The cosmic conspiracy.

Hi, this is my first topic, thanks for having me.
I am a Christian and therefore a Creationist, when i say Creationist I mean i believe God created the universe but i don't pertain to know how, why or when.
My question is this. If the visible universe is in the region of 80 billion light years across how is it possible for it to be only 13.7 billion years old? Wouldn't that mean that the wave like massless photons would have had to of traveled at nearly six times the speed of light for nearly 14 billion years? Also if photons are released as a result of reactions at the atomic level does this mean matter with quantifiable mass must also have made this incredibly fast and seemingly impossible journey?

Greetings Mike and welcome to EvC.Do you wish to present this question in a scientific context (in which case science will have an answer) or do you wish to defend,question, and argue your assertion from a faith/belief perspective?Let me know which direction you wish to take.Edited by AdminPhat, : No reason given.

Hi, i do love to debate but i think if science has an answer then please put it there.

Thread copied here from the The cosmic conspiracy. thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

Space is expanding carrying everything along with it. This is in addition to their intrinsic movement within space.Photons flying out at the speed of light through space are also boosted by the expansion of space itself. This results in an apparent separation faster then the speed of light thought no violation of relativity has taken place.Edited by AZPaul3, : cuz

It's as AZPaul says. To use a common analogy, imagine an ant crawling over the skin of a balloon which is being inflated. The ant can travel at a top speed of (let us say) 1 cm/sec. But after 5 seconds we will find that its distance from its starting point, measured along the skin of the balloon, is more then 5 cm, because the balloon is inflating, and the distance between any two points on it is getting bigger.The ant is analogous to light, the speed of the ant to the speed of light, and the balloon to space.

Thanks guys both answers make sense.
If the universe is expanding at the speed of light does that mean the galaxies at opposites sides are moving away from each other at twice the speed of light?
I saw a diagram in the book 'Bang' by Patrick Moore and Brian May showing two galaxies that where 18 billion light years apart, the aim of the diagram was to show that an observer at either galaxy wouldn't be able to see the other because the light hasn't had time to bridge the gap. This is definitely a mind expanding subject.
Also is there an opposite to e=mc2? Does the fact that the loss of a little mass producing a vast amount of energy work the other way round? Because if the universe once contained only energy and was once smaller than the size of a pin prick then it is obvious somthing amazing has happened to produce such quantities of mass?
As you can tell i have a million questions any help in answering them would be great.

The universe is not expanding at the speed of light. If it was, you wouldn't be able to see the computer screen in front of your face! (The light from the computer screen couldn't reach your eyes because the space between you and the screen would be expanding faster than the speed of light).The universe is actually expanding really slowly. It's just that if you have a lot of space expanding slowly, it adds up to a very fast, overall expansion. This can become greater than the speed of light. This is where the stuff you're talking about can happen.Here's another post from another thread on the same topic. Maybe it can help as well?
Message 31
Question About the UniverseYes. m=e/(c2)
Just re-arrange the equation as you would with any basic algebra equation. There's nothing that special about this equation I would guess that the logistics might get a bit complicated and more involved. But in a word, I would guess "yes." Yes. The Big Bang is pretty amazing, if you start being able to understand what's going on. Unfortunately, I'm not there yet. But I like to pretend I am sometimes. No one's here to do your homework
But lots of people enjoy answering questions. Ask away, the worst that's going to happen is it won't get answered. The best that's going to happen is that you'll learn something you didn't know before. I'd say the reward outweighs the risk.Have fun!

Well, it doesn't work like that.I drew this diagram, it may help.Each row corresponds to a state of the universe at a given point of time. (It's a one-dimensional universe, what do you expect with Microsoft Paint?) Imagine yourself sitting at the red dot, which from your point of view is sitting still.You can see that the further away from you something is, the faster it seems to recede from you; the yellow dot is moving from you faster than the green dot, and the blue dot faster than the yellow dot.A dot sufficiently far away from you would be moving away from you faster than light, and so would be beyond the limits of your visible universe.Note that there's nothing special about the red dot, it's just the place where you happen to be sitting.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No, the photons are not boosted by the expansion of space. The speed of light remains constant, but the wavelengths are stretched.

It is incorrect to say that the universe is expanding at the speed of light. They way that universe's expansion behaves is that the further apart two objects are, the greater the rate that space between them expands. For example, the rate of expansion of space between our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is less than 60 km/s. The separation between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy is about .8 Megaparsecs.By the way if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, this is a pretty good time of year for trying to view M31.For two galaxies to be separating at the speed of light due to the expansion of the universe, the galaxies need to be about 4.5 Gigaparsecs apart. Separations more than this amount produce expansion rates greater than the speed of light.

If you are interested in putting a little work into it, this is a very good book for lay people.
Brian Greene - The Fabric of the Cosmos

dup!!Edited by NoNukes, : remove dup

Processes of this type occur routinely. For example, a high energy gamma can interact with a heavy nucleus (such as lead nucleus) to produce an electron/positron pair moving off in opposite directions.

Like Dudley said I know what I meant.Thanks for the correction.