A contradiction

[ACG52]

Your challenges might carry more weight if you knew anything about that which you challenge.

 

But then, actually studying cosmology would offend you philisophically. You have no idea what we don't know because you have no idea what we do.

[WHR]

Your challenges might carry more weight if you knew anything about that which you challenge.

 

But then, actually studying cosmology would offend you philisophically. You have no idea what we don't know because you have no idea what we do.

 

Please explain. Did you look at the redshifts and the distances???????

 

Please do so without personal attack

 

To contradict the data without a point is just an insult.

[StringJunky]

 

I would prefer that religion not be crossed into a scientific topic. I am not on this site to discuss religion. I would contend that the hate of religion is why most people who ravenously defend science do so. To truly free your mind and be objective, you can't have a predisposition to even think about religion, discuss it, let it poison your thought at ALL about science. They are two completely different things, or should be. Unfortunately for many however, science is the void filler in absence of religion. This is a philosophical point and off topic but I'm replying to the statement...but you really have to put religion in a box and forget about it to liberate your mind and not accept science at face value. Otherwise is to have an inversely proportional viewpoint. For every measure of lack of faith in religion, a proportional amount of faith lended to the infallibility of science. That is not a healthy thing. Distrust in one should not reinforce the other. But that is not what is evident in human nature. The most vitriolic atheist is the champion of science. The most devout of religious persons is more than typically the most superstitious against science. An agnostic such as myself is liberated and can view science with as critical an eye as religion.

 

My point was that their central tenets are not subject to review and amendment like science's are...that's all.

[ACG52]

It should NOT be dependent of the observation point. This truly IS a geocentric view of the universe.

 

 

Every observation point in the universe sees everything receeding from it with a red shift and recession velocity directly proportional to it's distance.

[JMJones0424]

It is a map of the identified superclusters out to 2 billion light years. I noticed, by picking about 30 random superclusters, all but a few of the most distant (on the outskirts with our local supercluster being central) fall on redshift scale on the most extreme end (up to .225) the neighboring superclusters with few exceptions are redshifted at the bottom end. (.014)....it is my understanding that a redshift of 1 would indicate light speed. So out to 2 billion light years, we have detected no supercluster in the hundreds (or thousands depending on the criteria) that is moving faster than 1/4 the speed of light away from our location. The "super warp" superclusters begin where??

 

Your understanding, that redshift z of 1 equals recession at light speed, is incorrect. Anything receding at or greater than the speed of light would be undetectable, and by definition, lie outside of our observable universe.

 

 

I fail to see any relevant similarity between your misunderstanding of the topics at hand and religion.

 

I suggest, if you are looking for a good primer on modern cosmology, that you read through Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial.

Edited August 7, 2012 by JMJones0424

[WHR]

Every observation point in the universe sees everything receeding from it with a red shift and recession velocity directly proportional to it's distance.

That is an impossible assumption. Absolutely 100% impossible, unless you have a broadband connection that utilizes relativity and are sending emails to an alien at BLIP 999 supercluster (fictitious) and he has reported to you the redshifts from his vantage point, then that is an assumption that makes the whole house of cards fall.

 

You are basing that assumption on the balloon or rubber band model. The idea that if 4 people grab the corners of

an elastic sheet and pull, that the middle point will stay stationary, near center points will expand only a little, and the elastic around the edges near the tugging will move very fast. Complete phooey. Phooey because there has to be some kind of anchor point. If two observers were identified within our imagined elastic sheet, one positioned in the middle, the other positioned halfway to the edge...the one halfway to the edge would see a lopsided acceleration distribution. Oh buy I forgot, from his vantage point he is the center of his own elastic sheet. But he can't be both. Not unless his location and our location are both anchored by 1) a physical anchor that holds the two positions steady, not necvessarily fixed but at a steady rate with respect to each other and 2) have equal forces tugging from all points outward.

It is not philosophical differences that force me to reject this. It's the "wow this looks really cool when you look at that animation" factor. It's the stone cold reality that we haven't asked the guy a couple of million parsecs away what he sees. We are making it up because it sounds really good.

 

I know you will rebutt that the redshifts are the compelling evidence. There is another explanation for the redshifts, we will just have to wait 30 years when the new textbooks are printed to know what it will turn out to be. Everything else is phooey. Star Trek stuff. I can accept a big bang, but I can't accept the universes's constituents moving faster than the speed of light only in relation to the vantage point.

 

Your understanding, that redshift z of 1 equals recession at light speed, is incorrect. Anything receding at or greater than the speed of light would be undetectable, and by definition, lie outside of our observable universe.

so if the andromeda galaxy just so happened to instantaneously accelerate to light speed moving away from us, we wouldn't see it? Wouldn't that take a few million years, like longer than we'll be around to prove?

[JMJones0424]

so if the andromeda galaxy just so happened to instantaneously accelerate to light speed moving away from us, we wouldn't see it? Wouldn't that take a few million years, like longer than we'll be around to prove?

We would continue to see the light emitted by a far away object, though increasingly red-shifted, until its recession relative to us equaled the speed of light.

 

 

I am afraid, though, that you are confusing acceleration with space-time expansion. Again, I recommend reading through the cosmology tutorial. The section on distances in part 2 is particularly relevant to your question.

[ACG52]

That is an impossible assumption. Absolutely 100% impossible, unless you have a broadband connection that utilizes relativity and are sending emails to an alien at BLIP 999 supercluster (fictitious) and he has reported to you the redshifts from his vantage point, then that is an assumption that makes the whole house of cards fall.

 

 

With another poster, I might take the time to explain the basics of cosmology and the universe's expansion. But you've already amply demonstrated that you don't want to know anything.

[WHR]

And you have demonstrated that you already know everything.

[JMJones0424]

You are basing that assumption on the balloon or rubber band model. The idea that if 4 people grab the corners of

an elastic sheet and pull, that the middle point will stay stationary, near center points will expand only a little, and the elastic around the edges near the tugging will move very fast. Complete phooey. Phooey because there has to be some kind of anchor point. If two observers were identified within our imagined elastic sheet, one positioned in the middle, the other positioned halfway to the edge...the one halfway to the edge would see a lopsided acceleration distribution. Oh buy I forgot, from his vantage point he is the center of his own elastic sheet. But he can't be both. Not unless his location and our location are both anchored by 1) a physical anchor that holds the two positions steady, not necvessarily fixed but at a steady rate with respect to each other and 2) have equal forces tugging from all points outward.

It is not philosophical differences that force me to reject this. It's the "wow this looks really cool when you look at that animation" factor. It's the stone cold reality that we haven't asked the guy a couple of million parsecs away what he sees. We are making it up because it sounds really good.

 

If you don't like the ballon analogy, I don't blame you. It is, in my opinion, responsible for more misunderstanding than nearly anything else except possibly that entropy = disorder, but that's a different discussion. However, your understanding of what the balloon analogy is supposed to represent is incorrect. It is not a model of how space-time expands. To be honest, we don't know how or why, we only have very good indications that space-time is expanding. The balloon analogy is meant to represent why every observer appears to be at the center of their universe, thus disputing the erroneous conclusion that because (generally) every galaxy is receding from us, and the further the galaxy, the more rapid the recession, we are at the center of the universe.

 

For a somewhat better visualization, you might try this youtube video:

 

 

 

(Edited to embed the video rather than just posting the url.)

Edited August 7, 2012 by JMJones0424

[WHR]

Ok let me be clear on something. Not asking for clarification, clear on what I am insisting.

 

Let's say for arguments sake that the universe is certainly expanding, and that it is accelerating.

 

This would have it that outside of the observable universe there are galaxies and clusters, but they have accelerated past the "event horizon". Now it just so happens that this event horizon is also where we date the age of the universe because that's the oldest visible light (adding a few million years or a billion, whatever, to account for photon formation per the theory.)

 

You have two causal factors for not being able to see past the event horizon. Light has redshifted beyond visibility, in fact out of the electromagnetic spectrum altogether. Meaning light waves are in limbo between the mass that produced it and ours. The ultimate long wave. The other causal factor is that IT JUST SO HAPPENS that the universe is too young to have made light older than the observable universe anyway. The edge or event horizon is not only this threshold of expansion, a barrier. It is also the marker for "the beginning".

 

One or the other has to be phooey. We are clinging to the big bang because we want/need a start point. If the start point is not a where, it has to be a when. I've yet to read or hear anyone claim that nothing really exists beyond the End of the observable point or the "event horizon" of our little nook. That the unknown universe might in fact be infinite.

 

I think this is what scares people or what people can't wrap their minds around. If we accept the inflation/expansion concept, with acceleration, then eventually all of the mass in our little nook will be stretched out beyond the horizon as the outside galaxies get tugged beyond it. Eventually everything close to us will be so stretched with gaps inbetween so vast that we'll barely have a few points of light in the sky. (old Sol will be supernova long before then though).

 

But it is obvious that this is just a puzzle, a meaningless puzzle. We are trying to imagine what all of this looks like from our observation point. But if you could back up and take a few billion paces back and look at everything from a different vantage point, further back, all of those masses and superclusters would look like they were rewinding and pushinh back together. The space inbetween would shrink.

The whole thing would look like it is in rewind. The further outside of our precinct you went.

 

We are hung up on LIGHT. Einstein made us all obsessive compulsive about it. That's only because we are biological creatures and light is what we see. So what if the lights all shut off. We are the only critters in the universe that care about being able to see it LOL. The superclusters are not worrying about being able to see their neighbors.

 

If you have ever studied fractal geometry this makes perfect sense. You keep backing up and seeing the same pattern emerge, back up further still and it keeps on popping out, focus on the micro and you keep seeing the geometry spiraling to infinity. That's what the expanding universe would just keep doing with or without photons. And it will keep on and on and on. But likewise,the logic of my mind rules out a beginning. What we think was the beginning was just an infantesimal version of the present. Light need not be part of it, once you forget that light is a speed barrier and anything to be concerned with accept to read your book by.

 

I tell you where the problem lays. It's not with Geocentricism. It's we Egocentricism as a species. (amazing geo and ego happen to have the same 3 letters). We think of the universe as a show for us to figure out and understand. when the reality is that the universe just IS and doesn't care if it is understood or not.

 

I'll buy the accelerating expanding universe but I don't buy the big bang with it. I can imagine the inflation being an infinite process through time in both directions.

[JMJones0424]

Ok let me be clear on something. Not asking for clarification, clear on what I am insisting.

 

Let's say for arguments sake that the universe is certainly expanding, and that it is accelerating.

 

This would have it that outside of the observable universe there are galaxies and clusters, but they have accelerated past the "event horizon". Now it just so happens that this event horizon is also where we date the age of the universe because that's the oldest visible light (adding a few million years or a billion, whatever, to account for photon formation per the theory.)

 

You have two causal factors for not being able to see past the event horizon. Light has redshifted beyond visibility, in fact out of the electromagnetic spectrum altogether. Meaning light waves are in limbo between the mass that produced it and ours. The ultimate long wave. The other causal factor is that IT JUST SO HAPPENS that the universe is too young to have made light older than the observable universe anyway. The edge or event horizon is not only this threshold of expansion, a barrier. It is also the marker for "the beginning".

 

 

1) It's not that objects outside of our future light cone are red-shifted beyond visibility, the light they emit will never reach us because they are receding from us faster than the speed of light. Perhaps if we scale it down to velocities that we encounter regularly it will be easier to understand. Let's say you're standing on the side of the road and I'm traveling away from you in a car at 100 mph. You throw a baseball at my rear windshield at 80 mph. That baseball will never hit my rear windshield because I am traveling faster, relative to you, than the baseball is.

 

 

2)There could be galaxies within our future horizon, but the universe has not yet existed long enough for their light to reach us. It is impossible for us to make observations beyond the surface of last scattering.

 

Note that the distance to the surface of last scattering is not the same as to the edge of the observable universe. Your "IT JUST SO HAPPENS" is invalid. This is dealt with in the second paragraph of the wikipedia article on the observable universe which you linked to previously.

 

I think this is what scares people or what people can't wrap their minds around. If we accept the inflation/expansion concept, with acceleration, then eventually all of the mass in our little nook will be stretched out beyond the horizon as the outside galaxies get tugged beyond it. Eventually everything close to us will be so stretched with gaps inbetween so vast that we'll barely have a few points of light in the sky. (old Sol will be supernova long before then though).

Yes, this is referred to as the Big Rip, and would mean that in the very far future, if the expansion of space-time continues, the observable universe would consist of only our galaxy.

 

 

I tell you where the problem lays. It's not with Geocentricism. It's we Egocentricism as a species. (amazing geo and ego happen to have the same 3 letters). We think of the universe as a show for us to figure out and understand. when the reality is that the universe just IS and doesn't care if it is understood or not.

 

I'll buy the accelerating expanding universe but I don't buy the big bang with it. I can imagine the inflation being an infinite process through time in both directions.

I agree that the existence of the universe is not dependent on our desires. Likewise, while I too find the "beginning" of the universe philosophically displeasing, I do not require observations to conform to my desires.

Edited August 7, 2012 by JMJones0424

[swansont]

Editing to add this. I truly believe, from the depths of my heart, that Einsteins intellect and creative thought are so intimidating to us, so revered, that nobody has the guts to really call into question how it would be that entire galaxies can "apparently" break the light speed barrier. I think he himself would question this. I don't recall him making exceptions. I don't know who came up with a way to make an exception and still claim it falls within the fundamental principles of GR. hmmm

 

Balderdash. People test Einstein all the time (in fact, we've done an LPI measurement in our lab). Coming up with some physics that was at odds with relativity would mean a ticket to Stockholm. The issue is not some cult-of-personality following, it's that relativity has this persistent habit of being right whenever and wherever it's tested.

[CaptainPanic]

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[Airbrush]

"I take the Stance that on one side we say that there is no absolute knowledge, that knowledge is amendable when new observations warrant, but yet we still call it knowledge and argue that we know. Call people who don't think they know ignorant because they haven't unquestionably accepted the current version of "know"."

 

Scientists are generally very quick to admit what they don't know. Current knowledge is simply the best we know at this time. That can change. We don't know hardly anything about dark matter and dark energy, that is why we call them dark.

 

There is a term for clusters of clusters of galaxies. That is a "supercluster". We are members of the Virgo Supercluster which is gravitationally bound. Outside the Virgo Supercluster, all the other superclusters are moving away from us at an accelerating rate.

 

There is something called "dark flow" which is an anomaly to expansion, which may be of interest to you.

 

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

 

"Telescopes cannot see events earlier than about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe became transparent (the Cosmic Microwave Background); this corresponds to the particle horizon at a distance of about 46 billion (4.6×1010) light years. Since the matter causing the net motion in this proposal is outside this range, it would in a certain sense be outside our visible universe; however, it would still be in our past light cone."

Edited August 7, 2012 by Airbrush