Expanding time?

As Mod says, the sphere is not expanding. It is a fixed size. What is expanding are the circles of latitude, as you move up the lines of longitude from the South Pole, or down from the North Pole depending on your analogy preference. The circles of latitude represent space, and the lines of longitude are time.

Yes, that's right. And when we put it this way, the time lines can actually shrink and expand, like the space dimensions, depending on the overall geometry/topology. We just don't think of it that way as we're tied to travelling along the time lines, and also the geometry of our own universe is quite boring and doesn't behave that way (think of the lines of longitude around the globe)Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Not really - only anything that is a direct result of the expansion, such as density - e.g. the mass within a volume stays the same, so as the volume increases, the density must decrease.Why do you ask?

Yes, it is difficult to imagine - even V-Bird, who apparantly been considering these things for many years, has yet to grasp this concept. But the fact is (as in, what 99.999% of cosmologists accept) the Universe gets bigger but does not encroach on anything You have to let go of your instinctive ideas about distance. They work well around you, even across the Earth - actually, they work quite well even around our local galaxies. But at the end of the day, the distance between two objects is merely a number. Just like the strength of an electromagnetic field is a number and can vary at a point without anything else having to 'move out of its way', so too can the numerical distance between two points vary, without anything else having to move out of the way!The trick is to stop talking about the Universe expanding, and just think of the distances between things getting bigger. Imagine the Universe is infinite in extent (and it may well be) - how can it expand, it is already infinitely big? But you can easily double the distance between each two points within the Universe. So the distances grow, but the Universe itself is not expanding as such.Why do we believe this? It is exactly what Einstein's General Theory of Relativity shows us. And this theory is one of the two most successful theories ever discovered! It has told us many crazy things, and so far they have all turned out to be correct.

Don't worry, this is not easy, especially an esoteric subject like expansion of space. All of our simple analogies can be abused to bolster incorrect claims such as those of V-Bird, so I am jumping in at the deep end with you to try and avoid this.This may or may not help... here are three galaxies:

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They are 100 megaparsecs apart ( about 326 million light years)

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Now they are 200 megaparsecs apart.

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Now they are 300 megaparsecs apart.Nothing has changed apart from this number we call distance. It will take longer to travel beween them, but that is all. There is no edge to this space either. If this universe is infinite, we can keep looking further and further left of these three galaxies, meeting more and more galaxies, all of which are also getting further away from each other. If this universe is not infinite, if we look left far enough, we will get back to where we started from! There is no edge which is expanding into some outer nothingness (as V-Bird believes). There is just the Universe. The distances between the galaxies is growing larger, but that is all.Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

That is because you are still visualising the Universe as some ball that is growing. That viewpoint does not exist. You have to look at the Universe from the inside, as only the inside exists. In an infinite universe, there is no biggest number, and in a finite universe, you will simply start overlapping yourself as you describe larger and larger distances. You could describe New York and Sydney as a million mile apart, if you're willing to go round the earth several times before actually landing! If the Universe is finite this is quite possible, though you can't actullay do it because the space is expanding more quickly than you can travel. Imagine that the earth is expanding. It may expand so fast that you could never fly fast enough to get all the way around! Good question. Probably not, given the type of cosmology we seem to inhabit. But it is possible to have rotating space-times.

Oh, okay We could have a nice deep dicussion of Mach's ideas here, but I'm knackered so for now I'll simply say that in General Relativity, we can distinguish a rotating space-time from a non-rotating space time, from inside that space-time. A great example is the Kerr rotating black hole which differs significantly from the Schwarzschild non-rotating black hole. Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Yep, that's the stuff. When you spin round, would your arms lift up if there were no other stars and galaxies It's sort of sad that most of this is answered by GR, but there are still some mysterious areas...

Remember what I said about abusing analogies...?At the given scale, you would only see pin points for galaxies. And their size is irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make.

Yes, again, we have the unbelievable arrogance of an uneducated armchair muser claiming that the world-body of cosmologists and astrophysicists are all wrong, and only the one true V-bird has cracked it and all without an ounce of mathematics and a ton of semantics and word salad. Astounding...

despite it being the most successful branch of science known to mankindLook, a simple analogy is this. We have calculated pi to 1 trillion decimal places, but we're a little bit hazy how to go further. You come along, and say - aha, I know how to do this, but first you have to realise that it's not 3.14.... it's 3.24.... I mean, how do you communicate with someone like you? You're so obviously so unbelievably wrong, but you are also so obviously incapable of seeing just how unbelievably wrong you are.You are claiming to overturn 100 years of the most successful science ever conducted by whistling a few buzz words. You have 100 years of near perfect results to replicate with your theory, before you can even begin to talk about anything new. They are not reluctant to accept an "FTL cosmos" - there is no such thing. There is no such things as a "non-FTL" cosmos either. Just as there are no bullemic cars nor hypothermic pianos. You are plucking technical terms of which you have little knowledge and sticking them together to claim a new concept. It doesn't wash. FTL refers to a type of path through space-time. What is an FTL comsos? One where all paths are FTL, or just some of them, or none of them? And how does this differ from our Universe?

This is sort of correct, but it implies that there is some way of defining a 'fixed spot' - there is not. There is simply the concept of pairs of points having a distance defined between them. Without the metric defining the distances, the points may as well be marbles loose in a bag (ignoring global topological considerations) I would say that the term 'size' is undefined in this context. Size only makes sense internally when using the metric. From this 'outside' perspective, the size of the Universe is not 'zero' at the Big Bang, it is simply an invalid concept. And at our time, it remains an invalid concept. Size is only a meaningful concept inside the Universe.

You mis-understand. If something is ill-defined, it is not a case that we do not know and it is open to speculation. We do know, it is ill-defined, and it is not open for speculation. There are many unknowns that are not necessarily ill-defined, and I am happy to speculate on these if I have the time.

Obviously, as the gravitational interactions are exceptionally weak at the scale of our accelerators you must forgive us physicists for not having 25th century engineering at our disposal. And what has the Higgs to do with gravity??? You are exposing more of the obvious: your physics knowledge is merely based on highly erroneous and misleading popular science articles.Meanwhile the rest of your post is pure pseudo-science gobbledigook and simply confirms your delusion. Your words portray you as a obfuscating court mystic, not a scientist interested in truth. It is harmless and if you gain enjoyment from it, more power to you. But when you start trying to interrupt genuine discussion, you becomes a nuisance and a barrier to others' knowledge. For that I will slam you hard...

No time right now but I will get back to this. The website is not the "official" wbesite fo string theory - there is no such thing. However, a quick glance shows me it is put together by the student of someone I used to know, and I expect it has good (or at least reasonable) content.

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This is an idea with enormous philosophical implications.

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No more or less than the implications I have already discusssed in reducing everything to the basic fields, including distance. That is very misleading and I would disagree with that.

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"Strings create everything, including space and time and even us."

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That is a more reasonable way of putting it, and I would agree with this (within the context of string theory being "right") - though even this becomes vague as we enter M-theory. No, it doesn't QM remains exactly the same, with exactly the same weirdness and apparent paradoxes.