I suspect the increase in expansion is because the universe is trying to get away from mankind before we do something irreversibly stupid ...
Eggheads confirm it's not a bug – the universe really is expanding 9% faster than expected
Hubble boffins have confirmed that the universe is expanding about 9 per cent faster than expected thanks to new measurements taken by the venerable space telescope. Readers might remember the team from Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute, led by Nobel Laureate Adam Riess, came up with the …
COMMENTS
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Friday 26th April 2019 16:28 GMT steelpillow
Problems, problems
The simplest explanation is that the rate of expansion changes over time, it is a Hubble Variable not a Constant. But we already knew that. During the inflationary era moments after the Big Bang, expansion was faster than the speed of light. It then slowed to a sedate gentle huff. Eventually it began to accelerate again.
The latest measurements tell us that that recent acceleration has been fiercer than we previously thought. But as neither the fact of expansion nor its acceleration can be explained by any testable theory in the first place, I am not sure how there can be an "expected" rate, just a bad guess that has been proved wrong.
Hats off to the boffins for proving it wrong, though.
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Saturday 27th April 2019 01:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Simplest for you?
No the simplest is velocity as wave surfing over resonant electric field.
i.e. we have an electric oscillating field (see those electrons dance!), matter is in resonance with that field (atomic clocks *are* in sync!), if it does one oscillation per slot of the underlying field, it cancels out and does not move. If any of that component is pushed into an axis, it does less than one oscillation for each oscillation of the underlying field..... it's out of phase and so its resonance slot is across the field... it processes across the field with velocity. Light is the same, just at 1 resonant wavelength per oscillation. If it moved 1 wavelength each oscillation, it would also cancel out the field, only it would be one wavelength along the field.
i.e. velocity in matter is the same as velocity in light, and light and matter are the same oscillating dipolar stuff (obvious when you think you turn matter into light and light into matter!).
We travel out from the center at some fraction of this oscillation, e.g. 5 degrees. As matter thins and the field thins, the wavelength increases, 5 degrees is longer and the universe appears to accelerate.
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Saturday 27th April 2019 11:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Can I ask you a question
Do you really believe that when you measure the properties of a photon, you are setting properties of 'entangled' photons, even teleporting those properties into the future and the past by some, as yet to be understood, mechanism? Entanglement, Quantum Teleportation?
I mean think about it for a second, ludicrous isn't it?
You know light interacts with matter, it bends in glass, it doesn't even need to be inside the matter, it bends around slits, a circular polarizer make it spiral in your 3D glasses....
And if matter is all resonating, then filtering for a specific time, selects a specific state of oscillation of matter.
So that filter you have in your entanglement experiments, the one before the Bells test?.... That filter is selecting a specific state of matter. And if the matter is interacting with light, you're selecting a specific state of light..... so of course the photons have the same properties! You filtered for those!
That's all it is. Resonance in matter.
Oscillating electric resonance.
@"it's not because I'm thick or uneducated"
Do you believe in Quantum Teleportation? And Entanglement? No of course you don't, it's ridiculous isn't it. Nobody really does.
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Saturday 27th April 2019 13:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
So you don't believe in Quantum Teleportation?
You said: "it's not because I'm thick or uneducated"
I said :"Do you believe in Quantum Teleportation? And Entanglement? "
I note you did not answer my question in the affirmative.
Let me flip the logic on what I said, if its unclear.
1. You know light interacts with matter, you cannot measure its properties directly, so for example, you measure polarization by passing it through a polarizing filter, you measure its phase by bending it in a slit and so on. You *interact* light with matter to get an effect you can measure.
2. So if the photons have the same properties, then the matter they are interacted with to measure them has the same state.
3. So if you filter for time (Entanglement experiments *always* filter for time or a proxy for time).
Then both 'entangled photons' must be interacting with matter in the same state.
4. So Entanglement is proof of resonance in matter.
Oscillating electric resonance. That's all it is.
I ask you if you believe in Entanglement, since its a method of proof of oscillating resonance in matter, something you said was "Electric Universe shit".
I did answer your question but you didn't answer mine. So I ask again "Do you believe in Quantum Teleportation? And Entanglement? "
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Friday 3rd May 2019 15:22 GMT Rich 11
Re: So you don't believe in Quantum Teleportation?
You know light interacts with matter
No, I don't. I know light interacts with some types of matter, but possibly not with all types of matter.
Tell you what: cut to the chase and direct me to a university which teaches what you're trying to explain. Or just give me references to peer-reviewed papers I can read, if you prefer. I'm happy to put the work in to try to understand those, but I'm not wasting any more time reading your word salad.
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Sunday 28th April 2019 19:36 GMT Killing Time
Re: Simplest for you?
'No the simplest is velocity as wave surfing over resonant electric field.'
Presumably you will be putting this theorem up for peer review and publishing? Or is it someone else's idea hence the AC posting.
Does it make some kind of prediction which is testable? If not, it is just so much conjecture and dismiss-able as presumably it is you doing in the later post regarding entanglement. I know there is a lot of time and effort being put into testing that, not so much into this theory to my knowledge.
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Tuesday 30th April 2019 06:40 GMT Dagg
Re: Problems, problems
faster than the speed of light - Because not possible in our universe
Cherenkov radiation anyone.... not faster than the speed of light in a vacuum but faster than the speed of light on water.
Just consider what the medium that our early universe was expanding through. Also just consider that we consider as a vacuum may be like water outside our little space time.
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Wednesday 1st May 2019 03:57 GMT Dagg
Re: Problems, problems
So not faster than the speed of light then.
You don't appear to understand what the speed of light actually is!
There exists an absolute maximum velocity similar to absolute zero (which by definition is the absolute minimum velocity). With our current understanding nothing is able to travel faster than this absolute maximum velocity (AMV) in the same way all motion ceases at absolute zero.
Now light is also governed by the AMV and being basically mass-less it is the thing that we perceive as the fastest thing that we are able to observe hence we have come up with a value for the speed of light which will actually be slightly slower than AMV. It is highly there are things (particles / waves) traveling faster that light and much closer to the AMV but we are at the moment not able to observe them.
The speed of light is NOT the AMV the speed of light is relative, in a vacuum deep in a gravity well it travels considerably slower than in a vacuum say between stars. The issues we have with the GPS systems shows that.
In any medium the speed of light will be different. Therefore in water with Cherenkov radiation the electrons are traveling faster than the speed of light.
Compare high speed electrons from a reactor in free space to light in a vacuum chamber on the surface of the earth. The free space electrons will be faster.
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Tuesday 7th May 2019 12:04 GMT TheVogon
Re: Problems, problems
"Therefore in water with Cherenkov radiation the electrons are traveling faster than the speed of light."
No they are not.
"Compare high speed electrons from a reactor in free space to light in a vacuum chamber on the surface of the earth. The free space electrons will be faster."
No, no they wont. They both travel at a maximum of ~ 300,000 km/s
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Friday 26th April 2019 17:26 GMT JeffyPoooh
Evolution of the Hubble Constant
"Harvard boffins have a fun timeline of the evolution of human knowledge about the Hubble Constant [here=link]."
Link = https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~dfabricant/huchra/hubble/h1920.jpg
Seeing those error bars (up to 1950 or so) that fail to even overlap with the latest consensus is very amusing. Even if the error bars represent "95%" confidence, then how come 100% of them are wrong?
It's merely a larger factoid worth keeping in mind. It impacts nearly everything these days.
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Friday 26th April 2019 20:30 GMT Blazde
Re: Evolution of the Hubble Constant
Unknown unknowns. Here's an early biggie: "What Hubble had thought were individual stars in his most distant galaxies were actually star clusters, thus he had not been observing ``standard candles,'' objects whose absolute luminosity did not vary with distance."
Although, in my experience the more common reason for confidence intervals being wrong is simply confused use of statistical methods.
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Friday 26th April 2019 23:27 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: Evolution of the Hubble Constant
Science is self-correcting.
It follows directly from that that there is always some fraction of 'established scientific fact', at any point in time, that is actually wrong.
It then follows from that that such facts actually have a half-life, probably on the order of several decades.
The above noted 'comedy error bars' are merely another example of this.
To be clear, science is great.
Just don't have too much faith in any 'established scientific fact' du jour. No place for faith, in science.
Skeptical thinking, always.
'Appeal to Authority', never.
(But yes, CO2 levels are rising... Which is probably not good.)
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Sunday 28th April 2019 01:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Science is people
IMHO science is people. You wonder how a group of people can disbelieve global warming when the evidence is in front of their eyes, yet the same things exist in physics: Quantum Mechanics, 5 dimensional big bangs, where we can only see 3 of those dimensions etc..
The problem is once a theory is accepted, and repeated as if it is true, its a massive loss of face to admit the mistake. It's far easier to build a slightly more outlandish model on top of it to fix it up. The model tends to get more and more outlandish over time with each fixup. Electrons returning to their start positions isn't due to oscillation, its due to time travel like quantum teleportation effects.
Worse the more bizarre the more sexy, the more entertaining, the more famous the scientist. Science as entertainment is not a good thing.
Math as science too. If you accept a math model that's false, then instead of understanding a system, you can derive a definition of it, and claim a proof based on the math. Even if it means violating causal relationships.... the basis of experimental physics.
But the basic thrust of your comment is true. Science is self-correcting. Eventually, but its generational changes. Theories become ridiculous, the next generation rejects them, and heads off in a new direction.
Emperor Schrodinger's clothes are woven of the finest Jeffries tubes, just look at those quantum teleported wormholes covering his black holes.... fashion experts from Harvard and Stanford both agree it's the new fashion trend.... no say the children, he's naked, butt ass naked. The next generation changes the direction, the old guard defend the status quo.
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Tuesday 30th April 2019 02:54 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: Science is people
AC mentioned "Schrödinger", which triggers off the following comedy bit.
Erwin Schrödinger (famous physicist, of 'Schrödinger's Cat' fame) was an Austrian army artillery officer during WWI. It's just possible that he might have fired motors in the general direction of a young ambulance driver named Ernest Hemingway.
If Schrödinger had accidentally hit Hemingway's ambulance with a shell, then Hemingway would have been in a supposition of states, simultaneously both dead and alive, until somebody went over to the smoldering ambulance and actually checked.
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Sunday 28th April 2019 11:32 GMT Kiwi
Re: Evolution of the Hubble Constant
(But yes, CO2 levels are rising... Which is probably not good.)
CO2 - makes plants grow better, will contribute to desert areas growing again and more abundant crops and more plants being able to process other pollutants and other wonderful things.
Sadly, when we burn stuff that gives us this wonderful amazing gas, we also burn a hell of a lot of other garbage that really is nasty.
Even worse, the peeps doing a lot of "we must do something" crap to prevent "climate change" without thinking about what they're really doing - without counting the cost so-to-speak. EG if you get rid of your reasonably new petrol car and replace it with a hybrid or electric "coz environment", you've more likely done more harm than good (OTOH if you dispose of your car when it's relatively 'past it' that's another matter)
Rising CO2 = Great! MORE please! Rising other pollutants OTOH, no thanks.
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Sunday 28th April 2019 11:48 GMT Kiwi
Re: Evolution of the Hubble Constant
"CO2 - makes plants grow better, will contribute to desert areas growing again"
It's water that's needed to make desert areas grow again. CO2 was never a limiting factor.
True..
Another good thing about "global warming" is a greater amount of water in the atmosphere... :)
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Monday 29th April 2019 07:05 GMT Richard 12
Perhaps, but we'll be mostly dead
If we do not change course, human civilisation cannot survive the oncoming storm.
The planet will be fine. There'll be another Great Dying, but those have happened before and the planet remained full of life.
All large land animals died, which would of course include us. So you know, maybe we really ought to pay attention and change our habits.
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Monday 29th April 2019 13:08 GMT TheVogon
Re: Evolution of the Hubble Constant
"CO2 - makes plants grow better"
No it makes plants grow faster. Unfortunately increased CO2 also drastically decreases the nutritional value of many crops and increases toxin uptake.
"will contribute to desert areas growing again"
No, AGW will increase desertification overall.
" if you get rid of your reasonably new petrol car and replace it with a hybrid or electric "coz environment", you've more likely done more harm than good "
No, even when powered with fossil fuel generated electricity its still a lower carbon footprint than combustion engine vehicles due to the much higher efficiency.
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Monday 29th April 2019 17:35 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Evolution of the Hubble Constant
even when powered with fossil fuel generated electricity its still a lower carbon footprint than combustion engine vehicles due to the much higher efficiency
This doesn't count the environmental impact of manufacturing the new car (including transportation, etc) and disposing of the old one.
The break-even point for replacing an ICE vehicle with an electric one is going to depend on the specifics. But Kiwi did write that replacing an older vehicle is likely to be a net gain. It's replacing a relatively new one where the case is not so clear.
Frankly, I think it's more important that there are different use cases for the two categories, so treating one as inherently superior to the other is nonsense.
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Tuesday 30th April 2019 14:59 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Evolution of the Hubble Constant
The other day I saw a report that said that an EV in Germany would have and 11% or more greater lifetime CO2 footprint due to their switching back to coal from nuclear.
For the whole of my adult lifetime we've been shoving unnecessary amounts of coal up power-station chimneys due to "Greens" objecting to nuclear power. Will they take responsibility for that? No chance.
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Friday 26th April 2019 18:14 GMT tallenglish
Saying God did it, with extra steps
Why cant they just get over their egos and admit they haven't a clue, if the universe started in a bang then what caused it, where is the epicentre of this explosion?
Hell why not start by explaining what a dimension is and how time and space are different but part of the same thing. When they understand what they are they will also know how they were both created and how they interact with matter we can see.
I personally think space is a boson and time a 3/2 spin fermion, so both can be created or destroyed just in the same way light can be emitted or absorbed and particles are created in pairs.
What makes me laugh is all these athiests are biasing their whole idea of the universe, trying to fit their theories on something that originally came from a catholic priest.
That has to be the biggest and best troll of all time.
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Friday 26th April 2019 18:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
Responding as one still unfortunately does to the troll, First Causes are metaphysics or theology, not science. However, the Big Bang was not precisely an explosion. It did not take place "into" anything. The tiny and rather warm universe got bigger, at first very rapidly and then more slowly. There is no epicentre because it was the entire universe that expanded. One way of kind-of understanding it is thinking of two ants on an expanding balloon. The balloon is getting bigger, the ants are getting further apart, but there is no "centre" from which the expansion is taking place.
For the rest of it I refer you to, inter alia, Sean Carroll. He does it a lot better than I do.
There's also no paradox in Lemaitre having been a Catholic priest. The Church has always had a good record on educating the very intelligent members of its congregation. It's the fundie Prots that believe the Earth was kicked into position by the cosmic star goat 6000 years ago.
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Saturday 27th April 2019 08:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
The Catholic Church didn't excommunicate him. Do try to keep up.
Galileo's mistake was to write about everybody who disagreed with him as if they were total idiots. They might have been, but if he hadn't suggested that the Pope was an idiot too, he would probably have avoided any trouble.
In the same was, the Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie wasn't really because of "blasphemy"about Islam. It was because of his extremely unflattering portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini.
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Saturday 27th April 2019 09:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
This is an excellent series of science stories. It does a very good job of pointing out the the church already knew that the earth revolves around the Sun. They were just trying to figure out how to put it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed
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Sunday 28th April 2019 11:47 GMT Dr Paul Taylor
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
While I was studying Italian, we had to make a presentation about something. I chose Galileo, because it would be easy. I now have seven books on my shelf by or about Galileo, most of them in Italian, which I struggled through. One of them was chiefly concerned with arguing that Galileo was not an atheist; it was obvious that the author was a nutter before I bought the book, but I did so because it contained the vocabulary that I needed. I still don't understand why Galileo was condemned by the Inquistion. The most likely reason is that he was clumsy with academic politics. I can relate to that.
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Monday 29th April 2019 00:18 GMT Raphael
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
Galileo was condemned because he called the Pope (who up until that time) a simpleton for not accepting Galileo's (unproven at the time) theories as fact.Up until that incident there is plenty of evidence that the Church was fine with his teaching about his models, he just wasn't allowed to refer to them as facts because they were not proven yet (and the scientific conses of the day was that he was wrong.
The pope over reacted to being called a simpleton, and condemned Galileo's teaching as heresy.
(and Galileo's models were wrong, and had even more complicated epicycles with circular orbits than the Ptolemaic models used. Kepler's models with parabolic orbits and no complicated epicycles were right)
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Monday 29th April 2019 15:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
And not only the Pope. He was rude about various academics whom he could otherwise have counted on for support.
I admire Galileo, he is a very important bridge between pre-science and science, but he was a bit of a cross between Elon Musk and Richard Dawkins, and not in a good way.
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Friday 26th April 2019 23:25 GMT Lomax
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
Sean Carroll +1. Cf. also Lee Smolin, Frank Wilczek, Richard Feynman, Steven Weinberg, et al.
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Saturday 27th April 2019 10:52 GMT Lomax
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
I think they all do/did an excellent job of explaining some of the more mind-bendning aspects of "the big whooosh" to us mere mortals, and I for one am grateful they took the time to do so. If the OP still can't understand inflation I'd venture it's because he doesn't want to.
But if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. ;)
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Saturday 27th April 2019 13:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
I know I don't understand quantum mechanics. But I'm in good company because people like Feynman never claimed to understand it either; they basically said "this is the mathematics and it gives the right answer (waving away some infinities)."
But at least I'm informed about what I don't know.
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Sunday 28th April 2019 09:41 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
The balloon is getting bigger, the ants are getting further apart, but there is no "centre" from which the expansion is taking place.
Well, there is the centre of the balloon. But we may now have a better understanding of the amount of hot air being added. Or a more accurate way to answer that old question of 'Do you know how fast you were going Sir?'. Then again, adding a few more km/s isn't going to help you in places that set fines based on speed in excess of say, 80km/h.
But that's all part of the joy of science (or metaphysics), especially when 'constants' get revised, because then theories based on the previous constant also need to get revised.
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Monday 29th April 2019 12:58 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
From the point of view of the ants, there is no centre of the balloon.
Sure there is. The ants may not be aware of it, but if they were, they could invent trigonometry, clocks, telecommunications and calculate the centre, and rate of expansion. An ant may have a harder job, but we're that ant, observing 4D-cosmology from mostly a single reference frame.
But such is science.. Or post-normal science. Just because you can't observe something doesn't mean it's not happening. See climate science for more info. Which has also developed further into a full-blown cult with the adoption of it's young seer.
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Monday 29th April 2019 15:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
I note you didn't answer my question about your post.
From the point of view of the ants their two-dimensional spacetime (the surface of the balloon) is curved. It's an analogy*, not to be taken literally with actual ants on an actual balloon, but a way of approaching how spacetime may look to us. Perhaps Flatland would have been a better analogy. We can tell it is curved but we have no experimental way of determining if it is curved "into" anything.
*antology?
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Monday 29th April 2019 17:28 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
I note you didn't answer my question about your post.
Just a joke about speeding, and relativity. I think it's both fun, and rather awe inspiring to try and figure out exactly how fast we're moving.
We can tell it is curved but we have no experimental way of determining if it is curved "into" anything.
*antology?
Ah, pharoahmoans? So ancient Egyptian astronomers and possible celestial alignments of their structures. Or human nature to try and find patterns in archaelogical remains.
But again all part of the fun, ie space/time/gravity and fitting new observations into old models and theories. And thanks to curious humans stargazing, there's data from our ancestors in Neolithic times using stellar observations to figure out what day it is. And thus when the next ceremonial booze-up should be. Or doing the doomsday thing and predicting human extinction in 2025.. Even though there's no scientific basis for that.
But I digress. Now we have better technology for better observations, and better understanding of our place in the Universe.. And I'm still not entirely convinced by the 'flat Universe' theory, but then the 'big bang' also has it's own problems :)
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Tuesday 30th April 2019 03:02 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
Somebody mentioned ants on a balloon.
Wiki: Ant on a rubber rope
An ant starts to crawl along a taut rubber rope 1 km long at a speed of 1 cm per second (relative to the rubber it is crawling on). At the same time, the rope starts to stretch uniformly by 1 km per second, so that after 1 second it is 2 km long, after 2 seconds it is 3 km long, etc. Will the ant ever reach the end of the rope? At first consideration it seems that the ant will never reach the end of the rope, but in fact it does. (In the form stated above, it would take 8.9×10^43421 years.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_on_a_rubber_rope
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Sunday 28th April 2019 11:38 GMT Kiwi
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
It's the fundie Prots that believe the Earth was kicked into position by the cosmic star goat 6000 years ago.
These would be the same people who accepted the idea of "the big rip" a mere 2,000 years ago?
Your resort to attempts to be offensive suggest you might be a little defensive about something? Nothing to do with yet more rewrites of "accepted scientific age of the universe" would it?
Should I quite while I am a mile behind and go to bed? :)
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Sunday 28th April 2019 15:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
Oh, I can be far more offensive than that. It deeply pains me that after the efforts of the Church of England in the 18th and the 19th century to advance a whole lot of sciences, there are people in the 21st century who claim to (a) be Christians and (b) believe things that imply that earth sciences, biology and astronomy are bunk. At least people who don't accept or understand that quantum mechanics rests on remarkably firm foundations are merely ignorant or unintelligent. But many of the Creationists do it to gain power over the credulous for political ends, and that's just disgusting.
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Monday 29th April 2019 16:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
The balloon analogy is good, but a better analogy is that the ants are on a flat sheet of stretchy stuff which is progressively being stretched over time. This has two advantages: it avoids the whole 'but there's a centre of the balloon' thing, and it agrees much more with current experimental results, which indicate that the universe is spatially (note: spatially) flat as well as we can measure. It has the big problem that this sheet needs to have no edges and thus be infinite (or topologically strange). However that, too, is what we currently think is the case: the universe is spatially infinite (and has always been so, right back to the big bang).
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Monday 29th April 2019 10:57 GMT The Nazz
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
A week or so ago, the venerable (RIP) BBC had an article likening the Universe to an egg, stating the universe was most likely egg shaped (rather like most balloons are).
Perhaps, just perhaps, something large, very large is hatching?
Perhaps another mini-big bang is brewing?
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Sunday 28th April 2019 03:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps @ rich 11
No he hasn't. Which book? Something by L Ron Hubbard perhaps? or a book about ancient aliens? How about a book by the flat earther's? I repeat. How about answering his question with a specific book. The response, How about reading something that isn't the Bible, is nothing but a bigoted anti religious comment and ignores the fact that people like Keppler were very religious.
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Sunday 28th April 2019 11:41 GMT Kiwi
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps @ rich 11
The response, How about reading something that isn't the Bible, is nothing but a bigoted anti religious comment and ignores the fact that people like Keppler were very religious.
They also want to look to a lot of modern scientists as well. Lots of 'religious' types in there, and more coming by the day from the sounds of it (admittedly my reading and viewing material has a tendency to increase the possibility of 'confirmation bias'...)
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Sunday 28th April 2019 15:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps @ rich 11
Kepler [sic] is an irrelevance. You obviously (a) didn't read my original post that you think you're responding to and (b) have never read Kepler. I have. I've even made the pilgrimage to Regensburg, walking over the bridge to 5, Keplerstrasse.
Kepler had the religion of his day. His religious belief neither confirms nor disproves anything. In science, what matters is accumulated facts and theories. Otherwise we'd be dismissing Newton (alchemist, numerologist), Crookes (later in life he became a Spiritualist) and doubtless many others. Kepler's Catholicism, in short, is neither here nor there. What matters is his work. The thinker he categorically demolished was Aristotle, whose writings had been confused with Christian doctrine for some time. The Roman Catholic Church has gone so far in throwing out irrelevant trappings as to accept both the Big Bang and evolution by natural selection.
I mention in passing Sean Carroll as a good scientific populariser; others have been suggested. It helps when reading a thread to look at all of it, and to use those helpful little indents the Register now provides.
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Sunday 28th April 2019 15:50 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps @ rich 11
The Roman Catholic Church has gone so far in throwing out irrelevant trappings as to accept both the Big Bang and evolution by natural selection.
I blame the Jesuits. They're usually the ones blamed, especially as they run the observatory at Castel Gondolfo. But the Catholics have been star gazing for a long time, which gave us our calendar and a lot of historical observation data :)
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Monday 29th April 2019 08:11 GMT Avatar of They
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
Yawn. I think there is enough experimental science to disprove the idea that someone created all this nonsense and no evidence to prove that it did.
In recent news Hawkins and Einstein are being proved right with ideas from decades ago. So a fair bet in ten years with the replacement telescope somebody of scientific intelligence will prove this right or wrong to a much greater of accuracy. And Science will move forward, dragging archaic humanity with it - one holy place at a time.
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Monday 29th April 2019 16:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saying God did it, with extra steps
Why cant they just get over their egos and admit they haven't a clue, if the universe started in a bang then what caused it, where is the epicentre of this explosion?
We don't know what caused it because current physics falls apart as you get close enough in time to it. We do know where the epicentre is: everywhere.
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Friday 26th April 2019 18:29 GMT Rol
Is that right Ted!
Many, many years ago I was involved in the most monumental accident ever. I was driven away from the scene at what felt like light speed to a distant recouperation centre where I slowly gathered myself to be the person I am today.
One day, those in charge of the ward wheeled in the biggest telescope I had ever seen, and suggested it might help my recovery if I looked into the telescope toward where the calamity had happened.
I couldn't believe my eyes. The accident I was in all those years ago was still playing out.
"How so?" I enquired.
"Well. The light from distant events takes time to reach us, and the longer it takes, the further back in time the event is"
"But...but, the fact I travelled all that way to be here, surely means the light from that event passed by me some 14 odd billion years ago, when I was less than a nanometre from the epicentre?"
"That, I'm afraid, is a rather pedestrian view of the universe"
"Could you get me up to speed then?"
"Err. It's all very complicated, and you'd need to have been indoct...err...introduced to some very exotic concepts before any explanation could begin to make sense"
"So. In a nutshell, you have no reasonable explanation of why events that we were all a part of billions of years ago are still viewable?"
"Not one you would understand"
"You mean. Not one based on observation and logic!"
"Nurse! Nurse! We need to up his medication, he's having another no nonsense reality episode"
....
"Yeah..yeah...I see it now. These toy cows are close and the real ones are far away...and the money was just resting in your account Ted"
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Sunday 28th April 2019 02:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Is that right Ted!
Nicely put Rol
Looking pragmatically at it:
1. If the universe is accelerating outwards
2. Then it's been doing that all along
3. Which means at some point it was concentrated in the center (at zero velocity??).
4. So there was no big bang. It simply accelerated outwards by some [as yet] unexplained mechanism.
So do you try to understand that mechanism, or do you limit yourself to trying to patch up your broken theory?
It also means that the understanding of gravity and mass and velocity is borked. Since all of that mass in one place would create the mother of all black holes, which would be impossible to escape from in the current model.
@""Nurse! Nurse! We need to up his medication"
You need some peasoup! It's the finest medicine, a clear soup made of two ingredients and thickened with one broth. It cure all ailments *but* side effects include a bruised forehead from slapping it and saying "fuck", "fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck", over and over again.
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Sunday 28th April 2019 12:18 GMT cbars
Re: Is that right Ted!
Goodness me Rol and AC... you two are very critical given you don't seem to be familiar with the concepts at hand. "Popular Science" TV programs have a firmer grasp.
The analogy of being in accident doesn't make sense as no-one is saying that we're observing events from back in time that this region of space was physically present for. You can surely understand that if it takes time for light to travel, then if you are far enough away you're observing events that are not happening *now* but when the light was emitted.
Yes, the numbers we're talking about are mind boggling, and not easily understand by our brains (which are much more comfortable - for whatever reason you want to insert here as it's not relevant - with small numbers/speeds/distances which we encounter in day-to-day life).
That's why science is interesting. Now if you would like to actually become familiar with the concepts, you'll find it much harder to dismiss them. You can't successfully argue against something unless you understand it. That's why you can't argue against someone who speaks a different language to you, you can only shout at each other and gesticulate.
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Sunday 28th April 2019 15:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Woosh
"then if you are far enough away you're observing events that are not happening *now* but when the light was emitted"
And you traveled away from the accident at the speed of light, and the light you're viewing traveled at the speed of light..... you do the math then apologize to Rol who correctly explained it.
Look, universe is expanding... ergo big bang theory.
Rol pointed to the problem,
then we had a fixup '5 dimensional big bang where we can only see the first 3 dimension which are on the surface', fix up cough *magic inflation*.
Turns out universe is *accelerating*, ergo now you have two mechanisms for the same expansion observation and together they don't fit the observation!
Do you add a third fixup?
Do you realize that two mechanisms is twice as unlikely as 1?
Do you pretend that 9% is an error bar?
All you know at this point is there wasn't a big bang and a magic inflation.
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Monday 29th April 2019 21:34 GMT Lomax
Re: Woosh
> at the speed of light
While it's pretty well established that faster than light travel is an impossibility, this law does not apply to the fabric of space time itself. In fact inflation inevitably leads to distant regions of space receding from us at speeds > c, and they are thus eternally unknowable. In the distant future we will be left in a solitary island universe of gravitationally bound matter (the Milky Way), with no means of detecting any other part of the universe. Since that period will last far longer than the period we are in (where other galaxies can still be seen) we are quite lucky to have developed cosmology already - it would be much harder to gain such knowledge from the empty void which awaits us.
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Tuesday 30th April 2019 06:59 GMT Dagg
Re: Woosh
While it's pretty well established that faster than light travel is an impossibility
Incorrect, it is just that we have not succeeded yet therefore nothing can be established. All we can say <u>at the moment</u> is that we have not been able to exceed the speed of light in vacuum.
Just think of things in the past that have been considered impossible or in the realm of magic. Heart transplants, faster than sound travel, landing on the moon. Nuclear power etc.
Never say never....
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Tuesday 30th April 2019 12:52 GMT Lomax
Re: Woosh
> Incorrect.
Fantasy is fine, but your assertion suggests wishful thinking is obstructing your understanding. FTL travel is explicitly forbidden by relativity theory, and there are very good reasons for this. If you wish to contradict Einstein you need to do rather better. Straight from the horse's mouth:
“I would have to say that it is probably impossible, and even if it turns out to be possible, we are probably centuries away from being able to do it.”
- Miguel Alcubierre
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Friday 26th April 2019 22:29 GMT Rich 10
I am curious (but not yellow) as to any supposition being put forward by a true physicist, rather than a sort of normal person like me, that the initial inflationary episode in space-time during the first Plank Moment is related to this relatively new recognition that the physical universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. Space-time is still inflating - for perhaps the first 9 billion years after matter started forming, the gravitational effects on space time were sufficient to slow inflationary expansion, but once a relative decrease in density of the overall physical universe due to a constant amount of matter occupying a larger and larger volume, then the forces governing the speed of inflation of space time started gaining the upper hand again. And all us matter based things are just along for the ride.
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Monday 29th April 2019 11:27 GMT Annihilator
Re: Oh Thank You Eggheads
That's what I thought. An extra 46 miles of "space" being created every second - that's huge! Until you realise how big a megaparsec is. Sneaking it in as a megaparsec makes the 46 miles sound big. But it's only 7.6cm per parsec. And a parsec is 3.3 lightyears.
Having said that, by my fag packet calculations, the space between the earth and the sun is growing by about 6 meters a year. We'll be out of this solar system in no time!
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Saturday 27th April 2019 19:48 GMT HinD
Really...
All theese years not able to fully explain the universe and wasting millions of dollars. We should just accept the earth is flat and use the money to build a giant ladder to the roof of the planet. Obama knew this, thats why he funded all the sciences, because he was ordered by the muslim illuminatis to do so in order to hide the truth
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Sunday 28th April 2019 19:57 GMT nil0
I've argued this for years. To an observer inside the system, I'm not sure how you could tell if the universe is expanding, or the contents of it are shrinking. Just depends which frame of reference you choose.
And if it is just a case of choosing a frame of reference, it makes more sense to me to choose the contents-shrinking one.
If the stuff in the universe can be thought of as vibrations (you can tell I have a deep understanding of string theory here), then isn't it more likely that those vibrations gradually decay, rather than them staying constant but the universe expanding for no readily explained reason?
The expansion version also feels hubristic in a sun-goes-round-the-earth sort of way - we're the invariant bit and the whole universe has to expand to keep us that way?
So choose which frame of reference you find easier to imagine: universe expanding with an inexplicable expansionary pressure, or contents decaying with a damping factor.
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Sunday 28th April 2019 20:05 GMT nil0
...and if you want flippant, the Big Bang was the universe falling on the floor, setting up all those vibrations; the perceived expansion is the decay of those vibrations; the variation in the damping factor over time is the universe being handled, picked up and put back on the shelf.
It's as good a creation story as any I've heard. In the beginning was the word, and the word was probably "oops" (with apologies).
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Monday 29th April 2019 10:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
"I've argued this for years. To an observer inside the system, I'm not sure how you could tell if the universe is expanding, or the contents of it are shrinking. Just depends which frame of reference you choose."
Oh well, there goes thermodynamics.
For vibrations to decay, the energy has to go somewhere - which results in the surroundings warming up and an increase in entropy.
Where is the energy going in your model? Because in the expanding universe version, the book-keeping works, we're just having a problem working out the rate of inflation. In the static universe with shrinking contents model, there is nowhere for the energy to go.
(plus, when vibrations decay the frequency goes down a little and hence the wavelength goes up.)
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Monday 29th April 2019 10:54 GMT nil0
> Where is the energy going in your model?
No idea. Radiating out of the universe? Seems no less bizarre than the universe having to expand. Reformulate thermodynamics into the other frame of reference, and tell us if anything interesting pops out.
> (plus, when vibrations decay the frequency goes down a little and hence the wavelength goes up.)
Didn't know that. Makes it look like redshift, does it?
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Sunday 28th April 2019 09:54 GMT Scroticus Canis
How do you measure the rate of expansion by observing a gravitationaly bound dwarf galaxy?
The Greater Magellanic Cloud orbits the Milky Way and will eventually merge into it.
It is moving closer to the Milky Way; so how do you calculate a positive rate of expansion from two reference points inside a gravitationally collapsing system?
I am intrigued.
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Monday 29th April 2019 10:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Not An Astronomer
Not an astronomer, but if you imagine that we were an object entering a black hole and accelerating towards the centre, anything that went in before us would appear to accelerate away faster than us as accelleration is a function of time as well as distance, whilst we stretch away from anything which follows us. i.e. for an object inside a black hole the black hole would appear to be constantly expanding. If you further imagine a black hole in space the temperature of the space outside the black hole would be largely the same, From inside the black hole that similarity would show out at the edges of the black hole. Now in our universe the edge is a more or less constant temperature. In the black hole there is no need for dark matter to explain the properties of the black hole, only superdense mass at the centre and the fabric of space itself. So my theory is this, inside the black hole is not a void, but a pocket universe and our universe is one of those. All that missing dark matter, not a problem. Constant tempreture at the universes edge, not a problem, wierdly accellerating constants, not a problem. Only problem, of course, is our universe might have a limited lifespan and, well, it is probably all nonsense.