We can see to the edge of the universe.

[tar]

Impossible? No, I don't think so. It's on the contrary, obvious that it can be no other way.

 

People, including me, have a tendency to frame shift when talking about the universe. And it's often difficult to tell if someone has frame shifted, when thinking about an object in space, in terms of where and what it is.

 

Its important to talk about two distinct and often confused nows.

 

There is the personal, human now, in terms of what we see, when we look out into the expanse of space. And there is the universal, god like perspective, minds eye picture, of what the universe "looks like", NOW.

 

The two are often confused, and the translation from one to the other is not impossible, it just isn't always done, and often isn't done completely.

[D H]

What edge of the universe?

[Severian]

We can't quite see the 'edge of the universe'. As we look foruther and further away, we see further and further back in time because the light takes a long time to get to us (and was therefore emitted a long time ago).

 

If we look far enough away, you might think that eventually we will be back to the big bang (the 'edge of the universe', or at least the edge of our horizon). But that is not quite true. For a long time (though a short time on cosmological scales) the universe was opaque to photons, so light couldn't travel freely. Our satellites such as COBE, WMAP and Planck, see only back to the time when the universe became transparent to photons (the 'surface of last scattering').

[Airbrush]

Impossible? No, I don't think so. It's on the contrary, obvious that it can be no other way.

 

People, including me, have a tendency to frame shift when talking about the universe. And it's often difficult to tell if someone has frame shifted, when thinking about an object in space, in terms of where and what it is.

 

Its important to talk about two distinct and often confused nows.

 

There is the personal, human now, in terms of what we see, when we look out into the expanse of space. And there is the universal, god like perspective, minds eye picture, of what the universe "looks like", NOW.

 

The two are often confused, and the translation from one to the other is not impossible, it just isn't always done, and often isn't done completely.

 

Your title says little about your post which is all about "frame shifting". Would you like to explain how we can see to the edge of the universe? How is it so obvious? Do you mean we can detect the CMB (cosmic microwave background) which is NOW at a distance from us of about 45 or 46 Billion LY away?

 

I totally agree with you about "frame shifting". Whenever distances to the edge of the universe are discussed the distances should be qualified by WHEN. The distance now or when the light began its' long journey here?

[tar]

Airbrush,

 

To try and avoid frame shifting for a moment, put ourselves at the location of the milky way 380,000 years after the big bang. What do we see? Not much, the universe just (for the purposes of discussion) turned transparent to photons, so we see nothing. If we wait a second, we will see anything putting out a photon in a sphere, centered on us, with a radius of 300,000km. Another second and the radius will be 600,000km. Wait for a year, and we will have a clear view of anything putting out photons within a light year of us. Little do we know at this point that the WHOLE 84 million light year wide universe turned transparent on its 380,000 birthday. But 42(plus 42 million years of expansion, we'll give it liberal 5 percent)45 million years later, we will be able to see one end of the universe or the other, the "edge" of the universe. Wait another 42 million years, and no matter what the Milky Way's position is in relationship with all the other locations in the universe, the fog of the last scattering will have lifted completely, and we can see the whole universe, edge to edge, top to bottom. There is no matter outside of our view, no location in space we cannot see (provided it's been emitting photons for the last 87 million years.) And now the year is 87,380,000, at every location in the universe. That first bit of edge we saw 42,000,000 years ago, looked about a day old when we saw it, and now when we look at it, it looks about like the locations right next to us looked when we were 42,380,000. The other edge, the last to clear up looks even younger. (However many million years younger as it was between the time the one edge cleared up, and the other.)

 

So that was the universe, the whole universe, from the Milky Way's location's perspective, and from the mind's eye perspective from the year 380,000, to the year 87,380,000.

 

It is now year 13,700,000,000, everywhere in the universe, from the minds eye perspective, and it's the year 13,700,000,000, from the Milky Way perspective. In the mean time, a few things have changed, every location (from the minds eye perspective) went through eras of star building and destruction and rebuilding and are now (from the minds eye perspective looking pretty much like around here with strings and walls of galaxies and clusters.) And from the mind's eye perspective,we know that it has expanded in the mean time from half the size of the Milky Way to something like 100 billion light years wide. What should this universe look like to us from Earth in the year 13.7 billion? Well exactly like it does. We just have to figure out what we are looking at.

What location in space, at what age and at what redshift? But it seems to me, that if the Milky Way could see the entire universe in the year 87,380,000, we can still see it now. After all, the edges never stopped putting out photons.

 

Regards, TAR

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What edge of the universe?

DH,

 

I'm still working with Euclidean geometry. I figure that if there is a finite amount of material in the universe, and the material exists in a finite expanding volume, then if you head out in one direction and keep going in the same direction, fast enough, you will eventually come to the point where everything is behind you, and nothing is infront of you. That's the edge I am talking about. Is this wrong?

 

Or put another way. Take a moon size piece of the sky, and look into it, if you see something, look further, and see if there is anything behind it, if you see something look behind that... till there is nothing behind it. At that point, you would be looking at the edge. Is this wrong?

 

Regards, TAR

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We can't quite see the 'edge of the universe'. As we look foruther and further away, we see further and further back in time because the light takes a long time to get to us (and was therefore emitted a long time ago).

 

If we look far enough away, you might think that eventually we will be back to the big bang (the 'edge of the universe', or at least the edge of our horizon). But that is not quite true. For a long time (though a short time on cosmological scales) the universe was opaque to photons, so light couldn't travel freely. Our satellites such as COBE, WMAP and Planck, see only back to the time when the universe became transparent to photons (the 'surface of last scattering').

 

Severian,

 

I don't think we can see back that far. Not directly anyway. In my example of the universe (above) the last scattering was history from both the mind's eye perspective, and the location of the Milky Way's perspective. Gone, not to be directly seen again, anywhere in the universe, ever. And that example was, from the minds eye perspective, 13 billion years ago. That era may have had the time (from the minds eye perspective) to go over the edge, as well.

Of course I have never seen a photon get to the edge of the universe, so I don't know what it does when it get's there, but I would imagine it follows the rules of physics and gets absorbed by something and reemitted, or follows some magnetic, gravitational field extending from the last matter, around in a loop and heads back the way it came, or in some manner is reflected back at the angle of incidence or something, so information that ever got to the edge, is probably still available in some manner.

 

Regards, TAR

[Mokele]

Scientists say that, if you ever get to the edge of the universe, you would see everything reflected back at you. And they're right. I know, because I've been there. The edge of the universe is in Houston, Texas. How can that be? How do you know that's the edge of the universe. Because when you come to this part of Houston, you will find at Starbucks. And there, a short walk away, across the street, is another Starbucks![/u']

 

I too have seen the edge of the universe.

[tar]

Here is a crude diagram depicting the universe, from the Big Bang moment on the right, to the expanse of the current universe on the left. Each bar depicts the size of the universe in 1.37 billion year increments, each bar is double the size of the bar to it's right. Pick a spot on the bar on the left for the Milky Way's location now. Having been in a a proportional position in each bar in each epoch, you can draw a line back to the point at the right, depicting Milky Way's location in the universe since the beginning. Since we cannot see into the past, nor into the future, draw a 45 degree line from Earth, now, no longer than 13.7 billion lightyears long. (the distance photons can travel in the time since the beginning of the universe.) This line depicts us looking out radially from our position. When we see an object along that line, we are seeing an image of that location in space, meaning, all the photons that were heading toward our location from that location at that time.

 

Regards, TAR

[tar]

The location (little spot) on our sight line is located past the point where increasing light travel time equates to an equal subtraction of age of the location observed. So how old is that location? How should it appear to us? Which spot on the current universe bar does that locaton correspond to?

 

Regards, TAR

Edited August 11, 2009 by tar
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[D H]

You are ignoring inflation.

[Sisyphus]

 

I'm still working with Euclidean geometry. I figure that if there is a finite amount of material in the universe, and the material exists in a finite expanding volume, then if you head out in one direction and keep going in the same direction, fast enough, you will eventually come to the point where everything is behind you, and nothing is infront of you. That's the edge I am talking about. Is this wrong?

 

Or put another way. Take a moon size piece of the sky, and look into it, if you see something, look further, and see if there is anything behind it, if you see something look behind that... till there is nothing behind it. At that point, you would be looking at the edge. Is this wrong?

 

Yes, that's wrong. The universe is not a Euclidian 3D object. It does not have an edge. It does not have a center. It does not have an "outside." Expansion is not motion away from some central point, or any other kind of motion, just an increase in distances (e.g., one inch is added to every foot every X years). It might be infinite in size (in which case it's always been infinite in size, even when everything was much closer together), but if it's finite then it "folds back on itself" in some way, and is almost certainly much larger than the visible universe.

[rockman]

Actually, I believe what Tar was saying is right.

 

According to what most believe was the beginning of our universe, the big bang, would in my mind be the center. The universe expanded from this point...and still is.

 

"Expansion is not motion away from some central point, or any other kind of motion, just an increase in distances (e.g., one inch is added to every foot every X years). "

 

I'm not sure what is being said here. If any object moves away from another there is motion. "What" is in motion may be debatable. Is it the fabric of space itself? Or is it what occupies this fabric?

 

I like to think there is an edge, or point where the expansion still continues. Having never seen the edge I will not jump up and say there is one, because I don't know.

 

But I do wonder sometimes, did the fabric of space exist before the big bang? If so, then light would have traveled unhindered, and space, for all practical purposes, is infinite. If not, then light would have traveled with or in the fabric as it expanded.

 

To me, the edge is the farthest point light has reached. At that point, what is beyond? Does the fabric continue far past what the light has reached?

 

I guess the real question is, is the fabric of space expanding and all matter as we know it is just along for the ride, like boats in an expanding body of water, or did the water exist before there were ever boats? Did the big bang create the space fabric? Or did the big bang happen in an already existing space fabric?

 

It seems to me, to say the universe is infinite, requires that the fabric existed before the big bang. If it did not, and it is finite, then there is an edge.

[StringJunky]

Actually, I believe what Tar was saying is right.

 

According to what most believe was the beginning of our universe, the big bang, would in my mind be the center. The universe expanded from this point...and still is.

 

"Expansion is not motion away from some central point, or any other kind of motion, just an increase in distances (e.g., one inch is added to every foot every X years). "

 

I'm not sure what is being said here. If any object moves away from another there is motion. "What" is in motion may be debatable. Is it the fabric of space itself? Or is it what occupies this fabric?

 

I like to think there is an edge, or point where the expansion still continues. Having never seen the edge I will not jump up and say there is one, because I don't know.

 

But I do wonder sometimes, did the fabric of space exist before the big bang? If so, then light would have traveled unhindered, and space, for all practical purposes, is infinite. If not, then light would have traveled with or in the fabric as it expanded.

 

To me, the edge is the farthest point light has reached. At that point, what is beyond? Does the fabric continue far past what the light has reached?

 

I guess the real question is, is the fabric of space expanding and all matter as we know it is just along for the ride, like boats in an expanding body of water, or did the water exist before there were ever boats? Did the big bang create the space fabric? Or did the big bang happen in an already existing space fabric?

 

It seems to me, to say the universe is infinite, requires that the fabric existed before the big bang. If it did not, and it is finite, then there is an edge.

 

Rockman: I think Klaynos covers some of your questions quite well in the ' what was there?' thread or it should at least put you on the right footing as to what the big bang was.

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=42499

[tar]

You are ignoring inflation.

 

DH,

 

I am trying hard, not to ignore any well tested theory, and certainly not any laws of physics or the massive amount of detailed observation and calculation done by thousands and thousands of brilliant minds over the years.

I am trying to test my hypothesis and the consequences of it. Trying to solve a riddle so to speak, and I think my guess, might have some truth in it.

 

And so far, in my mental tests, a lot of my thinking seems to make sense in regular old expanding Euclidean space, following all the laws of physics and perception.

 

I am assuming that the Big Bang did take place (in fact, in a sense, it is still going on.) I do believe the matter and energy that makes us up was there(here), and since we are here, a small part of it is still "here"(there).

 

I am assuming inflation did occur, and anti-gravity overcame gravity and pushed everything apart in a fraction of a millisecond and the universe grew to 1000 times it size. And the momentum, (of everthing pushing away everything) even after gravity regained its footing was sufficient to grow the size of the cooling and plasma to a diameter of 84,000,000 lightyears by the year 330,000ABB. And I am supposing that gravity pulled close things together, even as the other forces continued to in general make the universe continue to expand. I am accepting the fact that the universe has grown in size a thousand times since then, and now (in the Godlike minds eye) could be 96,000,000,000 lightyears wide.

 

I don't think I am ignoring inflation. I think I am counting on it. I accept the Big Bang story, as much as I have read of it, and been told by Martin. I start my mental image at that 330,000 mark, when photons were set free at the time of the last scattering. I put myself at the location of the Milky Way(here) at that time, and ask myself, what would I see? I certainly would not see the whole universe because (from the Godlike perspective) it "just" went transparent, it would look perhaps like a fog. But a second later I could see 300km, because the photons from one light second away (and everywhere inbetween) had the time, and the ability to reach my eye. I imagine I would experience a sphere of clarity expanding at the speed of light, with the fog receeding at the same speed. Now the Milkyway's location shouldn't be in the center of the universe, cause the odds are against it, and it probably isn't near the edge, because the difference in what we see looking one way or the other in the year 13,730,000,000, would be too obvious, so for my mental excercise, I put myself somewhere between the center and edge, and figure that after 25 or 30 million years I would see a small "whole" in the fog, about 25 million lys away, where the Milky Way's location in the universe is closest the the edge. That location would look to me at that moment to be around 330,000 years old, because I am seeing the first photons that location ever emitted. I know that I(the Milkyway's) location is 25,330,000 years old, and I figure by the redshift of the light (compared to the light from closer objects) that that location has been moving away from me (for 25,330,000years), and that the light was traveling for 25,000,000years(cause that is how long I watched till I saw that first light from the edge)...

 

So DH, I give myself that situation, and project it forward to today, and try and figure out what that location, at the edge of our universe would look like to us today. How old would it look? What kind of redshift would it have? How far away would we figure it to be? How far away was it, in the year 25,330,000, when we first saw it, and basically, how should it appear to us now that it is 25,000,000,000 lys from us.

 

I have proven to myself, and I hope to some here, that my hypothesis may well be correct, that all space is causally linked. Obvious to me in two ways. One, if we see it (with radio,microwave,infrared,visible,ultraviolet,x-ray, or gamma), then photons from it reached us, from it. We are linked. And two, by my scenario above where one edge came into view by year 25,330,000, and the other probably by year 1,000,000,000, we could easily assume we have been photon linked to all the universe for a liberal 12billion years.

 

Which leads me to my current hypothesis, that the microwave background radiation is the thick edge of the universe, all the stars and galaxies, that we saw (had we been alive then) when the universe was 1 billion years old, redshifted 1000 times from visible to microwave, from THz to GHz.

If correct, we should "see" infrared radiation coming from beyond the furthest visible locations, infront of the microwave background.

 

Anybody here know, what we "see" in that region? Do we have infrared telescopes?

 

And even if correct, this hypothesis would not mean that the microwave background radiation is not the leftover heat, from the big bang. It would just mean that we are too.

 

And I have high hopes, that if I am correct, and we start trying to resolve the stars we are seeing, rather then taking their temperature, (how much heat are we receiving from Alpha Centauri?) we will find that the hotter spots are closer areas (higher frequencies) of the (rather wide and massive) edge, and colder areas are further distance, redshifted to lower frequencies. With this info, we can figure our position in the universe, the shape of the universe, and its size. With that, we can fine tune our equations and figure out this gravity thing, and be a step closer to unifying all the forces.

 

What do you think?

 

Regards, TAR

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We can't quite see the 'edge of the universe'. As we look foruther and further away, we see further and further back in time because the light takes a long time to get to us (and was therefore emitted a long time ago).

 

If we look far enough away, you might think that eventually we will be back to the big bang (the 'edge of the universe', or at least the edge of our horizon). But that is not quite true. For a long time (though a short time on cosmological scales) the universe was opaque to photons, so light couldn't travel freely. Our satellites such as COBE, WMAP and Planck, see only back to the time when the universe became transparent to photons (the 'surface of last scattering').

 

Severian,

 

I think this is incorrect. We don't "look out", photons come in to us. We don't look back in time, it just takes photons from far away, a long time to get to us. We can't see back in time, nor can we see forward in time. The photons we see are the one's arriving at our eyes or instruments, now. When you see someone a mile away, he is standing there in your now, you don't consider you are looking into YOUR past to see him, even though the photons he was reflecting took some time (a very small amount) to get to you. But consider watching a tv show where one correspondent is talking to an anchor half a world away, and every once in a while, they step on each other because the delay in the communication, mostly happening at the speed of light with signals bouncing off satellites and relay stations and zipping through solid state circuitry, proves that the one's "now" is not the other's. If the sun blows up now(speaking universally), we won't see it for seven seconds. Do you consider that the sun shines in the past? Or is it shining now? If we see a star, its shining now. Even though the light took 7 years to get here. 7 million, 7 billion years. It is still the same. It's the photons hitting us from our present universe. We only have one universe, and each star in it only has one location. And the material in each star is 13.7billion years old. Now we see a location 5 billion light years away, as the location's material looked in year 8.7, but that is just a fortunate circumstance that allows us to speculate upon what our sun might have looked like 5 billion years ago. We are looking at that star's past, the universe's past, but it's photons are hitting us in our present, we are not looking into our past. And if you would kindly refer to my earlier two dimensional diagram of the universe and draw a 45 degree line back from our current position on the left most bar, you will see that we can look into the universe's past only so far. Once our present sight line runs to where it is not intersecting any age universe, then no bar to the right of the last bar to intersect our sight line is visible. No photons from those ages can reach us. They already did. They are in our past. Remember, that is where our galaxy was when the universe was that age. We already saw that age. All of it.

 

Regards, TAR

[Sisyphus]

Actually, I believe what Tar was saying is right.

 

It isn't, though. I'm not just making stuff up.

 

According to what most believe was the beginning of our universe, the big bang, would in my mind be the center. The universe expanded from this point...and still is.

 

That's not how it works. The Big Bang was everywhere. It's not an explosion like you're thinking.

 

"Expansion is not motion away from some central point, or any other kind of motion, just an increase in distances (e.g., one inch is added to every foot every X years). "

 

I'm not sure what is being said here. If any object moves away from another there is motion. "What" is in motion may be debatable. Is it the fabric of space itself? Or is it what occupies this fabric?

 

No, it is not motion. It is regression. "The fabric of space itself" is not a bad way to think of it (though not entirely correct either). Imagine an infinite universe with no edge, but with stuff spaced throughout it, at measurable, finite distances. Now imagine that for every foot of distance between objects, an inch of space is added in a given period of time. Or, say 10%. So after X number of years, objects that were 10 light years apart are now 11, objects that were 1000 light years apart are now 1100, etc. And yet nothing is actually moving, just the "space itself" is increasing in volume. That is the way the expansion of the universe works.

 

The Big Bang, then, is basically just that point, moving backwards in time, when all distances approached zero. The universe was never a point in space. In fact, if it is in fact infinite now, then it was infinitely large from the very beginning.

 

I like to think there is an edge, or point where the expansion still continues. Having never seen the edge I will not jump up and say there is one, because I don't know.

 

It continues everywhere.

 

Check out this Wikipedia article:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space

[devrimci_kürt]

Is universe and space the same?

[DJBruce]

Is universe and space the same?

 

The universe is simply everything that exists as a whole, it includes space, but they are not the same thing.

[Severian]

Severian,

 

I think this is incorrect. We don't "look out", photons come in to us. We don't look back in time, it just takes photons from far away, a long time to get to us.

 

Are you serious, or is this a wind up? I would have hoped it was clear that I wasn't suggesting that we literally travelled back in time.

 

I am rather disturbed by your statement "that the microwave background radiation is the thick edge of the universe, all the stars and galaxies, that we saw (had we been alive then) when the universe was 1 billion years old, redshifted 1000 times from visible to microwave" since this is completely at odds with known science.

 

How do you then explain the perfect Black Body spectrum of the CMBR, and how it so perfectly fits the harmonics? How do you explain the formation of large scale structure?

 

Furthermore, you seem to be denying the idea of the universe being infinite ("we can see the whole universe, edge to edge, top to bottom"). If it is not infinite (that is, if you can go so far that you run out of matter, into 'empty space') then your model has a special frame, where the boundary is stationary. What is worse is that you appear to put us right at the centre.

 

This is just wrong. We know that we see 13.7 billion light years away, to the surface of last scattering, but that isn't an 'edge of the universe' in a literal sense, it is our horizon. Its spatial position is particular to us as observers, and will be in a different place for someone looking out from a different star. Just like the horizon you see when standing on ship is centred about you, and the world doesn't end at that horizon.

[rockman]

Thank you for the replies guys, and sorry to get off subject there. I'll keep reading up on it and try to get up to speed on what people believe now. Things change over 20 to 30 years.

[tar]

Are you serious, or is this a wind up? I would have hoped it was clear that I wasn't suggesting that we literally travelled back in time.

 

I am rather disturbed by your statement "that the microwave background radiation is the thick edge of the universe, all the stars and galaxies, that we saw (had we been alive then) when the universe was 1 billion years old, redshifted 1000 times from visible to microwave" since this is completely at odds with known science.

 

How do you then explain the perfect Black Body spectrum of the CMBR, and how it so perfectly fits the harmonics? How do you explain the formation of large scale structure?

 

Furthermore, you seem to be denying the idea of the universe being infinite ("we can see the whole universe, edge to edge, top to bottom"). If it is not infinite (that is, if you can go so far that you run out of matter, into 'empty space') then your model has a special frame, where the boundary is stationary. What is worse is that you appear to put us right at the centre.

 

This is just wrong. We know that we see 13.7 billion light years away, to the surface of last scattering, but that isn't an 'edge of the universe' in a literal sense, it is our horizon. Its spatial position is particular to us as observers, and will be in a different place for someone looking out from a different star. Just like the horizon you see when standing on ship is centred about you, and the world doesn't end at that horizon.

 

Severian,

 

I do wonder though, where my model breaks down. I was not considering that the universe was infinite as you are mentioning. If this is the current stance of modern science, I did not know it, before I read your post. From all the pieces of info I read, it seems finite. Scientists talk about a radius of the current universe. Scientists talk about how many ly wide it is, how many particles are in it, it's total mass, and energy content and so forth. That sounds finite to me. Where does the infinite part come in?

 

I was born in 1953, and the scientific model of the universe was different then, go back another 50 years and it was different again. We have not yet arrived at the complete model, and considering its size and age and the difficultly of observing what is happening in it, very far away, I would venture to guess, that there will always be questions, always surprises, and always new information that would force a rethinking of our current model.

 

That being said, the model in my head, is different than the model in your head. My model is finite in time and space. You have an infinite universe in yours. But we only have one universe to consider, and it is the same one that we both fit into our models.

 

So consider for a moment the surface of last scattering. You say it still exists in the current universe, we are observing it, in the heat of the microwave background, and we can't see beyond it, because it defines the point in the history of the universe when photons were free to travel at the speed of light. But to this location in the universe (the Milky Way) which was here at the time of the last scattering, the "surface" of the last scattering receeded from us, at the speed of light. The "surface" was in the shape of an expanding sphere, with the Milky Way at the center and the fog of the moments before the last scattering receeding at the speed of light. Since the universe at the time of the last scattering is figured to have been about 84,000,000 lys wide, the increasing sphere, denoting the surface of the last scattering would have eventually reached the closest edge of the universe, and then as it continued to expand, eventually reach the furthest as well. By my figuring the last view of the surface of the last scattering occured before the universe was 1 billion years old.

 

So in your model, we can't see beyond the surface of last scattering, because that is when light first traveled at C. In my model we can't see the surface because it doesn't exist anymore to any observer in the universe.

 

And I figure the background radiation gives out a black body radiation signature because its the average output of billions of 5 to 10 billion year old stars that were a billion miles away or more from the Milky way 5 billion years ago.

 

Regards, TAR

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Severian,

 

If nothing can be smaller than Plank, and nothing larger than C, and the universe is 13.73 billion years old, then all equations should replace their zeros with Plank and their infinities with 13.73billionC. So a-a=P/C.

 

Regards, TAR

[tar]

Quota was exceeded so original diagram was deleted and replaced with this one.

[Klaynos]

Universe != visible universe which I suspect is what you read people talking about?

 

The metric expansion of space is not limited to c like velocities are, it's an expansion not a movement.

[tar]

Diagram is a rough depiction of our universe. The bar on the left representing the current, mind's eye universe, 96,000,000,000 lys wide, and the shortest bar on the right depicting the 330,000 year old universe, 84,000,000 lys wide. The bars inbetween representing a doubling in the size of the universe every 1,370,000,000 years. The surface of the large cone depicts what we see when we look out into space.

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Sisyphus,

 

"Originally Posted by rockman

Actually, I believe what Tar was saying is right."

 

Sisyphus, you replied,

"It isn't, though. I'm not just making stuff up."

 

Then you corrected his understanding of expansion.

 

My understanding of expansion was not Rockman's.

 

However, my conclusions do seem to contradict the understanding of others here in terms of some assumptions they have, that to me, are impossible if the Big Bang, inflation, the last scattering and the subsequent expansion of the universe for 13.7 billion years is in fact, what happened. I am completely satisfied that that is what happened. I am not arguing with it. I am just thinking that it can't happen twice. We cannot see our location in space at the time of the last scattering. We (the matter that makes us up) were there, and it happened 13.7billion years ago. And since the universe was 84,000,000 lys wide at the time, a local observer, anywhere in that 330,000 year old universe would only have to wait a Maximum of 84,000,000 years to see most all the post last scattering universe, and probably all of it, before the universe was even 100,000,000 years old. If no local observer in the universe, when the universe was .1 billion years old, could see the last scattering. How could we now be seeing it, 13.63 billion years later? We can't be. So it must be something else we are seeing.

 

Regards, TAR

[Sisyphus]

One could see a surface of last scattering at 1 billion years, and at 13.7 billion, but not the same surface. And calling it a "surface" is misleading, since there's no actual shell of opaque space or anything. It's just that in the beginning of the universe, everything was opaque, and so light that takes the full length of the universe to reach us is going to show us this opaque space. If you were to watch a given point on the "surface" for billions of years, you'd see that space become transparent, galaxies form, etc., and you'd see a "surface" that was farther away, which would be light from that same early period that has had a longer time to get to us.

 

When they say the universe was 84,000,000 ly wide, they just mean that the stuff that is the farthest away we can see right now was only that distance away when the light we're seeing was emitted. In other words, light emitted from an object 84,000,000 ly away when the universe was 300,000 years old is just reaching us now, 13.7 billion years later. And the reason is because space is expanding, so as the light was traveling the journey was becoming longer and longer, and in total it ended up traveling 13.7 billion ly, even though that wasn't the distance between source and observer either at the beginning (opaque universe) or the end (present day) of the journey. Today, that stuff is something like 46.5 billion ly away.

[tar]

Sisyphus,

 

Thank you for responding. This topic has filled my thoughts since three weeks ago, when I had some "aha" moments, and had some insights that cleared up a lot "problems" that had been barriers to my visualization of the universe. I still think I might be seeing it correctly, taking everything that has been discovered, into account. Following all the laws of physics, and staying consistent with the Big Bang Theory. I was, when I had the insights, and still am, eager to share them. I have tested them against everything I have read in the last three weeks, and everything I have learned and thought about over the last half century. I honestly expected an instant acceptance of the insights and looked forward to working out the consequences or unearthing the flaws with people like you, and Martin, and DH, and Severian. I still hold that hope, but now realize it might not be so easy. After all, my conclusions as to what the microwave background radiation is, are not the conclusions currently being drawn. I am trying to figure out why that is? So let me try this.

 

You said, " In other words, light emitted from an object 84,000,000 ly away when the universe was 300,000 years old is just reaching us now, 13.7 billion years later."

 

Would you entertain a slight change in your statement, that would conform with my insights? Or I suppose, let me make a similar statement, but change one important word and change "light emitted" to "emitted light"?

 

Emitted light, from an object 84,000,000 ly away when the universe was 300,000 years old is still reaching us now, 13.7 billion years later.

 

Regards, TAR

[Pangloss]

I'm recommending this thread be moved to Pseudoscience and Speculations. The science sections are intended for questions, inquiries, clarifications and statements of fact, not objections to and challenging of established science. That's what we have P&S for.