Airbrush

As I recall, the last I heard from Kepler is that small, Earth-sized planets are more common than large planets. In fact, the smaller the planet the more common they are.

If it is true that there is a Great Void of 3.5 BILLION light years across, then the universe is not very "homogeneous and isotropic" with matter uniformly distributed. That sounds like a very uneven distribution.

The Australian Kia Silverbrook with 3967 US patent families (USPF). Second place is Japan's Shunpei Yamazaki with 2638 USPF, and Thomas Edison is third with 1084 USPF. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prolific_inventors

I really like these comments. Before the BB there was potential for BB. Some kind of "internal potential energy" that caused a rapid expansion of stuff, from a region of undeterminable size, at such a speed to overcome gravity. Without this initial motion everything would have just collapsed into a huge black hole. The universe never has been in a non-expanding state.

Good idea. For me it is mostly bird bombs that drive me nuts. I don't notice them until I start driving. Since windshield wipers only make them worse, I have to pull over and park, get out of my car with a facial tissue, or whatever is available, shoot a little wiper fluid on the windshield and manually remove it. If there was a simple device that saved me that trouble, I bet a lot of rich people would spend whatever it costs for one. Maybe someone here can think up a simpler, less costly solution. Maybe a hand held device you carry inside your car that sprays cleaning fluid and scrapes off the mess easily. An ordinary squeegy really isn't up to the task. Thanks Inigo for the info. I was not aware. Nice to see that. There it is, it DOES EXIST, the solar power cabin cooler. Someone who posted above will be disappointed. I wonder if it has a swamp cooling component? And you can even start the air conditioner 3 minutes early! Why only in the Toyota Prius?

After some thought, the razor scraper device would only be used when a serious splatter hits your windshield. Normal wiper blades are very adequate 99% of the time. But when a big bug squashes on your screen, you press a button and the razor-scrubber makes a pass over the windshield. It can be a combination of flexible plastic razor (that self-sharpens), rubber blades, spinning brush, washer fluid jets, all combining to be able to clean up the nastiest splatters in 10 seconds, and then withdraw out of view. The idea of making a car impossible to die from heat exhaustion is not a crap idea. I am just lousy at describing how to do it. I am certain my system would cost only a few hundred dollars and it will make a car in hot weather always much more comfortable and impossible to kill anything or anyone locked inside the cabin. You will see it someday, and you will remember me.

"...each jet of water is the equivalent of a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second..." I agree that this is somewhat vague. I think this means that in one second the star blasts off 100 Million times the amount of water in the entire Amazon River. This is much more than one second of flow of the Amazon River.

Thanks Mr. Alien. It is only a matter of time before the passive car cooling system becomes standard. You must live in a cooler climate, or you can park in a garage or in the shade. The windscreens will have to be designed flat for the Super Wiper Blade, to work. Thanks for your optimistic, cheerful outlook!

I know how you feel Marat. For some reason it is especially frustrating to have to stop your work momentum and untangle a few paper clips. I actually use recycled clips mostly and rarely open a new box of clips, so maybe that is why I don't get many tangles. I agree with you that, it actually takes some effort to tangle 2 clips together. How do they do it by themselves?!

Thanks for your reply Tony. I purchases a couple of those years ago after seeing them on TV. They are very poor efficiency, and they easily brake. It seems like a safety issue. A passive cooling system will save the lives of many babies and pets every year. Those window fans are not enough. Air should come cooled up through the floor and hot air expelled through the ceiling. The system will work much better when you add water to the reservour, so it can use swamp cooling. When it is 100F in the shade, and your car is roasting in the hot sun, the temperature inside your car will be much hotter than 100F. With a Car Cabin Cooling system the temperature inside your car might be 90F, and the air moves, so I don't think babies or pets will die from heat exhaustion, like they do now. However, it might cause people to leave their children and pets inside the car more? I have a moon roof in my car and I leave that open a 1" crack and my back windows open 1/2", and that helps, but not like a Car Cabin Cooler probably would. Many people may be paranoid about leaving any windows open a crack.

These seem so obvious, yet nobody invented them yet. The Car Cooler: Cars parked in the hot sun all day get very hot inside. So hot it can kill people or pets, and destroy things accidentally left in the car. There could easily be a passive car cooling system powered by solar cells on the car's roof. There could be several intake fans sucking air from the shade under the car, where the air is coolest, then pass thru a simple water swamp cooling device. Hot air would be expelled thru one or more vents in the car ceiling. This can be disabled during cold weather. The Super Wiper Blade: Besides a rubber blade, the windshild wipers should have a razor that presses against the glass and will shave off the bird dung and insects that splat on the windshield causing a ugly mess, and cannot be cleaned off by ordinary wipers, just spread and making a bigger mess. The super wiper blades can also have some occilation motion to "slice" off debris, and then something (like a long, narrow bottle brush) spins brushing it away, and the rubber blade clears it away completely. For this to work well, the windshield should be designed very flat to allow the razor to make good contact with the glass. Any inventors out there? Please try these. Thanks!

Interesting problem. I use paper clips all day, every day at work, and I only occasionally, a couple of times per week, find 2 or 3 entangled, not as often as you do. To my experience, when I open a new box of paper clips, they are not as entangled as you find them. Maybe something odd about the company that manufactures your paper clips. Who is the manufacturer of your paper clips? Our company uses Universal brand paper clips.

The CMB is here and now, if you were now 46 Billion light years away looking back at our Earth, our Earth, along with our entire galaxy, would appear only as a CMB radiation 13 Billion years ago, before our sun or any nearby stars and galaxies have formed. The new theory makes sense to me, that the entire universe originated from a very dense, hot condition, but of undeterminable size, not necessarily smaller than a proton.

The CMB is everywhere at a distance of now approx 46 Billion light years. That is how far you have to go to find regions of the universe that have cooled that much, and that is the furthest anything can be detected. There is plenty more beyond that which will always remain invisible to all our detection techniques. The limits to our observable universe is the CMB. Here is my question for anyone: If the universe began from a region smaller than a proton, or down about the Planck length in size (which is 1/(10 to the 20th power) the diameter of a proton, how can it be infinite in size? It had a finite amount of time to expand (13.7 Billion years) and expanding at a finite rate, even many times the speed of light, it should have a finite size.

Spyman already answered your question. How do you get "38 Billion years old" for the age of the universe? Hubble cannot "see" objects 14 Billion LY away. It can see light from ancient galaxies and quasars about 13 Billion years OLD. Those objects are much further now than when their light, which we see now, left them. The furthest galaxies seen are now about 30 Billion LY away, and the Cosmic Microwave Background is about 50% further away than the furthest galaxies, or as Spyman told us is now about 46 Billion LY away. This gives us an observable universe of about 92 Billion LY across, with us at the center, but that only makes us the center of our observable, or visible, universe. If you drew a circle with hubble as the center, and the CMB as the radius, the radius is NOW 46 Billion light years.

Welcome aboard Marqq. Your "tweens" sound like strings and your theory sounds a little like string theory. How does your theory differ from string theory?

I like your scientific precision in terms. Certainly the finiteness of time is calculated, not merely "assumed". There may be no mathematical or scientific meaning to "before the big bang", nor for any causitive factors for it, but common sense tells us there had to be something before the big bang, or the big bang could not happen. That something may well be what we call "nothing" but nothing is not as simple as the word implies, i.e. the absence of everything. The following is very interesting. "Vacuum fluctuation" or "Quantum fluctuation". Is it true that quantum rules allow the universe to last forever? "The idea that the Universe may have appeared out of nothing at all, and contains zero energy overall, was developed by Edward Tryon, of the City University in New York, who suggested in the 1970s, that it might have appeared out of nothing as a so-called vacuum fluctuation, allowed by quantum theory. Quantum uncertainty allows the temporary creation of bubbles of energy, or pairs of particles (such as electron-positron pairs) out of nothing, provided that they disappear in a short time. The less energy is involved, the longer the bubble can exist. Curiously, the energy in a gravitational field is negative, while the energy locked up in matter is positive. If the Universe is exactly flat , then as Tryon pointed out the two numbers cancel out, and the overall energy of the Universe is precisely zero. In that case, the quantum rules allow it to last forever." I think you mean: "How long does it take for a quantum fluctuation to create a universe?" With eternity to work on that, eventually a quantum fluctuation CAN create a universe, but that is a lot of quantum fluctuations over unimaginably long periods of time, before the big bang.

Since the universe is assumed finite in time, about 13.7 Billion years old, then it was caused by some undeterminable conditions that resulted in a Big Bang. Since those conditions pre-existed the universe, would it be correct to say that is proof for something older than the universe? If the universe popped out of nothing, that "nothing" had some kind of profound potential energy which is older than 13.7 BY.

Until I hear a convincing explanation that how the observable universe looks tells us how the entire universe behaves, I will wonder. Flat Earth is the assumption that since this area looks faily flat, the world is flat.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I did not intend my "tub of soap bubbles" as a model. I only vaguely remember something like that on an episode of THC's "The Universe". I suppose for someone to explain how the entire universe is supposed to be expanding at an accelerating rate, because the observable universe is doing that, is quite beyond my understanding.

I cannot prove this of course, but you cannot prove the entire universe is expanding. Only the observable universe is expanding.

If the universe is everything, everywhere, then it is NOT correct to say the "universe is expanding". All we can say is the observable unverse is expanding. Beyond the observable universe there may be regions of the universe which are not expanding. Dark flow gives a hint at this. The entire universe, or multiverse if you prefer, is like an infinite tub of soap bubbles. Some bubbles, such as our observable universe or Big Bang, are expanding, other bubbles are shrinking, popping, budding off others, or whatever.

Excellent presentation between! I especially like the part about what's beyond the edge of the Universe..."NOTHING - not even space (or therefore distance)...." However, if there was no distance between someone and any part of the "sphere" you would end up just inside the edge. How do you leap all the way back to the center? Does cosmic inflation imply the possibility of infinite speed of expansion? Or just beyond the speed of light, but a finite speed?

I appreciate your knowledge on this. After some thought I want to change the name of my proposed model (not analogy) to the "coconut shell model". In this model our observable universe happens to be a tiny region embedded in the shell of the giant coconut. We see homogeneous, isotropic, expansion everwhere. The thickness of the coconut shell is greater than 90 Billion light years. The diameter of the giant coconut could be Trillions or Quadrillions (or perhaps Googols) of light years across. Now would somebody tell me what's wrong with this model? And explain it like you are lecturing to a college Intro to Astonomy 101 class.

Thanks for your reply. How can what I wrote be "just wrong"? I only suggested that the balloon analogy is misleading to the casual astro-cosmo enthusiast, such as myself, who cannot twist their thinking into the surface of the balloon is "all that exists". Now I ask you to explain how the "thick-skinned balloon analogy fails. It allows for the observable universe to be homogeneous, isotropic and expanding. I proposed that 13.7 Billion years is too short a time for an expansion that is Millions of times larger than the observable universe. But I am not an expert. How would you determine the "thick-skinned balloon analogy" is not valid? I don't know what you mean by "intrinsic manifold" or how it is relevant to my proposed concept. The observable universe is embedded in the entire universe. I am trying to explain the observable universe.