Is our universe stationary ?

Which part of "our universe as known to us as originating from our big bang" and not the Entire Universe are you having a problem with? Explain to me what part of the question you feel is gibberish. I've broken all the big words down nice and small for you but you still seem bewildered. Since you are incapable of even contemplating in your head the possibility of the point singularity that created our solar system, our galaxy, and everything else that we know exists may have had an original velocity I suggest you find somewhere else to banter as your replies are getting more and more repetitive containing less and less substance. changed table tags to quote tags...table tags were playing havoc on my browser for some reason - The QueenThis message has been edited by nipok, 08-28-2004 08:23 PMThis message has been edited by AdminAsgara, 08-28-2004 08:25 PM

The problem with this is that what you call the Entire Universe and "our universe" are, by the very definition of the words, the same thing.You have suggested that there is something outside our universe which still shares the same frame of spatial reference. You have suggested a redefinition of the word universe.We are saying that this is highly unusual and we ask you to explain what you mean by it, what observations or calculations you have done to back this up, and why you refuse to accept the model of the universe that science has generated so far.

Yes I use the universe in two places but so have many other philosophers and scientists. I did not make up the usage and I'm sorry if the concept is too foreign to comprehend. It seems to be causing a lot of grief. There are those that feel that the big bang created the entire Universe and those that feel our known universe as created from our big bang is a much smaller part of a much larger possibly infinite fabric of space and time.Many like to think that our big bang created the entire Universe because then they don’t feel as insignificant. Once you realize that our big bang could be one of a huge number of other big bangs then we each become even more insignificant then we already are. Our lifetime and the space you or I take up is nothing compared to the size of our known universe and its lifespan. Make that entire time and space a drop in a larger bucket and I can’t blame most folks for not having the mental capacity to even consider its possibility.I refuse to accept the model of the universe that science has generated so far because it is full of holes. Quantum mechanics and relativity have known discrepancies that seem to nullify the possibility that they can both be right in 100% of the situations. There are uncertainty principles, renormalization of Feynman diagrams, perturbation, accounting for imaginary vacuum fluctuations or particle-antiparticle annihilations that appear out of nowhere, 10+ dimensional string theories, and a big bang that created all matter in the known universe once being a smaller than a grain of sand. And you ask why I question the paradigm. Read some of my other posts. The current paradigm is flawed and needs more than band-aids to make sense.I only posed the question, what if our point singularity was moving before expansion. A very simple question. Something to ponder. Seems that it is too simple of a question for some to ponder.

And there lies the problem. You really should be cautious when you are talking about philosophy instead of observed science. Nothing wrong with philosophy, but we need to be in the clear on what we are debating.There is a rather large problem with your idea of using a moving sub-universe (or whatever you wish to call it) and that is that you need to discover the rest of the universe before you can say that it's moving, which sort of defeats the point with the question in the first place. Hence, even then it's a pointless question to ask, even if you grant the possibility of a radical change needed in our cosmological view of the universe.Also... Don't you think it would be best to actually discover this external universe before starting to make conclutions about it?It's not foreign to comprehend at all, it's just not cosmology (yet).This message has been edited by Melchior, 08-29-2004 12:03 AM

The problem is that you're not consistent. You talk about "our universe as known to us as originating from our big bang" which would include space, but you also say you aren't talking about the space moving at all but you aren't talking about just the matter either.So you are talking about SOME subset of "our universe as known to us as originating from our big bang" but you won't say what it consists of. Nor will you explain how it can be said to move at all or how it could be identified as moving without first detecting or discovering your hyppothetical space it is supposed to move in, whihc would render your whole argument moot.

OK, I think we are getting somewhere. I am going to try to simplify my point as clearly as possible to see if I can get the point across. Rather than being hung up so much on what we have been unable to observe to date or limiting your scope to only that which we have been able to observe step back for a second and really think about the likelihood of there being so much more out there that we have not found or seen yet. It is foolish to think that we already know everything there is to know about the size of the Entire Universe.SpaceTime as relative to us would be that spacetime that we can observe because it exists with us and thus is relative to us. It was created from the same process that put our galaxies and solar system into being and into motion. Time and Space are relative and my time and my space as I observe them are different from the time and space relative to someone on a rocket going at 1/2 the speed of light. Similarly time and space would be different to someone in another galaxy that sees the light from our sun a billion years after it goes nova. But relative to all points of reference inside our universe there is still the common spacetime that has the original moment of expansion of our big bang as a single frame of reference that is global to all other frames of reference inside our known universe. Everything created from our big bang may observe time and space or be acted upon by time and space relative to itself but there is still a spacetime relative to the initial moment of expansion that is a fixed frame of reference that all other points of reference inside our space time pocket have in common. Does this make sense? Do I need to elaborate on this in more detail?Now I never claimed that the point singularity that our big bang was spawned from was in fact moving. I only questioned what if. But lets step back for a second and stick with the obviously more likely option that the point singularity was stationary. Thus our known spacetime continuum, or our known universe, or whatever term you want to give to all that was created from our big bang expanded outwards in all directions from a point that was initially at rest and not in motion. That seems to be the more logical and more accepted paradigm. We still know that our Sun and solar system has velocity. We know that the Milky Way has velocity. We know that the Local Group that our Milky Way is contained in has velocity and we may very well know now or someday may find out that the Local Group is contained inside a larger cluster that itself may have velocity. It is this type of movement that I question What if?. If you can accept the possibility that our solar system and galaxy are moving then you should be able to close you eyes for a second and picture in your head the concept of our entire known pocket of space time that we call our known universe as possibly moving. Again I am not asking you to believe it is moving, I am asking the readers to picture in their heads the possibility of it moving.That is the whole point in a nutshell. IF it was or is moving then that in my eyes negates the big bang as being the creation point of time itself. It may have created the space time that we observe but if there was initial velocity then the point I am making is that there must have been a larger frame of reference or larger pocket of space time that our point singularity was contained in.If you are up to this point and are too close-minded to picture for a moment something other than what you already believe then so be it. I am surely not going to change your minds. But if your mind is open enough to conceptualize the possibility then maybe you might agree that there could be a point on the outer edge of our known universe where a star could leave the confines of our known STC and be left behind if it’s trajectory was 180 degrees from the trajectory of our STC. The existence of such a point on the outer edge of our known universe is likely something that we may never find.We may never find it because our STC was in fact stationary at the point in time of the original expansion or because we will not be able to obtain an adequate amount of data to process for a long enough period if time and are in fact looking for a needle in a haystack.Now I am sure you will quote me again and call all this gibberish and claim I am avoiding your questions and not making any sense. I don’t know how much clearer I can try to make the point. If you are unable to ponder the movement of our point singularity then so be it. I am curious if any real astronomers that study the nature of the universe regularly have ever thought about this possibility and the inherent difficulty in proving it one way or the other. The same difficulty I may have in presenting an argument for an initial velocity would seem to me to be no different then the difficulty someone might have in presenting an argument for it not having an initial velocity. Both are speculation that are almost impossible to prove. I happen to think however there could be a way to prove it as mentioned multiple times.This message has been edited by nipok, 08-30-2004 03:27 AM

I think you are just confused. If the Big Bang singularity were not embedded in some other space-time it is meaningless to speak of it as stationary. Or moving.Secondly according to Special Relativity there are no fixed points of reference for motion. None. And since all our spacetime was within the singularity you can't use that as a fixed point of reference either.ANd if the singularity was moving you are talking about a region of space-time moving. Which is itself something you need to explain as I pointed out in my first post. Without ever getting a satisfactory answer.

I think you are just confused. If the Big Bang singularity were not embedded in some other space-time it is meaningless to speak of it as stationary. Or moving.
Yes, IF it was embedded in some other pocket of space-time then our big bang would not be the catalyst that created time, just our time.Secondly according to Special Relativity there are no fixed points of reference for motion. Yes againNone. And since all our spacetime was within the singularity you can't use that as a fixed point of reference either.
That is part of issue at hand. How do we know "ALL" spacetime was within the singularity. My exact point is that All we know of spacetime was within but that does not prove that "ALL" spacetime was withinAnd if the singularity was moving you are talking about a region of space-time moving. Which is itself something you need to explain as I pointed out in my first post. Without ever getting a satisfactory answer. I am unsure how I can phrase my question differently to explain motion any other way. Motion is item A being in spot A at point in time A then being spatial coordinate B at point in time B thus traversing a length of measurable distance during a measureable length of time. To think about what I propose you need to let go of the fact that we can't prove it is not moving for a second and accept that we can't prove it is moving either. Think about our space time as a pocket of self-contained self-relative space time with a begining and an eventual ending. But don't confuse this finite pocket as the Entire UniverseThis message has been edited by nipok, 08-30-2004 10:21 AM

In other words you can;t offer any explanation of how it makes sense to say that a region of space is moving.And we've still got the problem of how to detect that our universe is "moving" without already knowing about whatever it is it is supposed to be moving in.

Statements:You are a fly.You are flying about in a car.The windows are painted over and you cannot see outside the car.You can see what is inside the car.Questions:Can you tell if the car is sitting still or driving at a constant rate of speed on a super smooth highway?Why do you never see bugs smashed on the inside of the windshield?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Assuming you eliminate other cues (noise and of course the speedometer) constant velocity motion is not detectable. That's Special Relativity.

Hi jar. I'm not Paul (duh!) so I hope you don't mind me sticking my head in. If there is no way to detect anything outside the car then I would say no. Because the pocket of air inside the car is moving with the car. Relative to the car, the air inside is stationary (well, it does still move around, of course, but stationary within reason).EDIT: Damn, he beat me.This message has been edited by Tony650, 08-30-2004 05:40 PM

So how can us flies in the car we call our universe ever tell if the car is staionary or moving?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I, for one, don't think we can, which was my original point; the universe may exist within some "greater" realm (higher dimension, hyperspace, etc), relative to which, it is moving.However, I think it's like any number of things that could be true, but by their very nature, we can never know. Personally, I can't think of any way we could test such a hypothesis.I don't know if this is Paul's take on it, of course; this is just my opinion.

I proposed already that there might be a way to tell if this was the case at all and went so far to state that IF "our car" was moving there might be a way we can tell. I even went so far as to make the next deduction that under the right conditions we could not only determine if it is moving but we could calculate the velocity and the diameter of the orbit our "car" makes in it's path around a much larger more dense "car".The problem is that it would require a very long period of time being able to monitor every remote point at the outside edge of our expanding pocket of space time. A period of time likely to exceed that which our species will survive. That’s why this is a hypothetical IF. You have to read the original post in this thread to see why I propose the hypothetical IF.Lets say by chance we are able in 1,000 years to monitor every star in our universe using a supercomputer and a large scale array with dishes on our Moon and maybe other planets. Capturing all the data from every star at the most remote regions of space on the farthest edges of our pocket of space time and recording the results for another 10,000-100,000 years I submit that we could find an area where stars disappear from view for no apparent reason. If our pocket of space time does have a velocity AND that velocity is much greater then the velocity of the stars and galaxies inside of it then a star or solar system that ends up on a trajectory that is 180 degrees opposite the front of our STC’s trajectory could in theory break free and be left behind. If there is no velocity of our STC at all then everything will expand relatively uniformly as it has been doing all along. However if there is velocity of our STC but it is not much greater than a star or galaxy then I submit that to us it would look like somebody on the moon throwing a flashlight into the air. Gravity will pull that flashlight back. If this is the case then at the outermost edges of our universe the red shift may have slightly different properties for certain stars that we can’t explain in other ways. The other observable phenomenon would be the new matter crashing more frequently on the side of our STC that is at the front of our orbital path.So there are three phenomenon that could prove our STC is moving. Stars disappearing at the outer edge, new stars or solar systems coming crashing in more from one direction then another, or stars appearing to return back towards us. This is all very hypothetical and most likely un-provable but that does not mean that it could not be true.I suppose another possible way to determine if it is possible or likely that we are moving would be to take a sphere that is loosely joined and apply centrifugal and centripetal forces and see what sort of shapes arises. If we take a point singularity that is stationary and watch it expand I don’t know about you closed minded folks but us open-minded folks might think that matter, stars, solar systems, and galaxies would be distributed more evenly in a spherical shape. If however the point singularity was not stationary and there were external forces of friction and resistance occurring then I might think the shape would not be spherical but maybe more oval. Not saying the oval shape to our universe is proof of our universe in motion, just that the needle in our haystack may have just became easier to find. IF we concentrated our efforts at monitoring the outer most edges of our known universe for any of the 3 phenonmem I predict might be observable along the equator of our STC I think we would increase the likelihood of finding the front and back of our STC’s trajectory.Now back to your flies in a car. I submit the difference in your analogy is that you have the windows closed and painted. That stops stuff from coming in and going out. If there were no windows then you would have flies in your teeth. So rather then paint the closed windows lets put the car on ice at night in total darkness with no headlights. Other then the wind in your face you might not know you were moving until you stepped out of the car or hit a tree. The real problem with my theory and hypothesis is that I not only believe that our STC has its own orbit I also believe it has an imaginary axis so finding the needle in a haystack is tougher when the car is spinning in circles across an ocean of ice in the middle of cloudy moonless night.