Big Bang Problem

If we can see the light from the past,how did it get there?
How old is it?
Man has been around a very long time.
If all time can be seen in the sky,then the sky has remained the
same,right?

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Desdamona

Think about the 4th of July and those bright white loud shells: you see the flash, and then it's a second or more until you hear the BOOM - enough time to cringe. Even light only travels at 186,000 miles per second (and sound at 1100 feet per second), so the sunlight you see actually left the sun's surface eight minutes ago - just like the sound from the shell left with the light, but took a bit longer getting to you. The next-nearest star that you can see from Lovington is far enough away that its light left eight years ago. (The Dog Star - the bright one high in the South this time of year when it first gets dark.)
I've seen 2,000,000,000 year old light in my telescope, from the quasar 3C273. And you can see two million year old light with your naked eye, from the Andromeda Galaxy. Nope. It changes all the time. Stars orbit other stars, some stars pulsate and change brightness, and others explode. Never a dull moment, in fact.

I'm a little... shocked. But here goes.The stars in the sky are actually very far apart. The nearest star to our sun is alpha centaur, which is 4 light years away. That means that it takes 4 years for light to travel from that star to our planet.Our galaxy (please ask me to explain if you don't know what a galaxy is) is about 75 thousand light years in diameter. That means that it takes about 75 thousand years for light to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. Considering that recorded history can only be traced back to 6 thousand years ago, this is a very short time compared to how long it took for light to get to here from where they were.Now, when we talk about other galaxies beside our own, we are talking distances in the hundreds of millions to billions of light years. Another strong evidence against young earth, young universe claim.

Lightning. See the flash, count ten seconds to hear the thunder.

If all the stars in the universe exploded, we wouldn't hear or see that event for years, alfa centauri would be the first one we would see explode. However, if we got caught up in some vast time dilation consequencial anomoly effect, we would be fried chicken at black hole mean time. How's that for a combustable catastrophism. Which means the stretchathon marathon would render me six foot and 2 million in-escapable light years. However, if the stars are attached to the firmament then the universe is infact 2 dimensional, rendering me a comic character in Dan Carrolls picturethon/-->>

How can we see the past in the sky if it has changed so much?

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Desdamona

How can you be so certain that all this is true?

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Desdamona

Because I have taken astro-physics in the past and I have participated in a research. Would you like me to start putting equations in here??? Have you taken trigonometry? Have you taken calculus? Have you taken differential equation? If not, I doubt that you can understand most of these.

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The Laminator

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No,I have not taken these classes. If I had an interest in them I
might,but I really don't.
It's good for you though,right?
At least you can feel smart about some things.
So,because you took these classes,does that mean the teachings are,
facts and/or infalible?
Do creationists have classes that they teach their ideas to?
Just curious because I might want to attend their classes.

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Desdamona

Are their ever really any falling stars?
If a spaceship exploded in space,would anyone ever know about it?
They wouldn't right?

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Desdamona

First of all, I'm not saying that I'm smarter than you. Since I do not know you in real life, I can't make that kind of judgement. What I am saying is that I know what I am talking about, and you don't.You started implying that the big bang didn't happen because the bible didn't say so. For one thing, science doesn't give a rat's ass what the bible says. We perform experiments and collect data first, then we come up with theories to try to explain these data.Are you seriously doubting math now? This is the part of your message that really ticked me off:

quote:

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So,because you took these classes,does that mean the teachings are,
facts and/or infalible?

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From your previous posts, it became very clear that you didn't even know light had a finite speed. It also became very clear that you had absolutely no idea there was a universe out there besides your back yard. From the looks of it, I'm willing to bet that you don't know the first thing about our solar system. I'm even beginning to think that you don't know there are currently 9 known planets in our solar system.Yet, you made that statement there, doubting what I have learned and am learning in my school are all bogus. See anything wrong with this picture? You don't know the first thing about math or science, and you've already made claims that they're all bogus.I am beginning to get a glimpse at the true nature behind creationism. I had no idea it was so... ignorant prone.

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The Laminator

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True,I didn't do very great at math,so you got me all figured out,on that one.
I passed all other subjects easily.
So you have the right then to judge what I study and get angry when,
I don't agree with what you study as truth to me.
If you were so sure of your education,no one could get you angry,
just because they see it different.
Thats like saying that I can't trust any man just because the world
says they are all lustful.
I am saying that you get your answers from other sources that I don't
happen to agree with,not that you are not a smart or worth while person.
I hope that what you study is not all you are.
I hope you are more than just a brain.
For you,it works,for me it doesn't,but we are not clones,and cannot
agree on everything.
I think you are smart,but I don't see why you have to get so angry,
about this.This is just one part of life,and one aspect of who we are.
I respect your education and your determination to be in school
My uncle was a Professor.He never got tired of school.
Your education works for you and makes your life happier,and thats
what matters,isn't it,that it works for you?

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Desdamona

For the record, if you think high school education is all there is, you ain't seen not'n yet.Just make sure you never accidently wander into one of the philosophy debates where I'm the referee.

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The Laminator

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That is something you don't ever have to worry about.

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Desdamona

The topic here is the Big Bang; which is sometimes described as an explosion, although that description is a bit misleading. Nevertheless, we can see this explosion, in a sense. You can see it on your TV. Sound weird? The answer has to do with the answer to the question about an exploding spaceship.When there was an explosion on board Apollo 13, we knew about it; but not immediately. It takes time for any signal to get from the spacecraft back to Earth.At the time of the explosion, Apollo 13 was already on the way to the moon, and this means there is a short time delay in signals from the craft back to Earth. I don't know the exact distance. However, when the damaged craft was rounding the back of the moon, the crew set a record which is yet to be beaten for the greatest distance anyone has been from Earth... 400,171 km measured from the Earth's surface.Light, and radio signals, take more than a second to travel that distance. Thus, if there had been another catastrophic explosion as the craft began the long return to Earth, we would have taken more than a second to find out about it.Several deep space probes have been a lot further from Earth than this. The greatest distance for a space craft to be from Earth while still sending radio messages that we could read is for Pioneer 10, I think. Signals were received from 11.6 billion kilometres, and it took more than eleven hours for the signal to reach Earth.The closest star to Earth is just over four light years away. That means that light from the star takes four years to reach us. What you see twinkling in the sky for this star is an image of the star from four years ago. Most of the stars you see in the sky are several thousand light years away. If one of those stars blows up tomorrow, we won't see the explosion for more than a thousand years.In 1987, we saw a star blow up in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The explosion was visible to the naked eye. But it actually blew up 167,000 years ago. That is how long it took for the light to reach us.We regularly see such catastrophic explosions in even more distant galaxies; at distances of several billion light years. However, this requires a very powerful telescope to capture the light from such a distance explosion.Finally, the Big Bang is an explosion of space itself; which is rather different from any other explosion you might think of. That explosion filled all of space, and the light from that explosion continues to fill all of space. To get really pedantic, we can only see light from some time after the initial singularity, since the universe was originally opaque to light, but once space thinned out enough for light to travel freely, light began a long journey and we can see it now. Curiously, due to the effects of the expansion, the light also stretches and cools over time; that light is now called the cosmic microwave background radiation; and was first identified about forty years ago.You can see it now, on your TV, in a rather curious way. Just turn to a frequency where there is no station transmitting and watch the static. Something like 1% of what you are watching is the light signals from the explosion of space itself, and that signal has been travelling about 13.4 billion years.This is not all just random assumptions. There are good reasons for the statements given. They are discoveries, and thoroughly tested. We will no doubt continue to learn many new and amazing things about the universe as we continue to look openly at the world. The only aspect of the above which is even remotely tentative is the precise age of 13.4 billion years for CMBR; but that figure is now pretty solid, and certainly in the right ballpark.Cheers -- Sylas[This message has been edited by Sylas, 04-20-2004]