The accelerating expanding universe

Exactly Yes, this is precisely what Hoyle wanted. He was not alone. Many cosmologists were not impressed with a theory that smacked of creationism, especially as one of its proponents, Lemaitre, was a Catholic priest!

It's a valid point. But at the moment, we seem to be in a semi-infinite Universe - past finite, future infinite. The "sweet spot" in time for life is the last few billion years, and will continue for many billions of billions of years. Yet with the continuing and ever increasing expansion, the encroaching heat-death or cold-death will eventually be reached, and the Universe will remain in that state ad infinitum. So no matter how long the temporal sweet-spot, it is infinitesimal next to the entire Universe.

Yes - in a non-teleological sense Sure, if you have a handy perpetual motion engine in your garage. Otherwise, the heat/cold-death has several 10^10... billion years to wait for your energy to run out, and then it will get you and your bubble... Only in the more speculative big-rip type ideas. But it doesn't have to in order to still win over anything you care to postulate. It has time, lots and lots of time. Time for your energy to run out. Time for your matter to decay into the basicc atoms. Time for your neutrons to decay to protons. Time for your protons to decay to pions. And then the ever accelerating expansion will scatter those final particles each into their own causally isolated volumes of space...ABE: I love this stuff, but even I was getting depressed writing that paragraph Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

And my friend's mother thinks that NASA never landed men on the moon. I hold you and she in similar regard What is hilarious is that you even screw up presenting his claptrap. Ah, so now you are telling me what is happening amongst my own peers. How insightful of you I'm sorry, Alfred, but you are bringing nothing but idiocy to this thread. I have little time as it is, and I prefer spending my time answering the questions of those with a genuine desire to learn, not bantering with those with a desperate desire to be right.

No, local forces vastly dominate any expansion (except in the Big-Rip.) But with the disintegration and decay of even your atoms into more basic partciles, there will be no molecular or atomic forces left to compete against, and the expansion of space will simply carry these non-bound particles apart. Again, matter won't expand as long as there are inter-molecular and inter-atomic forces at work (except with the Big-Rip), but these forces will vanish as the atoms decay away.Edited by cavediver, : subtitle

Yes, that's right. But it was before we discovered that the Universe's expansion is accelerating. Before that, we assumed the rate of expansion was slowing as that is what we expected from theory. With the discovery of the acceleration, the Big Crunch is sadly no more. That said, if the acceleration is driven by a dynamic field (i.e. if dark energy can vary) then it is just about possible that the acceleration could switch off, and if the matter content (dark + visible) is sufficient, then we could still get a Big Crunch - lots of "ifs".Edited by cavediver, : subtitle

Possibly... Roger Penrose has an idea that the ultimate end-state of the heat/cold-death is pure energy - ugh, can't belive I just used that term - by which I mean there are only photons left in the Universe, which travel at the speed of light. The Universe is thus left in a state in which there is no length scale (anything that travels at the speed of light has no concept of length) - and so its size is undetermined, despite the fact that it has just undergone exponential expansion for the past 10^1010... years !!! Thus the entire Universe can be considered the "singularity" of a new cycle of the Universe, and it all begins again. It's profoundly Escher in character, which is so applicable given that Escher's impossible drawings are based on Roger's impossible triangle - the Penrose Triangle Do I buy it? Probably not, but I do love it...

Actually, I don't find anything in that statement objectionable. The time directions in distinct cosmic regions are certainly not parallel - it is precisely this fact which gives rise to cosmological red-shift.

Yes, it was a good description. No. The k=0 solution, the "flat" solution, is only flat in the hypersurfaces - i.e. intrinsic 3-curavture is zero, but extrinsic 4-curvature is non-zero. This is a very common misconception. Exactly. The red-shift is simply given by the angle between the light-cones at emission and reception - this angle is generated by both curvature (cosmological red-shift, light-cone tipping) and motion (doppler, Lorentz transformation).

Well, you have a (metric-based) connection, so parallel transport is not a problem... and thus you can drag your light cones around and compare them. Yes, but essentially by definition.

Cool - where are you studying? Are you going on to postgrad?

...and is complete bollocks, much like the rest of his site. Funny how he has no model to back this up, and no metric as Oli points out. This guy is so clueless, he doesn't even realise how the concept of a "black hole" arises. He thinks that as long as he can squeeze in enough buzz words and cool sounding jargon, that he may just pass for someone who knows what he is talking about. Unfortunately, he is just one big epic fail.

The Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a specific cross-section of the Schwarzschild (and related) space-time(s) - and Mayer obviosuly doesn't have a Schwarzschild space-time as he has replaced General Relativity with something of his own making.Furthermore, the Einstein-Rosen Bridge is purely space-like and is thus non-traversable - nothing can cross it from one-side to the other - it is merely an artifact of the space-time geometry.