What the Creation Museum did to me

[Cyberman]

No-one apart from creationists says it was either.

Life is just one (of many) manifestations of physics.

Exactly my point, although chemistry would still like a word with you. However, now you've switched gears; you began this point by stating that "The size of the universe is necessary, it's not an accident or chance"; in other words you didn't mention life. I repeat, nobody apart from creationists insist that it had to be either of those things.

Physics is demonstrable, repeatable, predictable, reliable. Know what else shares these properties? Not your god.

Physics is guided by bias and opinions, you know this. Consider Pi. Pi is a transcendental number, its decimals recess infinitely. But we actually only need the first 11 decimal places. All the practical uses of Pi you would ever need only require the first 11 decimals. Thus you can use Pi = 3.14159265358, isn't that simpler?

Bollocks. Now you've switched gears again - from physics to mathematics without pausing for breath. You're going to get whiplash if you carry on like this, arguing without due care and attention. The fact that we can, indeed must, round down the value of Pi for all practical purposes does not mean that physics is therefore guided by bias and opinion. There have been documented cases in history in which people have demonstrated their opinion about the laws of gravity, testing their blind faith in some pet god of their own subscription (more often than not, depressingly, the same one). There is a very good reason why one hundred percent of these people are now a part of history; and presumably a part of geography as well. Any idea what that might be? The video of the swinging ball holds a clue.

According to Occam's Razor the simplest theory is more likely to be correct (although tell that to Einstein).

Nope; Occam's Razor is a principle of parsimony, that one should not multiply the number of entities more than necessary; or given competing hypotheses, the one more likely to be correct is the one making the fewer assumptions. It's by no means a fundamental law of nature, more a labour-saving guideline for sorting the potentially fruitful wheat from the potentially inconsequential chaff, and it's hardly infallible.

If it was physics, you would derive the number experimentally, and then call it a constant - ah, isn't that much simpler than having an irrational number? Of course it is! According to physics the simpler option is preferred - according to Mathematics, physics can get stuffed because Pi is one of the most complicated numbers known to man.

Without maths, theoretical physics would be practically impossible since the discipline relies on describing physical laws mathematically. Conversely, maths can get along quite happily without physics and is more than capable of quite startling and impossible things that physics can only stand and watch on the sidelines with a note from its mother. Does that mean that maths is superior to physics? Well, unless you want to produce some physical effect in the real Universe, then you're pretty much reduced to crawling on your hands and knees, begging for physics to take you back.

In short, when it comes to feats of raw computational 'magic', maths is the Golden Age Superman to physics' Dazzler. On the other hand, when you want something you can see, hear and touch, then maths is left talking to itself at parties while physics is in the bedroom getting hummers.

The universe was structurally different 3 billion years ago.

"No shit, Sherlock," said Watson drily.

If you don't believe me, then go ask an astrophysicist what the size of the universe is today, and what it was 3 billion years ago.

So mischaracterising a reliance and a knowledge of the workings of physics as "blind faith" doesn't prevent you from accepting what astrophysicists have to say, then?

Of course you can't repeat what you had 3 billion years ago, in the same way that it's impossible to re-create the big bang.

Why would you even need to do that? What Georges Lemaître and others before, and contemporary with, him did is take the state of the Universe as we see it today, apply the knowledge that the Universe is expanding, then extrapolate backwards to investigate what the early Universe must have been like and how long ago it was like that. The whole of the rest of the science in that area is based on examining varous aspects of that early state experimentally. For instance, by examining the Universe with a microwave detector, Bell lab technicians Penzias and Wilson discovered - completely accidentally - the long-sought-after cosmic microwave background, essentially the glow from the Big Bang now Doppler shifted down into microwave region of the spectrum. This CMB radiation has since been mapped and can be, in fact has been, investigated by anyone with an interest in it.

Bottom line, for now, would be: while it would be extremely difficult to recreate the Big Bang, though not impossible given the technology and a colossal amount of energy (remember the fuss about the LHC from the perennial doomsayers?), we don't need to.