Size of the universe

If all attempts to translate a piece of mathematics into English result in gobbledegook, it may be a good indication that such is the original meaning.

I guess if I set myself the task of describing that Mozart's concerto in English, the result would be missing out on the immediate pleasure of listening to the piece, as that could not be put in words, yet I could indeed logically analyse the score, point out why this or that development or relation between sounds gives me a particular pleasure and so on and I am sure that my translation of the music into words would not be anything to strain Mozart's logic.

If there is a hypothetical tone deaf person unless that person is totally devoid of the faculty of reason that may not still mean there is no way for me to find a good analogy to render the pleasurable effect of Mozart's piece quite comprehensible to that person albeit in an abstract fashion. If that person is visually endowed geometry could well be used to translate the sound relations in the piece into a language to make a perfect logical sense.You are asking me what is the mathematical error in the Standard Model. Well, that is obvious to me. It's simply a fundamental flaw in the understanding of the relation of infinite and finite. The hypothesis is built on that flawed foundation and though the cathedral itself may be a pure mathematical genius since it's foundation is pure nothing, it may forever float over the la-la land of fantasy never managing to land upon any concrete physical reality.That is simple. The infinite may exist indeed and it may exist necessarily but it may never exist as anything actual though it may exist necessarily as a pure potential anything actual is constantly coming from. Anything finite is a tendency and a striving towards infinity without any possibility of ever reaching it actually. It is even better to be said that the infinity can neither be reached nor ever be stopped from being approached. That would describe the reality of universal motion. Infinity may not have any physical reality. All physical reality is the realm of the finite and actual only.The concept of singularity is a flawed assumption of a possibility of that infinity being actually reached and that on the universal scale which is a clear physical impossibility. Infinity is, of course, expressed with a zero and that zero may represent the universe shrunk into nothing with all the laws of necessity vanished inside the zero. It's very easy to draw a zero on a piece of paper and to declare a total physical anarchy inside of it. The next step is introducing some arbitrary positive values standing for relations of something to something and some progressive development of those relations and no end of intricate, most ingenious calculations could be engaged into by the mathemagician. The cathedrals built on the zero are all pure genius of mathematical invention even if none of it may mean anything in real terms and that is why all the attempts to translate the numbers into any meaningful language are resulting in gibberish. Language is dynamic necessarily, it's all verbs which are standing for processes and even when it's nouns, the nouns are static snapshots of the same dynamic processes. Inside nothing there is no process possible by definition thus all attempts to apply the English language to tell anything about it result in contradictions and prevarications necessitating a lot of further explaining away and the gobbledegook is the inevitable result of all that strenuous semantic effort. That is what they all are having so much fun with. They divide and multiply by that zero while ascribing to it some impossible positive attributes. They keep on trying to squeeze something tangible into the pure nothing that may physically exist as a concept and on paper only, they keep on failing in that and keep on trying to do it again and again and such fun and mathematical games could go on and on indefinitely. That's nothing very new. It had been done already and it had been going on for centuries and instead of the advanced maths, the language employed for having this kind of intellectual fun used to be Latin.Whereas the real singularities are under everybody's nose. They are called the past and the future. Everybody in that sense lives inside a moving black hole of the present squeezed in between the two event horizons. Black holes ain't as black as they are painted after all.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Put the blank lines in between the paragraphs.

That the standard model does not deal with and makes no statement about any relations of the finite to the infinite is what you claim, my friend, and I have to take the validity of that assertion on trust. Well, I do not take it on trust. Let us examine the content of your claim a little further. To point out to me what is it in your view the standard model is dealing with and is making statements about really you condescendingly enlighten me that it is the evolution of the universe instead.
Well, my friend, the notion of evolution belongs to the realm of the finite while the universe firmly remains in the category of the infinite. Thus the fatal flaw of the model is clearly demonstrated in your own words here. The nature of that fatal mathematical flaw is attributing to the infinite all the qualities of the finite in the manner described in my initial post you had the courtesy to completely miss the meaning of, my friend.

To your question whether it would be better if they spent their time building the cathedrals on foundations more real...well..that is hard to tell. Take the spiritual music. The subject matter there is God. Even if you do not believe in God, you may still appreciate the genius that is in the music. Moreover, it is still related to and is expressing the human emotions and the human condition which are real indeed. In the same way Hawking's mathematics are well related to the tangible gravity, energy, motion, rest, time and space and the rest of the real physical attributes of existence. Even if the black holes and big bang, dark matter and energy are pure fictions like God, angels and the saints in heaven.

That is a total reification of space. Space in that poetic description sounds to be the primary substance of existence and not a mere shadow motion casts as I understand it to be.
No wonder that in your theory space can easily move on its own and in a fashion perfectly independent of anything else.

That's to do with the nature of these two dimensions. Though upon reflection it is clear that the two are inseparable and equivalent, they are by no means identical. Time appears to be so much more elusive and when thinking of locating things it is space that comes to mind first so it is easier to associate space with rest and permanence while identifying time more with motion and change. Either may be indispensable for both motion and rest yet when I try to conjure up the idea of timeless space, my mind at least is coming with something, even if that something is impossible as any physical reality. In the case of spaceless time the mind simply draws blank.
Time itself has no volume to fill up with any shapes.

It's better admit that the terms the Universe and expansion are not compatible. Your might as well talk about the colour of mass. Ex means out, the universe has no outside so it cannot expand for the same reason that mass cannot have colour.

Sorry, Crankdriver, what I say is contradicted only by the majority of experts belonging to the same club you do and the textbooks written by the club members. It's neither contradicted by all like you'd love to make others believe nor is it contradicted by reason.
Those who contradict what I say cannot define the Universe or expansion in any consistent fashion for all the tea in China so their collective authority your appeal to is irrelevant. They are inept at defining their terms and their definitions are contradictory as a result so ultimately it's themselves and not me that they are contradicting.
Those outside the club are having a good laugh at the whole thing together with my cat.

My friend, let's hear some arguments from you. Present your definition of the terms the Universe and expansion so I can examine both of your definitions and see if either is consistent and whether the terms are compatible. Appeals to some superior numbers of allegedly intellectually superior people do nothing but demonstrate the paucity of your own mental capacities, I am sorry to inform you.Edited by Alfred Maddenstein, : spelling

Crankdriver, your description demonstrates that you and your ilk has got none to do with science and everything with the blind collectivist faith and fear of authority. I am from Russia and my conclusion is that he Big Big theory is no more scientific in its premises than historical materialism that equally pretended to the scientific status.
You are nothing but a petty priest and mathemagican worrying about your prebend and grant money your superiors get for building more cathedrals. Like all priests you cannot defend your faith with any arguments so you keep on referring to the esoteric knowledge and language where you allege the absurdities you peddle possess the logical shape beyond reach of a layman.
That is an old and familiar trick employed by all the religious throughout the ages. The grant money are given by the members of the club to other members toeing the peer-reviewing line.Still, remember, being at the height of power guarantees no priest against being laughed at.If you don't believe me, visit youstupidrelativist.com. The man who wrote the book and devised the site seems to have an excellent fun at your boring expense.
Also your assumptions are sweeping and not all relativists support the nonsense you peddle. Alexander Franklin Mayer is a strict relativist and his theory is a good attempt to rescue relativity from all the gibberish you teach.
Not all the grant money come from the collectivist club you are a member of either. His research grant is private and came from Jay Pritzker who was a billionaire enamoured of independent research.

Well, you have no patience to present any reasonable defence of the ludicrous proposition that the whole of existence may possess attributes of expansion and compression.
Yet you have patience enough to pile on still more and more appeals ad populum and verecundium. And you have a lot of patience to try and humiliate me for having my own opinion on the issues of expansion, black holes and singularities. Not good enough again. If black holes exist indeed and the Big Bang happened as alleged, all the stellar names won't be hurt any with any logical analysis of those propositions.
They won't be hurt anyway, for they are all celebrities and even if what they teach should be found to be utter nonsense, they would have had good innings having fun with the equations, colliders and fooling themselves and gullible admiring folk like you.
Otherwise, yes, I am limited in many respects and on many issues I do not have any opinion of my own leaving the judgement entirely to the experts who I suppose know better than me. The thing is, black holes and the expansion of the Universe is not one of those things. I know precisely why these things are physically impossible and absurd and I can formulate what I know well enough.

Do you see any green in my eye? Are you suggesting that providing good maths demonstrating the alleged entities are physically impossible may purchase any one a ticket to Stockholm? Do you expect me to take your suggestion at face value?
It would be redundant of me, anyway, as that has been done a few times already without those who did it going to Stockholm. Not to my knowledge.
Try Stephen J. Crothers, Bert Schreiber or Angelo Loinger if you are eager to read the maths.
Also there is no need for any maths to begin with because the impossibility of black holes is not any question of maths- it is a conceptual issue just like the impossibility of pink unicorns eating yellow dragons in my garden right now. You either believe they are being consumed or you don't. The level of interest in calculating the rate of such consumption may depend on the faith it is taking place.

Not exactly as my scepticism is based on strict reasoning. First, infinities may not exist in any concrete, countable physical shape for the science to deal with. They are either nothing or pure potentialities. That is elementary maths, in spite of whatever some mathemagicians starting from Cantor might have said to the contrary and that puts firmly paid to the idea of singularities in any way, shape or form.
Zero radius or anything zero for that matter is not a scientific idea. It describes something with the rest of its parameters equalling zero just as well, ie., nothing.
Next I doubt very much that the relationship between density, mass and gravity and light is of the kind postulated by the black holes hypothesis. There could be an increase of density only up to a certain limit.
Nothing indicates that matter is infinitely compressible. All indicates that such a compression may require an application of an enormous force. Other than happening by pure magic.
Gravity, being not a static phenomenon but a result of the intrinsic momentum of matter, given an exponential increase of that matter's density, even if that was physically possible - which is extremely doubtful in its own right,- would be rendered nil instead of increasing exponentially in its turn as proposed by the proponents of the black monsters superstition. To squeeze all matter into a point may practically imply to nip in the bud all the motion on the quantum level thus eliminating the very cause of what is supposed to be increasing exponentially.
Nobody knows precisely how degenerate matter behaves practically so all those ideas strongly seem to be a pure speculation.

Larni, well..there are two ways not to believe in God. Some people and that would include most of those posting here would say that they don't believe in God because there is no evidence for such.
Others, myself included, would just find the concept perfectly contradictory and absurd and they would find that the term itself has never been defined really making any alleged evidence for such an ill-defined entity irrelevant. To me the ideas of Big Bang and Black Holes are very much like God in this respect. If my scepticism seems a fallacy to you, I am happy to stay fallacious leaving to you all the good logic to enjoy.