csmyth3025

Perhaps it would be easier to think of it this way: If you toss a two-headed coin up in the air, the probability that it will come up heads is 1 (or 100%, if you prefer) and the probability that it will come up tails is 1-1=0. If you toss a regular coin up in the air, the probability that it will come up heads is 1/2 (or 0.5, if you prefer) and the probability that it will come up tails is 1-0.5=0.5 If you toss a six-sided die into the air, the chance that the number one will come up is 1/6 (or about 0.167) and the chance that any other number will come up is 1-0.167=0.833 (about 83%). Chris

Let me try to more clearly restate my question: Why is it inevitable that one form of matter is consumed at a greater rate than others if there is probabilistic behavior in the universe? I consider tossing a coin in the air to be an example of probabilistic behavior. Your statement sounds to me like: "If a tossed coin exhibits probabilistic behavior, then it is inevitable that heads will come up more often than tails." Chris

If Bert is in the front seat of their spaceship and Frank is in the back seat, Frank will measure the same distance between himself and Bert no matter how much they accelerate or how fast they go. They share the same frame of reference. Chris

One of the basic assumptions of special relativity is that the speed of light in a vacuum will always be the same no matter what the relative motion of the observer and the emitting source may be. This has been confirmed by many experiments. Is this what you're asking about? Chris

I don't understand your reasoning. As far as I know, probabilistic behavior doesn't require that one reaction is preferred over another. Please explain or provide a link. Chris

A black hole is thought to have a central singularity toward which everything within the event horizon moves, regardless of their velocity relative to any other thing within the event horizon. The universe is currently thought to not have a center of any sort. Everything that's not gravitationally bound is moving away from everything else in proportion to the Hubble parameter. As far as I know, light from everything farther away from the black hole central singularity than the observer would be blue shifted and everything closer in would be red shifted. We don't observe this asymmetry in our universe. Chris

Although the ancient Greeks are generally credited for alot of things, I doubt that javascript is one of them. I think Mr. Charles Babbage and his very able and talented translator (and, as it turns out, first of all programmers) Ms. Ada Agusta, Countess of Agusta preceded javascript by about 150 years. In regard to the automatic calculation of logarithms and trigonometric functions, Ada has this to say: Mr Babbage's Anylitical Engine (never built) is an even more versatile and sophisticated machine which, with the input of the remarkable Countess, is believed to have incorporated every fundamental aspect of electronic computing used to this very day. (ref. http://www.fourmilab...age/sketch.html ) In short, before the advent of the successors to the (unfinished) Difference Engine and the (unbuilt) Anylitical engine, logarithms and trigonometric functions were laboriously calculated by hand with pen and paper usng formulas that were even at that time more than a hundred years old. Javascript is a latecomer to the game. Chris

I bet on the lottery 50% of the time - that way I get my money's worth Chris

[math]\frac{2\times\pi\times8.8\times10^8\,m}{8834\,s}=\frac{625900\,m}{s}=625,900\,m/s=625.9\,km/s[/math] It seems that what tripped me up is the use of "\eq" for the equals symbol instead of just inserting "=" in the script. Also, it's easier to read the equation if I use "\," before "m" and "s". I remember reading in one of the tutorial pages that spaces between characters are ignored. Thanks for the help. Chris

I'll have to agree with Swansont. I think your "solution" is a red herring offered up (somewhat tongue-in cheek) to those amateurs who think that the encryption is mostly "noise" (white, pink or otherwise). Chris

This is an interesting question because it involves several relativistic effects - the sum of which I'm totally unable to calculate. The in-falling observer starting with zero tangential and radial velocity at an arbitrarily large distance from the event horizon (r>>>) will, I'm guessing, arrive at the event horizon with a radial velocity of c relative to his/her companion safely orbiting the black hole at the starting distance. This presents several relativistic effects from the standpoint of the orbiting observer that will conspire to make the in-falling observer appear to both "freeze" and vanish as he/she reaches the event horizon: 1) The in-falling observer's accelerating velocity away from the orbiting observer will make it appear that his/her motions are increasingly slowed down and, simultaneously, the light by which the in-falling observer can be "seen" will be increasingly red shifted (special relativity effects). 2) The same "slowing down" and red shifting effects seen by the orbiting observer will be enhanced by the increasing gravitational intensity (the so-called gravity well) from which the in-falling observer's light is transmitted to the orbiting observer (general relativity effects). It seems to me that the special relativity effects as seen be the in-falling observer looking out to his/her orbiting companion would be the same: the orbiting companion's motions would seem to be slowing down and the light by which the orbiting companion can be seen would be red shifted. The general relativity effects as seen by the in-falling observer would be different. I believe that the light from the orbiting companion would be blue-shifted. I don't know how much this gravitational blue shifting would offset the special relativistic red shifting, though. NOTE: I suspect that the two effects will cancel each other out. The big question is: Would the in-falling observer see the motions of the orbiting observer slow down as he/she approached the event horizon? I don't have a clue. Any comments from the more knowledgeable members here would be greatly appreciated. Chris Edited to add NOTE

Pardon the interuption, but I was trying to use LaTeX in the astronomy and cosmology section and it didn't seem to work. I'm just testing a short script here; [math]\frac{2\times\pi\times8.8\times10^8 m}{8834s}\eq\frac{625900 m}{s}[/math] I inserted the spaces after the beginning and before the ending brackets so that the quoted section would appear as the original script I wrote. Well...obviously I'm doing something wrong. The equation I'm trying to write is: (2*pi*8.8*10^8 m)/(8834 s)=625900 m/s Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Chris

I'm not knowledgeable enough about cosmology to comment directly on the plausibility of your speculation. There are several speculative explanations being offered for the observed baryon asymmetry that are presented in the Wikipedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia....aryon_asymmetry The main problem with your speculation is that you're substituting one mysterious mechanism for baryon asymmetry (the proposed preference of black holes to absorb anti-matter over regular matter) for other equally mysterious and unexplained mechanisms such as CP symmetry violation. An interesting pie chart that illustrates the magnitude of the problem can be found on the NASA webpage here: http://map.gsfc.nasa...0998/index.html At first glance it would seem that since "only" 4.6% of all the matter/energy thought to exist is in the form of ordinary matter, there might be another 4.6 % of anti-matter that has been preferentially swallowed up by black holes. You have to consider, though, that this 4.6% represents all of the stars and galaxies and all of the inter- and intra- galactic gas and dust we can see or reasonably infer. That's a lot of black holes. Chris

I have to admit that despite the explanations given in the replies to the OP cited above I'm still not sure what the SI value of Ho means. As I understand it, the Hubble parameter today is given as approximately 71 km/s per Mpc, although the value ranges: (ref. http://en.wikipedia..../Hubble%27s_law ) A parsec is given as: (ref. http://www.iau.org/public/measuring/ ) Thus, a Mpc (a million parsecs) would be equal to 30.857 x 1012 km x 106 = 3.0857 x 1019 km. Accordingly, the inverse of the Hubble parameter would be: (3.0857 x 1019 km) / (71 km/s)= 0.04346 x 1019s = ~4.35 x 1017s or about 13.8 billion years - which is the approximate age of the universe. This much I understand. What has me scratching my head is the reciprocal of this number: 2.3 x 10-18/s. What does this number tell you? Does it tell you by how much, on average, each unit of measure (meters, kilometers, or light years) increases each second from the beginning of the universe to the present day? It's understood, of course, that this factor would only apply to distant objects that are not gravitationally bound. Chris Edited to add last sentence.

Another term for the cosmos and "everything we know and have thought of" is the universe. It all exists in the universe because, by definition, the universe is everything there is. The portion of the univere that we call the observable universe is a spherical volume of the cosmos surrounding the Earth and limited to a present radial distance of about 46 billion light years. We can't see anything more distant than something whose light has been traveling to us for about 13.7 billion years (the age of the universe). The expansion of the universe has increased the distance between us and these ancient regions of space when (and where) the light was first emitted by a factor of about 1090. These ancient regions were much closer to us when they emitted the light we're just now seeing - about 42 million light years away. These same regions are now about 46 billion light years away from us. The light we see from these regions is called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It is generally believed that the entire universe is a lot bigger than out observable universe. It may be infinite - but so far there's no way we can tell for sure if it is or not. More information can be found in the Wikipedia article on the universe here: Universe Chris

You've obviously devoted a great deal of time, effort, and thought to your Pan Theory. In my estimation this has been a monumental undertaking on your part, for which I congratulate you heartily. I wonder, though, in what way your theory can better explain the orbits of the planets around our sun than the (approximate) formulations of Kepler's laws of planetary motion while, at the same time, provide a sound basis for explaining the anomalous galactic rotation curves observed by Vera Rubin and Kent Ford and the equally anomalous rotational velocities of galaxies in galaxy clusters observed and reported by Fritz Zwicky 40 years earlier (at which time he postulated the existence of "unseen matter"). Chris

Before you get too involved with inventing protonic devices you should read the Wikipedia article on plasma physics. It will give you a more realistic picture of what happens when hydrogen atoms are ionized: Plasma (physics) Chris

There are observational reasons. Basically, nothing has been found to go faster than the speed of light no matter how much energy we pump into it. We have found, however, that the relativistic mass of a particle will increase in exact accordance with the predictions of special relativity as it is accelerated closer and closer to the speed of light. This is strong evidence that special relativity represents the way things really do work - and special relativity predicts that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a particle with rest mass (or a spaceship, for instance) to the speed of light (photons have no rest mass). Chris

Any model of the evolution of the universe that doesn't include the expansion of the universe is going to be problematic. Observations that distant galaxies seem to be rushing away from each other have been noted since before 1917: (ref. http://en.wikipedia....i/Vesto_Slipher ) In this century there have been studies conducted using three separate instruments that have confirmed the recessional velocity of distant galaxies and refined the value of the Hubble constant: (ref. http://en.wikipedia....Hubble_constant ) As far as I know, tired light as first proposed by Fritz Zwicky in 1929 is the only proposed hypothesis claiming to explain the observed cosmological red shift while allowing for a non-expanding universe. "...Despite periodic re-examination of the concept, tired light has not been supported by observational tests..." (ref. http://en.wikipedia....iki/Tired_light ) Regarding the OP's quandary: "...It seems to me that if the Big Bang shoots out energy randomly in all directions, this energy will coalesce into particles that are also moving randomly in all directions, so it would be overwhelmingly probable that the universe would start out in a high entropy state and no (or very little) work could be done because everything would be the same temperature...", he seems to be thinking of the big bang as a physical explosion from some central point that "...shoots out energy randomly in all directions..." As has been stated many times in this and other threads, the big bang was characterized by the uniform expansion of the space between every particle and every other particle throughout the universe. The universe itself expanded and carried all the particles it contained along with it. This expansion simply "stretched" the distance between every adjacent particle uniformly to accommodate the increasing volume. The Op's claim of initial high entropy in the universe is, in my mind, only partially correct. For the first 380,000 years or so the observable universe at that time was in thermal equilibrium. Radiation kept the particles (electrons,protons and helium nuclei, mostly) at a uniform (but constantly falling) temperature as the universe expanded. Even at this time, though, there were gravity "wells" - perhaps as a result of dark matter - that tended to concentrate matter. The observed CMB anisotropies bear witness to these early precursors to the structure we see in the universe today. At this stage one might imagine that the "stuff" of the universe was balanced between the outward pressure of radiation and the inward pull of gravity - similar to the way our sun is also balanced between these competing forces. Once recombination allowed photons to decouple from the preceding "fog" of ions, gravity could then take hold and start clumping the matter particles together - converting gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy. The rest, as they say, is history. The high state of entropy that the OP attributes to the early universe was a sort of pseudo-entropy. It could only exist for as long as the temperature of the universe remained high enough to sustain the ionic "fog" that allowed the radiation of the early universe to keep matter particles in thermal equilibrium. Chris

The question "then what was there before that?" reminds me of the "It's turtles all the way down" story: (ref. http://en.wikipedia....ll_the_way_down ) Chris

Although there is nothing wrong with pointing out that the correct term is generally accepted as Occam's razor (or, alternately, Ockham's razor), your further explanation misses the mark both it terms of the use of this term and it's applicability to the OP (What was there before the Big Bang?) (ref. http://en.wikipedia....s_razor#History ) The above is meant to point out that Occam's razor has nothing to do with entropy. The entropy of the universe, in itself, doesn't address the OP: "What was there before the Big Bang". The only thing that can be said about conditions before the inflationary epoch (about 10-36 seconds after the initiating event of the big bang) is that the universe was very hot, very dense and both homogeneous and isotropic to a very high degree. Anything said about conditions at the instant of the initiating event and, certainly, prior to the initiating event is speculation. As far as I know, we have no means at present to test any hypothesis about this event. The explanation that "...and God said 'Let there be light'..." is as good as any theory that's been postulated so far. Chris Edited for clarification

I'll try to respond to the remainder of your post in a separate reply. Concerning the portion cited above, cosmologist Ned Wright offers the following: (ref. Errors in the Steady State and Quasi-SS Models ) The entire article covers other aspects of the differences between what the steady state model (and the revised quasi-steady state model) predict and what is observed. Chris

(bold added) According to BB models in general, the observable universe should not be uniform in density. For observing most of it we must look back in time. In an expanding universe model (expanding distances between galaxies) the universe should have been eight times more dense 7 billion years ago (the volume of a sphere pi x r^3). As you said the universe appears to be of a uniform density no matter how far back in time we look, which I also think is what we have observed. The direct implication, I believe, is that the universe may not be expanding at all, which would also explain contradictions of entropy as questioned by the O.P. If so there would be a different reason for the observed redshifts. There does seem to be a contradiction IMO concerning continuously increasing entropy, the standard model, and what is being observed. If the universe is not expanding then gravity could seemingly keep pace with entropy to accordingly find the equilibrium that we may be now observing. First, I apologize for my lengthy post #14. I submitted three separate replies (to pantheory, I Me and MajorTom). For some reason these separate replies appear in the same post. Regarding the earliest time during which the universe must have been in thermal equilibrium, I repeat that this state of thermal equilibrium must have existed prior to the inflationary epoch: (ref. http://en.wikipedia....oblem#Inflation ) (bold added by me) I Me is correct that the process of inflation resolves the flatness problem and that flatness is not a pre-condition. In fact, one of the reasons that inflationary theory has been incorporated in the standard model is that it eliminates the need for flatness as an initial condition of the universe. I mistakenly related the flatness problem to the pre-inflationary universe's distribution of matter and energy. Rather, the almost perfectly uniform density of the pre-inflationary universe is required to explain the large scale homogeneity and isotropy observed in the universe today: (ref. http://www.lifesci.s...ibbin/cosmo.htm ) It's my understanding that the BB model is based on the assumption that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic (the cosmological principle). It's true that the universe today is larger and that matter and energy are more spread out now than they were 7 billion years ago. But for each slice of time in the past that we examine, observations indicate that "...the universe appears to be of a uniform density no matter how far back in time we look..." A lengthy (but pretty thorough) explanation relating the standard model with what is being observed can be found here: Science and Reason: The Big Bang Chris Edited to correct syntax error

The role of gravity (and the consequent flow of mass) in the universe is something about which I'm still working to understand. The role that gravity played in upsetting the thermal equilibrium of the very early universe is well described in the following excerpt: (ref. http://www.knowledge...eginningweb.htm ) By the way, the home site of which this article on the early universe is just one part is a very comprehensive and interesitng collection of articles about natural science and history. Although I can't be sure of the technical correctness of Ross Mays' description as cited above (he has a Masters degree in Psychology), it seems to conform to other descriptions of the standard big bang model of cosmology that I've read. Chris From what I've read most cosmologists agree that the requiste pre-inflationary conditions are high temperature and (to resolve the "flatness problem") an almost perfectly uniform density - within 1 part in 1060 according to John Gribbin's "Inflation for Beginners" (ref. http://www.lifesci.s...ibbin/cosmo.htm ). Additionally, inflationary theory in big bang cosmology requires that the pre-inflationary universe was in thermal equilibrium (a state of maximum entropy) in order to explain the "horizon problem": (ref. http://en.wikipedia....oblem#Inflation ) (bold added by me) As I understand it, this period of thermal equilibrium essentially ended about 380,000 years after the big bang when the temperature of the universe was low enough for neutral atoms to form and for photons to decouple from the preceding "fog" of plasma. If my understanding of these concepts is correct then it would seem the the universe must have started with very high entropy even prior to inflation. As the excerpt in my post #14 indicates, gravity seems to have reversed this situation. I'm still trying to figure out how all this ties in with the second law of thermodynamics. It may be that the combined effects of the (global) expansion of the universe and the (local) movement of matter from large regions of higher gravitational potential energy to small regions of lower gravitaional potential energy may in some way "balance the books". Any help from the experts out there is welcome. Chris I'm not sure I understand this, could you explain in more detail? I'm not so sure we disagree here, I think we may actually be on the same page but I may not have explained myself well. It all depends on what you mean by this. Please explain in more detail if you don't mind. Thanks. If the distribution of energy is consistent (homogenous), then there is essentially a single temperature reservoir: (ref. http://en.wikipedia...._thermodynamics ) If the entropy of the universe has increased over time, it seems to me that the present distribution of energy (albeit inconsistent) would have to be less inconsistent than it was in the past. Chris

Well, since I read the message I have to conclude that I couldn't follow it. Is there a simpler explanation suitable for the mathematically challenged? Chris