You saw that he was a "PhD" and that was enough for you. You didn't check what his PhD was in, or whether he was an active researcher. You saw "PhD" and the words you wanted and that was all that mattered.
That, in a nutshell, is the appeal to authority fallacy, all wrapped up in a nice neat observer bias package, topped with a cherry picker ribbon.
This is precisely what people keep criticising you for, and you keep doing it. One would have hoped that your experience of linking to a white supremacist website without checking it out first would have made you a little more cautious, but no. This is exactly why nobody trusts your sources, and everyone questions your motives.
It's also extremely interesting that the site you say you chose at random is written by a christian apologist. This may be indicative of your observer bias, or the fact that the phrase you picked is far more commonly used by those who don't actually understand the science. Maybe it's a combination of both.
So, let me explain, slowly and carefully, why your "PhD" is wrong to use the phrase "The Universe will burn out".
Stars "burn out". I put it in quotation marks, because stars do not, of course, 'burn' anything. The phraseology is specific to astronomy, and refers to the nuclear fusion reactions that power a star during its time on the main sequence and post main sequence until it becomes a white dwarf, neutron star, supernova or black dwarf. None of these latter objects undergoes fusion reactions (except the supernova, which does so
very briefly, for the pedantic amongst you).
The end of the Universe will come in one of three manners;
1. A "Big Crunch". This will occur if the mass of the Universe is large enough to overcome the expansion and cause the Universe to contract. It's sort of the opposite of the Big Bang, and will result in a single solitary singularity. Some scientists conjecture that the Universe is just one in a continuous sequence of universes, beginning and ending in Big Bangs / Big Crunches, with each "Crunch" setting off a "Bang". The current evidence suggests that the mass is insufficient to cause a Big Crunch, which leaves two other possibilities.
2. "Heat Death". This means that the Universe will go on expanding for an infinite time into the future, until the matter is so spread out (on average) that interactions become rare, and stars can no longer form.
3. A "Big Rip", is what will happen if the cosmological constant is large enough, and does indeed increase as the Universe expands. The rate of expansion will increase exponentially until the fabric of spacetime tears itself apart.
Not a single one of these should be described, by anyone who knows what they're talking about, as "the Universe burning out". That's not to say that some who should know better has never actually used these words, or very similar, but if they did then they misspoke, or were mistaken.
Will you concede that you were wrong? Or even simply that your phrasing was in error? Will you ever admit that you don't actually understand the science that you're constantly talking about?
Oh, and if you have any questions about astronomy, why don't you ask a real astronomer?
I'd be more than happy to help.
