Spyman

Then you won't have any problems with supporting evidence in favour of your claim, so please, go ahead and post a link to a reputable source with evidence of scientific consensus determining the Universe to be a singularity before the Big Bang. You might be able to mathematically model a Universe backwards in time all the way to a singularity, but without observational evidence that is nothing more than speculation. Did you even bother to read the links I provided? Here are a few excerpts from the first: Extrapolation of the expansion of the Universe backwards in time using general relativity yields an infinite density and temperature at a finite time in the past. This singularity signals the breakdown of general relativity. How closely we can extrapolate towards the singularity is debated—certainly not earlier than the Planck epoch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang Without any evidence associated with the earliest instant of the expansion, the Big Bang theory cannot and does not provide any explanation for such an initial condition; rather, it describes and explains the general evolution of the universe since that instant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe. Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distance between two comoving points. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang [EDIT] Since you seem to have some trouble with distinguishing between the Big Bang theory and the Big Bang event you should also read through this link: A tale of two big bangs Whenever you hear or read about cosmology, there is one distinction you should have in the back of your mind - otherwise, matters might get a bit confusing: The term "big bang" has two slightly different meanings, and the answer to questions like "Did the big bang really happen" depends crucially on which of the two big bangs you are talking about. http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/big_bangs

But we would not get the same observational result. If it's the rate of time that is changing instead of scale of space then observable phenomenas would happen at differnet durations, as viewed by us, related to their distance to us. So it looks like you have a testable idea but it doesn't seem to match observation. In astronomy 1a supernovas are used as standard candles to measure distances because they nearly constant follow a graph of afterglow luminosity as a function of time after the supernova ignition. The Phillips relationship are used to calculate 1a supernova peak magnitude from the speed of luminosity evolution and by comparing the luminosity with the observed brightness the distance can be calculated. I think a cosmological time dilation influencing the rates of how fast supernova candles very far away decreases brightness compared to closer ones, would greatly alter the calculations and should likely have been discovered.

The orbit for a planet is caused by a balance between the speed of the planet and the force of gravity from the star. The force of gravity is directed from the center of the planet to the center of the star and totally independent of the angle of rotation or spin of the star. Thus the planet could be said to constantly be falling towards the star but due to a sideway speed it also continues to miss it. A star-planet system is thought to form from a swirling cloud an as such the stars and the planets should keep this initial rotation but otherwise there is no relation between the stars spin direction and the planets orbital direction. If a planet gets very disturbed by something like a large collision or a close encounter with something massive enough it could change path or even get hurled out of the system. A rogue planet from another system could also come close enough to a star that it gets captured and then the infalling angle will determine its orbital path. Understanding orbits There are a few common ways of understanding orbits: ¤ As the object moves sideways, it falls toward the central body. However, it moves so quickly that the central body will curve away beneath it. ¤ A force, such as gravity, pulls the object into a curved path as it attempts to fly off in a straight line. ¤ As the object moves sideways (tangentially), it falls toward the central body. However, it has enough tangential velocity to miss the orbited object, and will continue falling indefinitely. This understanding is particularly useful for mathematical analysis, because the object's motion can be described as the sum of the three one-dimensional coordinates oscillating around a gravitational center. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit

While you did not specifically use the word "explosion" it is obvious from your old post #6 and your recent post #9 that you are describing the expansion of Universe as if objects are moving outward through space from a center location similar to an explosion, which is not consistent with the Big Bang theory. I suggest you to read the following links and learn more: Big Bang theory Misconceptions about the Big Bang Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial

From careful analysis of the CMBR the scientific consensus is that the Universe has expanded ~1100 times during the traveltime from when this radiation was emitted ~13.6 billion years ago until today when we observe it. We don't know the size of either the early or the present Universe, it could very well have been infinite back then and then it still is infinite but less dense. Our best knowledge and observations indicate that objects inside the Universe, independent of it's total size, has been ~1100 times closer in the past than what they are now. [EDIT] I was rereading this thread an noticed that you said "expansion direction" to which I think I need to clarify that the CMBR is surrounding us equally in all directions and as such the expansion also has been equally large in all directions around us. According to scientific consensus there is no center inside space which the Universe is expanding from.

Now you have left the initial intention far behind and have started to speculate of other things...

Are you speculating wildly or speaking without knowledge of scientific consensus? Either way you are wrong, the Big Bang theory is NOT about an explosion in space.

Read this thread: Picture of galaxy from when expansion only 600 million years old And the follow up: Very old view of the Universe But even more importantly read the explanations in the links I posted in #46.

Just a small note: The corresponding instant must be placed farther away than the center of the ring to match the distance to the observer, since the distance to the center is closer than the distance to the rim of the disc.

After reading through that thread, I realize that I have made a somewhat sloppy translation in my post #40 when I said: "IF we assume for the sake of the argument that we can only observe EM-radiation propagating with lightspeed, then the visible part of the surface on the cone you mention would at the observable distance for the CMBR consist of a filled untransparent sphere surrounding us, in every direction around the Earth." Were I instead ment to say "filled untransparent spherical surface surrounding us", in essence that means the CMBR would be like a huge shell or distant wall surrounding us, which is in accordance with what Michel says there: But I don't intend to argue against the 'surface of the cone idea' and in fact did my very best to try to avoid it when I said "IF we assume for the sake of the argument". What I however have been arguing is that Michel seem to claim that NASA made a mistake and should have made the CMBR in the picture hollow, whereas I think that NASA made it like this on purpose. So, does a filled disc of CMBR indicate that the picture is not a spacetime diagram of your cind or that several scientists at NASA faulted? ----- Since we don't have any reference to compare against we are not able to discern whether our meterstick is shrinking or distances are increasing, all we can measure is that the scale between them is changing. ----- For alpha2cen and others, some links that might help understanding expansion of space: http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/LineweaverDavisSciAm.pdf http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/Balloon.html http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/Balloon2.html

And exactly how would that be different from if the Universe would had been growing around us? (I am very certain that we would still see the same figure about old Universe then too.) Except that I consider 1100 times to be a rather large size variation, I can't see anything new or against what I posted here.

Gigahertz in computers are generally the measurement of how fast the CPU is able to access the memory. It does not affect how much of it there is and does not use any of the available amount.

You did not answere my question: "What would be the difference if the Universe is fixed and we are shrinking inside it compared to if we are fixed and the Universe are expanding around us?" Please do, your problem with the size might be solved. We are exactly in the center of our observable view of the Universe and as such most parts of it we see have expanded outward from close to our location, everything distant we see was closer to us in the past and is now receding away from us equally in all directions. There is nothing against the size of the old Universe in this argument.

Hmm, obviously if you don't try to understand then you won't succed either... This image from NASA is clearly not a simple spacetime diagram solely intended to show the WMAP spacecrafts worldline extending out from the Big Bang, I have repeated it a few times already and this is the last time, the picture have multiple purposes and shows more than one single thing. IF we assume for the sake of the argument that we can only observe EM-radiation propagating with lightspeed, then the visible part of the surface on the cone you mention would at the observable distance for the CMBR consist of a filled untransparent sphere surrounding us, in every direction around the Earth. ¤ If we look the CMBR in the skye, is the image we see hollow? ¤ If you look at the CMBR in the picture from NASA is it hollow? In a spacetime diagram the object has a worldline from the past to the future, but if this image instead is viewed as what the WMAP spacecraft are observing, through the timeline for evolution of the Universe, then the curved disc representing the CMBR, to the left in the picture, is not hollow and even the center line of eyesight is fully observable. Yes, in any direction we look, we will see increasingly older views of the Universe when we look further distant. What would be the difference if the Universe is fixed and we are shrinking inside it compared to if we are fixed and the Universe are expanding around us? According to Albert Einsteins theory of relativity the geometry of spacetime is dynamic, so from that viewpoint it's more convinient to think that the geometry is expanding instead of us shrinking. There are no fixed positions in the Universe, everything is relative the observers frame of reference.

Currently Andromeda and Milky Way are closing in on each other and will eventually merge, inside clusters of galaxies the gravity are stronger than the expansion and keeps the objects inside bound together. The Black Holes in the center of galaxies could be said to anchor them but when compared to our solar system were the Sun is dominant and holds ~99.8% of all mass in the system, the supermassive Black Holes in the centers of galaxies are small compared to the total mass of it's host galaxy, I think much below 0.1%, so they are not the dominant force holding stuff at the edges of a galaxy. Dark matter that likely are evently distributed in the galaxy accounts for around 90% of the mass are the dominant force for the overall structure and holds the galaxy together. The Sun consists of most of the mass in our system and yet it is incapable of 'pulling' in the planets because the planets have speed which combined with gravity is causing them to orbit, similar to how our system ended up swirling around the Sun in the center, in large systems like clusters of galaxies, individual galaxies had initial speed relative each other causing them to orbit around their center of mass.

I don't understand your argument, I never claimed multiple base points.

What is a "super massive galaxy"? The Universe is filled with galaxies of different sizes and mass, were do we draw the limit between normal and super massive? Very close to the beginning of the Universe there was no galaxies, stars and galaxies are thought to have formed roughly several hundred million years after the Big Bang. Gravity has over time organized Stars in Galaxies and Galaxies themselves in Clusters which are organized in Superclusters. If galaxies are forming in random sizes, then some will be smaller and some larger, but there will be a spread depending on the initial distribution of matter limiting the maximum size, so one could answere that the initial conditions didn't allow for any 'super galaxies'. Since galaxies merge and cannibalise on each other, adding others stars and mass to their own, the average size and mass they have today is also the result of this process and as such the question could also be answered with that they have not yet have had enough time to grow. However we have observed gigantic objects in the Universe: IC 1101 is a supergiant lenticular galaxy at the center of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster. It is 1.07 billion light years away in the constellation of Serpens and is classified as a cD class of galaxy. Size The galaxy has a diameter of approximately 6 million light years, which makes it currently (as of 2010) the largest known galaxy in terms of breadth. It is thought to contain up to 100 trillion stars, compared to our own galaxy's estimated 0.25 trillion stars, or Andromeda's 1 trillion. Being more than 50 times the size of the Milky Way and 2000 times as massive, if it was in place of our galaxy, it would swallow up the Large Magellanic Cloud, Small Magellanic Cloud, Andromeda Galaxy, and Triangulum Galaxy. IC 1101 owes its size to many collisions of much smaller galaxies about the size of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC_1101 The Great Attractor is a gravity anomaly in intergalactic space within the range of the Centaurus Supercluster that reveals the existence of a localised concentration of mass equivalent to tens of thousands of Milky Ways, observable by its effect on the motion of galaxies and their associated clusters over a region hundreds of millions of light years across. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor The Sloan Great Wall is a giant wall of galaxies (a galactic filament) and, as of 2010, is the largest known structure in the Universe. Its discovery was announced on October 20, 2003 by J. Richard Gott III of Princeton University and Mario Jurić and their colleagues, based on data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The wall measures 1.37 billion light years (1.30×1025 m) in length and is located approximately one billion light-years from Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloan_Great_Wall

All that tells us that it might be harder to simulate reality than what it first seems, but I am confident that cosmologists have more advanced simulators than Autocad and are able to model the expansion of the Universe. According to theory of Relativity the observer is his own base point as each observer has his own frame of reference. If two observers are under equal conditions but at different locations then it doesn't matter which observer are used as base point when rescaling the distance between them, they will both agree on the change in distance.

Well, it's only one image and I can't claim any more knowledge on what or how the people at NASA were thinking when they made the image than you, so lets just accept that we disagree on parts of it. But I want to make a final attempt to explain two parts of my view: The discs locations are not a simple time position they are also at a distance through space and as such I would say they represents the situation at each interval of a combination of time and space. For instance the objects in any disc once emitted a part of the universal CMBR but we are only able to view it from one disc since those photons from the other discs has already passed us or could reach us in the future and alternatively never reach us if expansion is accelerating. From the timeline on evolution of the Universe time is going from the ignition to the left to the present to the right and it would be incorrect to place CMBR in the future, but from our observational viewpoint we can look in any direction we want and see the timeline going back to the ignition. So we can look to the left and se the timeline as represented in the image but we could also look to the right and see the timeline like a mirror of the left representation. A picture are not limited to contain only one motive or purpose, it can have several layers and of course there will be as many interpretations as there are different people looking at it.

Well, if we assume that the Universe suddenly "puffed into existence" then why is it so strange that it puffed in where it exists now as opposed to somewhere else? One common misconception by laymens about the Big Bang theory is that it deals with how the Universe 'Banged' into existence. But how the Universe got into existence is NOT covered by the Big Bang theory and however the Universe managed to suddenly exist or from what it came, it must still have been in some cind of state afterwards. IMHO I think the "puffed into existence" is of much more worrying concern than the resulting condition. Anyhow the Big Bang theory starts out with the primeval state the Universe is in after the entrance to existance and is about the following evolution from there. Without any evidence associated with the earliest instant of the expansion, the Big Bang theory cannot and does not provide any explanation for such an initial condition; rather, it describes and explains the general evolution of the universe since that instant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang Another commonly wrong version amongst laymens of the Big Bang theory is that it is about an explosion in space, sending matter and energy outwards from a central point. But the Big Bang theory doesn't have any gunpowder explosion despite its 'Banging' name. In the Big Bang theory the Universe was very dense in its primeval state after it came into existense and then it expanded, which it still continues to do. The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe. Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distance between two comoving points. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang Lets make two different examples: ¤ 1) Suppose we have 1 million balls in a huge concentration and then a central explosion flings them away. Every observer on all of the large amount of balls would be able to discern his own position, speed and direction relative the other balls and the centre of the explosion. ¤ 2) Lets start out equally but instead of using explosives we instead expand the distance equally between every single ball simultaneously. Observers on these balls would not be able to discern their location, speed and direction relative the others nor would they be able to find a center. In the first example the 'Bang' happened at a certain location but in the second example the 'Bang' happened everywhere at once. When we look up into the sky to observe other objects in the Universe then we are not able to measure our position, speed and direction as if there was an explosion but by observation it appears as if everything is separating from everything equally, just like if "the Big Bang happened everywhere".

No, since it's not ment as a spacetime diagram the WMAP spacecraft don't have a worldline through the discs, it has always been where it's located in the image. As such the discs would be like a distant wall, (if space wasn't transparent), and I doubt the walls in your room appear hollow when you look at them. However due to traveltime the distance to all parts of the wall would need to be equal, which if you look carefully in the picture is showed by a slight curving of the CMBR like the bottom of a bowl. The circle you would like to view from the constancy of lightspeed would in this case be in the third dimension which is used to show time in the image. Since you seem to be so sure of this then maybe you can explain why the picture apparently doesn't look like a cone with the right side 1100 times larger than the left. The observable universe is a filled sphere surrounding us in the center, but if the image had looked like a huge ball with a CMBR pattern then it wouldn't have showed us the expansion rate, would it? Instead they show us a small slice of the observable universe with the CMBR on the left side, I already mentioned that it's curved, imagine how it would look if you extend the CMBR until it closes in on itself and there is your observable universe with the WMAP in the centre. The image is not a physical representation in scale like a spacetime diagram, it's a composite of several things for a simplified view of the Evolution of the Universe.

Well ydoaPs, if you read my posts again, slowly and carefully, you might discover that I did not say it was "arrogant to explain modern physics in a way that people can understand it" nor did I say something against GR or basic philosophy. There was nothing wrong with your explanation except the "you are all wrong" part. AFAIK, and contrary to what you seem to claim, the Arrow of time and the question: "Is there a single possible past?" is still some of the major unsolved problems in physics. Also regarding your edit: Please show me where I did present an explanation which creates paradoxes or where I did show "a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem".

I don't think it was intended to be like a spacetime diagram, it is a simple representation of our observable view and we can only see a star once, in one time slice. We don't see lines or the same stars multiple times in different timeslices. (Neglecting relativity effects like gravitational lensing and such.) The image doesn't discern between what we actually see and what our model predicts, it is a "representation of the evolution of the universe" with a blend of the rate of expansion and what we are observing at present period of time. As such we can only see a star at one point in time and at one distance corresponding to that time, so the slices doesn't contain everything that has ever been at that distance or everything that has passed through that time period. The slices only contain stars that was both at that distance and in that time period that allowed their light to reach us from there at present time.

With all due respect, I think making the statement that everyone else is wrong and you are correct without any evidence whatsoever seems a little arrogant. Until we can build a timemachine, if that's even possible, and then actually test your view of timetravel, we are not able to discern what would happen and distinguish between possibilities.

The discovery of signals from another civilization will undoubtly be an excellent and exciting find and to actually make contact would likely bring a huge advantage and exchange of knowledge to both of our races, but as I said in my post #3 - the main goal and ultimate reason to become spacefaring and colonize other Stellar systems is to secure the survival of mankind. The Milky Way galaxy that our Sun and we happen to be a part of have a diameter of 100 000 lightyears and a thickness of 1000 lightyears and it contains about 100-400 billion of stars that is located closer than 1 million lightyears and without any cosmological doppler shift. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_way Our closest neighbourhood, inside the Milky Way, within a distance of 16 lightyears from our Solar system contains 51 Stellar systems with a total of 62 hydrogen-burning stars and 7 brown dwarfs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars Gliese 581 is located at roughly 20 lightyears distant from Earth and have several confirmed planets and "the planet with the greatest likelihood of having conditions suitable for liquid water at its surface found to date". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581 While communicating with another civilization at such a distance, when the signals would take several years to reach the receiver and then another several years before we get the reply, would be hard but it is still very far from impossible and totally achievable even within the lifetime for humans. Making a journey there would take much longer time and is currently outside of our technological abilities, so it could be debatable for the sole purpose of a 'social visit'. Hoping for a very close neighbour might be to much but the possibility for another intelligent race within the Milky Way doesn't seem to be unreasonable and while communicating with someone on the other side seems futile, we would at least be able to exchange signals and recognize each other.