Scientists see blast from past -- 13 billion years ago

[sikander]

Originally Posted by ibjamming

Please enlighten me then... Your link didn't work. Everyone agrees the big bang came from a singularity...a single point. So how can you see "back to the beginning" in all directions? The universe is the skin of an expanding ball? There is no inside? There are many big bang theories...of which are you referring?

Okay. There is no single point in space from which the Big Bang originated, because the Big Bang was an explosion of space. Space itself began to expand, and it was all of space expanding away from itself. There is no center to the Universe (or, if you insist on there being a center, you'd have to say that the whole Universe is its own center).

If you're still having trouble wrapping your head around the concept, I don't blame you, but I gotta run so that'll have to do as far as sikander's explanation for the moment.

[SmokeAndThink]

Originally Posted by G-MAN

http://forum.grasscity.com/YouTube - 'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009

The space between the galaxies expands, everything gets further away.

I just watched that whole video, + rep

[TheHighChild]

"Gamma ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe," he added.
"They are believed to be associated with the formation of stellar-sized black holes or rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars during cataclysmic events such as the collapse of a massive star or the coalescence of two compact stellar objects."

Started crying blood while reading that.

[ibjamming]

Originally Posted by sikander

Okay. There is no single point in space from which the Big Bang originated, because the Big Bang was an explosion of space. Space itself began to expand, and it was all of space expanding away from itself. There is no center to the Universe (or, if you insist on there being a center, you'd have to say that the whole Universe is its own center).

If you're still having trouble wrapping your head around the concept, I don't blame you, but I gotta run so that'll have to do as far as sikander's explanation for the moment.

Yes there is a center...it's widely accepted that a "singularity", a single "point" exploded (inflated) to form the universe (space)...correct? If space inflated from this single point...and this "light emitter" formed at the 1 billion year point...then the light of this thing SHOULD have moved and still is moving faster than space is expanding. Actually, there should be a whole bunch of light hitting the leading (expanding) edge of the universe (space). Light should be piled up at the edge of the universe. Or, is it bouncing off the boundary and THAT'S why we see "old light" from all directions.

The ONLY thing that can fix this problem is if space is expanding faster than light. Which throws out Einstein. I've said before, Einstein is wrong...or better...incomplete.

Even if space expands in all directions...as long as it originally started as a point, there is and will always be a "center".

I CAN wrap my head around the concept...apparently too well...I see the flaw in it. As an aside...I'm in the 99th percentile for "space relations" and "abstract reasoning".

I think the "universe" or "space" was always there...isn't itself expanding...and goes on infinitely...at least as far as we'll ever know. MATTER and what we know as energy may have been "pushed away from each other" in a big bang. But the space it occupies was always there. Matter and energy have always been here. When we see things far away...we're looking at what they were in he past...but it's not looking back at a "young" in the sense of "new" universe. The universe is eternal. It was always here and will be always here. Things in it come and go and move around but basically it's unchanging.

[SmokeaSpliff]

How can a bunch of stoners get so worked up about science? amazing, no? Red shift, the doppler effect, general n specific theories of relativity, nuclear fission, communist politics, and psychology are all the strange things i have talked with my smokin buddies about. yeah, i understand basically everything said here so far, i just dont know what the point of the discussio was in the first place. i dunno, im fuckin tired, srry if i sound like an asshole. anyone ever think maybe the universe originated from a black hole? if u press rewind on the big bang, it looks remarkably like a black hole, and all that matter has to go somewhere, right? because if it just stayed at bthe singularity, then eventually the normal matter would cancel out the hole's anti-matter and it would go away, but they dont. so all that matter must be ejected somewhere. damn, this is starting to sound all sci fi, but nobody realy knows, so why not speculate? im not stoned enough, sorry if some of this doesnt make sense.
Peace!

[420Haze]

Originally Posted by ibjamming

So if the universe can't expand faster than the speed of light...PROVEN by the red shift...how can light that was emitted 13 billion years ago just now be reaching us? The universe was nothing near the current size back then. It has had to have expanded to include where we are...SLOWER than that original light traveled to get here. So what happened to that light? What slowed it down so much to just be getting here now?

Says who? Scientists? So? You believe everything that "experts" tell you? I think they're wrong. They are after all just guessing. Nobody has gone out there to see if it's actually moving away. And...if everything is supposedly moving away from everything else...where does the blue shift come from? All the galaxies are supposedly moving away from each other with the expanding universe...yet I've heard that Andromeda is going to collide with our galaxy?!? How can that be?

Science at our stage...is barely better than religion. We KNOW nothing...

G-MAN,

I understand the expansion of the universe just as you show. Now answer me this. If the universe can't expand faster than light...how can light from the upper left corner reach ANY of the other points AFTER 13 billion years when the entire age is less than 14 billion years? There is nothing in the universe that has been pumping out massive amounts of light for 14 billion years. Anything that old should have gone dark billions of years ago...and we shouldn't be able to see it. Light from the upper left point is continuously hitting the other points as the grid expands. If anything, the light isn't as old as suggested. Or, the universe is much older than suggested.

I've seen theories of the universe expanding faster than the speed of light in the first few milliseconds...but I think it would gave to have continued that fast... It's the only thing that fits.

Personally, I don't believe the big bang. I believe there may have been an explosion staring things flying, but the "container", "the universe", was always here. Where it came from, I have no idea.

We can't pinpoint the center of the universe because everything is moving away from each other, including the Earth which when observed from Earth it looks like everything is moving away from us, which is what it would look like from any observation point. In order to trace back where everything came from you would have to leave Earth, go into space and take a step back and look at everything from a nonmoving point far enough away from everything to not be affected by it.

Also, the reason the Andromeda galaxy is on a collision course with ours is a little thing called gravity. Even though everything is moving away from each other there are still objects that are going to be relatively close to each other and there are still factors that can slow, move, or distort the movement of bodies in space.

[sikander]

Originally Posted by ibjamming

The ONLY thing that can fix this problem is if space is expanding faster than light. Which throws out Einstein. I've said before, Einstein is wrong...or better...incomplete

This statement alone proves that you either didn't read or just utterly did not comprehend the link I pointed you to.

The light-velocity barrier applies to particles, not to space itself, and in fact, there is a distance beyond which space expands the distance between two objects faster than the speed of light. It's standard cosmology, go look it up. (It's commonly called the Hubble volume or the Hubble sphere)

[ibjamming]

Originally Posted by 420Haze

We can't pinpoint the center of the universe because everything is moving away from each other, including the Earth which when observed from Earth it looks like everything is moving away from us, which is what it would look like from any observation point. In order to trace back where everything came from you would have to leave Earth, go into space and take a step back and look at everything from a nonmoving point far enough away from everything to not be affected by it.

Also, the reason the Andromeda galaxy is on a collision course with ours is a little thing called gravity. Even though everything is moving away from each other there are still objects that are going to be relatively close to each other and there are still factors that can slow, move, or distort the movement of bodies in space.

If THAT were the case...space is expanding EVERYWHERE at greater than the speed of light...the gap between the sun and earth would also be expanding at greater than the speed of light. Unless you are going to tell me that gravity can overcome this expansion AND hold something in orbit. Is the gap between us and Alpha Centuri expanding at greater than the speed of light? How about the gap between us and Andromeda? You think the gravity between us and Andromeda is enough to overcome space expansion AND to drag us together? Remember...Andromeda is 2,500,000 light years away!

Originally Posted by sikander

This statement alone proves that you either didn't read or just utterly did not comprehend the link I pointed you to.

The light-velocity barrier applies to particles, not to space itself, and in fact, there is a distance beyond which space expands the distance between two objects faster than the speed of light. It's standard cosmology, go look it up. (It's commonly called the Hubble volume or the Hubble sphere)

I told you...the link didn't work. And do you know how many theories I've read in Scientific American? I'm 51...I've been reading that magazine since high school. I've forgotten more theories than you've read. That's where my whole "science is woefully lacking" arguments come from. I've seen theory after theory fall apart and be replaced by another that falls apart too.

OK...then why isn't the space around me expanding at greater than the speed of light? I'm not in the right place? GRAVITY can overcome it? Well then that PROVES that "empty space" has mass. There is an aether.

Your Hubble Sphere is just another in a long line of failed explanations.

[Lacan]

People seem to forget that the discipline of science at one time was regarded as a normative pursuit.

We get things like an approximation for the pull of gravity, and Newtons laws, and all of a sudden we think we're hot shit.

[Thunderstruck]

Originally Posted by Lacan

People seem to forget that the discipline of science at one time was regarded as a normative pursuit.

We get things like an approximation for the pull of gravity, and Newtons laws, and all of a sudden we think we're hot shit.

some do yes, the people making the real impacts don't and normally enjoy the fact that they are wrong sometimes. It's a way to see that we are on the right path to finding the truth of things.

Personally that's what I love most about science, at it's heart it's really just an educated guess about how nature works.

[sikander]

Originally Posted by ibjamming

I told you...the link didn't work. And do you know how many theories I've read in Scientific American? I'm 51...I've been reading that magazine since high school. I've forgotten more theories than you've read. That's where my whole "science is woefully lacking" arguments come from. I've seen theory after theory fall apart and be replaced by another that falls apart too.

That's the strength of science. You come up with an idea, test it to see if it works, and if it doesn't work, then you go and find something else. It's a continual process of improvement and it works based on finding out what's wrong about our understanding. In addition to other science-related stuff, Scientific American reports on the work various scientists are doing in the field as of publication. So you bet your ass you're going to see theories come and go, because a lot of theories in science end up falling apart. But if you never even try to come up with some explanation then you've given up doing science.

You look more certain if you stick to your guns and all that, and people who look certain and confident do get more pussy than wishy-washy guys who qualify everything they say like Woody Allen, but if you don't accept that you have the capacity to be wrong and aren't willing to revise your ideas in the face of new evidence then what you have is no longer a reasoned position, it's a dogmatic faith in something.

(The link didn't work as in it didn't lead you to a readable web page, or it didn't work as in it didn't enlighten you?)

OK...then why isn't the space around me expanding at greater than the speed of light? I'm not in the right place? GRAVITY can overcome it? Well then that PROVES that "empty space" has mass. There is an aether.

Good heavens, where did you go to school? I got a crash-course in this in high school.

The rate at which space increases between things is proportional to their distance, which is another way of saying that the amount of space expansion is a function of how much space you're considering. All of space is expanding, so if you start off with the space encompassed in two meters, you'll see more space created (things on either end of those two meters will seem to "recede" faster) than if you consider only one meter.

The answer to your question is: totally different scales. I mentioned the Hubble Sphere, whose radius is just the distance between two things such that they recede at c. The Hubble Distance is around 13.8 billion light years.

Numbers like that are thrown around a lot, but I don't think we really take the time to comprehend what they mean. So 13.8 billion light years is 13,800,000,000 light years. One light year is around 9,460,528,400,000 kilometers. So multiply 13.8 billion by one light-year in kilometers and you get 1,305,552,919,200,000,000,000,000 km. I don't even know the number you'd use to say that most significant digit. So that's so far away it has absolutely NOTHING to do with every-day existence. The effect is negligibly-small on distances smaller than a megaparsec (million parsecs). I think the number I heard once is that for distances of about a light-year the recession velocity is less than an inch per second. < One inch, in 9,460,528,400,000 km. So if you want to figure out the effect of expansion over a kilometer, divide an inch by 9 and a half quadrillion. Over a few meters? By another thousand. And that speed you get? It's still too damn big.

Your Hubble Sphere is just another in a long line of failed explanations.

Didn't you just a couple posts ago admit that you didn't even understand what this is all about? And you're just dismissing it like that?

And like it or not, it does explain the fact that everything in the Universe seems to be accelerating away from us. If we went by your explanation that expansion was centered on a single point, and therefore everything was expanding away from this single point, then we would have to conclude - based on the fact that the whole Universe seems to be accelerating away from us - that the Big Bang actually happened in the location of the present-day solar system.

Hubble didn't just make up Hubble's Law. He derived the relationship - v = HD - after extensive data-collection on what galaxies were actually doing. His explanation fits the data. Yours does not. Or rather, it does, but only if you make some pretty big assumptions for which no evidence exists and which would demand the complete re-jiggering of our understanding of modern cosmology. I'm personally open to that, but you kind of need to have some satisfactory explanations and damn good data to back them up. Trying and failing to poke holes in a theory that you admittedly don't even understand does not a persuasive argument make.

[MelT]

Great posts Sikander, there really isn't a lot more to say.

MelT

[MelT]

Originally Posted by ibjamming

I've seen theory after theory fall apart and be replaced by another that falls apart too.

Your Hubble Sphere is just another in a long line of failed explanations.

I'm finding it harder and harder to understand why you insist that this is the case?.

Science is wrong, often, it is revised often - but it is also right, often. It does not claim to be the final answer, it will continue to grow and to accept its failures and deserve its victories. But you seem to want to try to prove that it's a dismal failure in every respect, when everyone can see that it's not. Science does not know everything, and....?

You seem to be courting a pet theory that you want to tell us about, but first feel that you have to try to damage the validity of science before you can tell us what it is? You really don't need to do that, lots of us here have whacky ideas that are proven wrong by science, it doesn't really matter. I'd be interested to hear what it is you want to talk about, regardless of what science says about it. Is it the aether theory by any chance?

Just tell us what you want talk about and we can get past this daft argument that everything science knows is wrong and into something that I'm sure is far more interesting

MelT

[MelT]

Originally Posted by ibjamming

Personally, I don't believe the big bang. I believe there may have been an explosion staring things flying, but the "container", "the universe", was always here. Where it came from, I have no idea.

See? This is the stuff we can talk sensibly about, you have an actual idea about what you think happened. Your container could easily be thought of as both 'block time' and the quantum field, or the resultant field on branes meeting, etc., acceptable ideas already. I certainly believe that the universe and many other universes are within a 'thing' too, which has always existed, just like you. It has no time within it, and neither comes about nor goes away, though there are areas of lesser dimensions within it that are subject to an arrow of relative time. Why not? Many scientists would go for a version of that now. What I'm getting at is that what you think science is dismissing could well be what some branches of science believe already.

We are on the whole, usually, and with a good wind behind us and plenty of good weed, are all friends here who don't ridicule anyone who has ideas of their own. How about it? Let's just talk about how you see the universe and the ideas you have? We may actually be able to add weight to what you believe, not shoot it down. Who's not to say you don't have something remarkable?

MelT

[G-MAN]

Originally Posted by SmokeAndThink

I just watched that whole video, + rep

lol click the rep button then

Its definitely worth watching and explains quite elegantly how the universe came from nothing, and how empty space actually contains a lot of energy. I would answer iljammings question but the video does a far better job at explaining what's going on + it looks like he's been banned for some rather nasty comments about rape, figures lol