Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Orbach and Genesis

This is rather disconcerting: a talk on the beginning of time by Raymond Orbach, Director of DOE’s Office of Science that quotes liberally from the book of Genesis. Orbach apparently gave his talk on April 6th as part of a…
April 13, 2005

This is rather disconcerting: a talk on the beginning of time by Raymond Orbach, Director of DOE’s Office of Science that quotes liberally from the book of Genesis. Orbach apparently gave his talk on April 6th as part of a brown bag lunch discussion. The title— Genesis: Science and the Beginning of Time.

Orbach takes science back to its limits, something like string theory and the first 10^-44 seconds, but in going back further then seems determined to inject religion into the discussion by quoting Genesis and by quoting others who invoke God as part of the process that explains the beginning of time. Not exactly what you would expect of a man of science—a science that has succeeded in going back further and further in time towards the Big Bang, and which shows no signs of suddenly stopping or of needing to invoke God at any point.

Is Orbach pandering to the religious right or devaluing science as is already underway in the Administration? In any case, I don’t think it’s appropriate for a man of his position.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.