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Science does not mean simply making up bullshit and then hoping something comes of it. You may as well try to recreate the Mona Lisa by having monkeys throw their shit at a wall.

A more reasonable person might spend some time reading - before posting, to understand the style (culture) and content of a web forum. This is to understand what's allowed/expected, and where to post a topic (if at all). That reading would include the rules.

You can try this in a real car (please be careful). Of course you won't be able to do this in a vacuum, but what you'll see is that the thing you drop (say, a rock) will land ahead of the location where you let go of it. It might be hard to check - maybe have a friend (outside the car) video the experiment. The air will slow down the rocks forward movement (i.e. it will go backwards, relative to the car), but just as noted in posts above, that thing you drop will start with that forward (relative to the ground) movement. It's certainly not going to land behind the location where it's been let go. Come to think of it, you could do this inside a van. As the air inside moves with the van, there would be no horizontal effect on the dropped thing. i.e. carefully mark (A) the centre of the roof of the van, and (B) the centre of the floor - directly below. Drive along at 100 km/h and let go of a rock from the roof (A). Where do you expect the rock to hit the floor? At (B)? Behind (B)? Or ahead of (B)?

Bear in mind the BB isn't something that happened in one place in a pre-existing space, with everything then moving away from that one place. The BB happened everywhere. At the end of your nose, and off the shoulder of Orion. So while everything was once "closer", we're not going to see everything "nearing" one particular point distant from us. (Edit: just to note, was typing this before the above reply, not meaning to disagree with (or even add to) Stranges' good reply.)

You have half a point there, but in the motion of Galaxies there's going to be a fair bit of predictability. What's more likely: all the Galaxies we see, since they emitted that light, were eaten by space Unicorns? Or, they continued "moving" in ways governed by things like Gravity and expansion that we've learned about? We've seen the expansion and seen it accelerating, you can say "sure, but what's happening now" - but what's your alternative? Are you going to say everything has actually (just for example ...) stopped? Well - why? How? If you don't have an alternative, and just want to say "well, we don't know", that's fine. But also very pointless.

All good. I just mentioned that to part-explain why I was doing something slightly silly (to learn something). It's very hard to do something truly new. Just a few weeks ago a friend (way cleverer than me, and more experienced in this stuff too) mentioned he wanted to do a project using speakers to direct lasers, to do a light show. The idea was that the electromagnets in the speakers could be used not to make sound, but to allow precise positioning by feeding a varying voltage in. So that night I did a quick search, and yep, been done.

I'm part way into something now; in response to a co-worker (A) having trouble getting the attention of another co-worker (B) when she's got her headphones in. With an Arduino Nano, an ENC28j60 based Ethernet adaptor and a small servo; the plan is to bolt something to the back of B's monitor (on the Vesa mounts) that allows A to go to a web site and click a link. That link'll just refer back to itself, with a GET parameter that tells the Arduino to drive the servo to raise a little red flag from behind her screen. If I can do it all secretly, I'm hoping for a good fall-off-her-chair moment. ... haven't done Ethernet on an Arduino before - so that's what I'm having to google and youtube the last few nights. (And is kind of the underlying point of the exercise.)

I lost track. In that other thread - closed by a moderator - did you ever mention your Father? Further - you've had the "something from nothing" thread before, too. This one not closed: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/88212-can-matter-and-energy-come-from-nothing-why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing/

Never eat cheese before going to bed.

(Ooops will re-make this post when not at work). (Youtube link issue).

In any case, this seems more about the elegant systems of math we've got that allow us to efficiently express these quantities. I've always liked how I can easily write on a small piece of paper a number that's "more" than the number of atoms in the visible Universe.

Yeah, this is the part where you start flinging more and more semi-relevant details at the thread, rather than simply acknowledge you were wrong. No biggie.

It's true that what Sony sold as "memory stick" varied in physical size, but the memory card for the PS2 was never part of that range.

No, but the PSP (not the Vita) uses Memory Stick. I've got one of those, and also a Sony camera that uses Memory Stick. Pain in the neck. When most devices just use SD or TF (Micro-SD), for Sony to have their own weirdo standard is just annoying.

Seems to me (as an outsider, and no expert) that American politics has become more and more about polarisation. There's less middle-ground; the two main parties strive to be more and more different than each other. That then tends towards the extremes. It does seem this happens more with the Republicans *; their candidates seem to pander more to the extremes and absolutes of what they perceive as their party members beliefs. e.g. this "yay God, boo Darwin" stuff (which may be his genuine belief, but I still doubt an atheist would win the Republican nomination in any case). I've seen commentators claim this is why they lost the last election. The ultra-right tea party types turn off the centre-right voters, who either abstain or vote Democrat; because the centre-left seems more aligned to their views than the far-right. (* Republicans (as portrayed - by themselves - in the media, at least) seem to think that Democrats, being more "social", are gosh-darned Communists. But compared to much of the rest of the World, both Republicans and Democrats are on the Right.)

If people don't specify entire or observable when they talk about "the" Universe, it's dangerous to make an assumption you base a whole theory on. As Strange notes, in this case it's "observable".

How do you know the entire Universe was finite at the start?

First up, do you deny the first postulate of special relativity?

A Philadelphia experiment reference is all you've got? Theoretical physics does not mean "making up bullshit". P.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics So ... Where are your mathematical models? etc.

We don't want a guarantee. We want evidence.

Try to avoid thinking "real universe". That'll lead to thinking there's absolute time and absolute distance. It's all relative.

That's an utter lie, which fails to acknowledge "... which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications ...". You're simply doing the standard "gosh that looks complicated, therefore God" dance.

Do you know what "theory" means, in the domain of science?

I'd avoid using phrases like that. No observers view of the Universe is more "real" than any others. That kind of thinking makes it hard to let go of concepts like absolute time or absolute simultaneity.

Sure, it's a simple basic fact of relativity that any observer can consider themselves as at rest. e.g. The train observer sees themselves as at rest and the embankment observer is moving. And vice versa. But that still doesn't make sense out of the part of your post I was commenting on. You wrote "... formal linear transformations can only be made between stationary observers ...". { Transformations } - { between } - { stationary observers } Yes, both observers can consider themselves as stationary, but there's no outside view where both are stationary (if there's any relative motion), so it makes no sense to write "between stationary observers". You may as well have just written "... formal linear transformations can only be made between observers ..." ... in which case, I've lost the point you were originally trying to make back then. Why "can only"? By "stationary observers" here, do you really mean "inertial observers" (i.e. trying to keep acceleration out of it?)