Universe Race

As theories go, that the universe was once in a very hot, dense state is something in which we have a high degree of confidence because of the strong empirical support in the form of observational evidence of things like recession speed of galaxies increasing with distance, the decreasing proportion of heavy elements with increasing distance, the cosmic microwave background radiation arriving with (almost) equal intensity from all directions, etc., and the equally strong theoretical support from general relativity that rules out a static universe. Absolutely true, but you fail to note that the evidence upon which older theories were based is not replaced. New theories must still be consistent with old data. This is why, for example, theories of the shape of earth went from flat to spherical to oblate spheroid, and not from flat to spherical to cubical. Any theory that replaces the Big Bang must still explain the original hot, dense state for which the observational evidence is so strong.--Percy

You're just asking the same question over and over again. We keep giving you the same answer over and over again. Do you think the answer is going to change? No, the data cannot be interpreted as an explosion into pre-existing space. Our local reference frame is considered stationary. There is no such thing as an absolute reference frame to measure against. The amount of red shift provides an extremely accurate measure of relative speed. You're pulling the "nothing is moving" comment out of context. In the scenario under consideration in that prior discussion, nothing is moving. Obviously everything in the universe has local motions, but these are dwarfed by the recession velocities of objects a great distance apart. How many times do we have to mention the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR)? It proved your model wrong a half century ago.--Percy

Space is expanding at the same rate everywhere, but objects that are gravitationally bound to each other do not expand away from one another with the expanding space. Gravity diminishes by the square of the distance, so at the largest scales, larger than galactic clusters, objects are so distant from one another and their mutual gravitational attraction so weak that they are carried away from each other by the expansion of space. No one said measurement is impossible. We said that there's no such thing as an absolute reference frame. It is equally valid to make measurements from any inertial (non-accelerating) reference frame you choose, so we choose our own local reference frame for convenience, which by definition is stationary since we're not moving relative to ourself. I would guess that it is also common to adjust cosmological measurements to be relative to our sun or to the Milky Way galaxy in which our sun resides, but you'd have to ask Cavediver or Son Goku to find out for sure. The Hubble constant, the rate of expansion of the universe, is approximately 71 kilometers/second/megaparsec. The speed of light is approximately 300,000 kilometers/second. Since recession velocity is proportional to distance, doing the math tells us that objects separated from each other by more than 4,222 megaparsecs (8 10²² miles or 1.3 10¹⁰ light years) are receding from each other at a speed greater than that of light.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Correct values in last paragraph, must have accidentally hit a number one row off on the number pad.

I wasn't able to figure this out. What was Tesla correct about?--Percy

Corrected - thank you!And thanks for the British sarcasm alert. I have a dry sense of humor myself, but that doesn't seem to help me detect it in others. --Percy

If these cars are relatively close together in space, say on the same stretch of road, then space is not expanding between the two cars at 60 miles an hour. The two cars are separating from one another by traveling through space at a relative speed of 60 miles an hour.But now imagine that these two cars, each still moving at 30 mph relative to ourselves but in opposite directions, are instead a great distance away. One is a half megaparsec in one direction, the other a half megaparsec in the opposite direction. Their local velocities are still 30 mph relative to ourselves, but their velocity relative to each other is now 71 kilometers/second due to the expansion of the intervening space, and we would now measure them each as traveling at half that rate, 35.5 km/s, away from ourselves. I'm guessing that this is a reference to needing an object to pass point 1 at time 1 and point 2 at time 2 in order to calculate the velocity. We can't really do this directly using the visible motion of distant galaxies because they are too far away for their motion to be discernible, but we can do it indirectly by measuring their red shift, which gives two points separated by time on wavelengths of light. How many times must it be explained that the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) disproved this possibility nearly a half century ago. How many times do you want us to tell you "no".--Percy

This looks like nonsense. I suppose it is inevitable that you will at least occasionally stumble upon a collection and ordering of words that sort of make sense and are sort of correct. The theory of relativity says that all motion is relative, and more importantly and fundamentally, that the physical laws of the universe will always be observed to be the same in all inertial reference frames independent of their motion with respect to all other inertial reference frames. The key insight is that the speed of light will always be measured as c (300,000 kilometers/second) regardless of the relative speed of the reference frame from which the light was emitted.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Left out a word.

You're getting your contexts confused. I was responding to your claim that two cars traveling at 30 mph in opposite directions was due to the expansion of space between them. I replied that they're merely traveling through space, and explained that you would need them to be separated by a great distance before the expansion of space would be a significant factor. The time in the reference frame of the object whose speed you are measuring can be ignored. No one said that theories related to the Big Bang shouldn't be scrutinized. It's being more thoroughly scrutinized recently than ever before in its history.What was actually said was that it makes no sense to return to theories disproven long ago, which happens to be the case for what you're proposing.--Percy

Your model is not new. Your proposal is for the explosion of matter and energy into existing space as opposed to the expansion of space itself. This was disproven nearly a half century ago by the discovery of the CMBR.It's also disproven by the fact that except for groups of galaxies bound gravitationally, all galaxies are in retreat from each other with velocities proportional to distance, indicating the expansion was everywhere at once and not from a single point in pre-existing space.It's also disproven by the fact that the clocks in distant galaxies do not run significantly slower than our own, as would be the case if their motion were due to travel through space instead of the expansion of space.--Percy

If you want to try to argue Paul Marmet's position here, go ahead (Paul Marmet rejects Einsteinian relativity). In the meantime, the CMBR is solid, peer-reviewed science both observationally and theoretically. Its discovery won the Nobel Prize for Penzias and Wilson and cemented the Big Bang as the only viable theory of cosmological origins.--Percy

Hi Tesla,What I said before was that if you want to argue Paul Marmet's position that you should go ahead, but what you instead posted was a link to: Which doesn't have anything to do with Paul Marmet's ideas, in fact seems to be a completely different set of ideas except for the rejection of Einsteinian relativity.Anyway, whoever's position you want to advocate, you have to do more than just post links. This is from the Forum Guidelines:

Keep in mind that you can find any sort of cockamamie idea you want out there on the Internet. Your last two links were to material from message boards. People can post any kind of nonsense they like at message boards, which is pretty much what you're doing here, but which doesn't reflect anything in the published literature. I suggest you seek out some legitimate science sources. If by "not definite" you mean the science is tentative, then of course I agree with you. It is the nature of all science to be tentative.--Percy

This thread saw two different objections to current scientific views on cosmological origins:

1. That the Big Bang was actually an explosion into space rather than an expansion of space.
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2. That our lack of knowledge of what happened at and very shortly after T=0 indicates that the rest of what we know about cosmological origins is wrong.

The first objection is very reasonable from a lay perspective, and it must be answered by explaining how current scientific views derive from the evidence. I thought the science side did a fair job of this. It was actually absolutely excellent in those posts that took a "here's the information you seek" approach, but I say fair because it was all spread out over 400 messages, and in many messages the science side allowed themselves to be distracted by taunts and such, such as this from CTD way back in Message 22: In my opinion the science side is better off just ignoring these kinds of responses and only paying attention to actual issues.I can't recall now if anyone mentioned the accelerating expansion of the universe, but in case not, I'll just add that this is another piece of evidence that the Big Bang was not an explosion into existing space, since of course explosions don't continue accelerating after the initial explosion. It's even weirder than that, since the evidence tells us that the expansion slowed for a while, then began accelerating.The second objection based upon our lack of knowledge at and shortly after T=0 is just addlepated. Human beings will never know even the tiniest percentage of everything, and if what we don't know could actually invalidate what we do then it would be impossible to ever know anything.This particular objection also saw the most determined effort of misunderstanding and misinterpreting that I've ever witnessed. It was like he was saying over and over and over again, "I don't care how idiotic I'm going to appear, I'm going to find a way to misinterpret this. God Bless!"--Percy