Looking Into Deep Space & Back In Time. How does it work?
Discussion
If I may, I'd like to address the matters discussed above my last post.
It is matter of the speed of light.
It is a constant and is not violated.
To explain the apparent increase in the speed of far distant groups of galaxies, we need to take the analogy of the balloon a little further.
First, there are distinct bands of red shifted speed of expansion, there are 5 of them.
So, we must think of 6 balloons, each inside the other like Russian dolls.
In the space between each balloon there are Galaxies and each galaxy is expanding within the laws we know here, so the whole structure of the 6 balloons is expanding as a result of the expansion of the little 'balloon' of each galaxy in that layer, light has to pass from the most distant to our detectors.
By way of explanation, the little balloons representing the galaxies are not representative of the mass of the galaxies themselves but their effect in space by din't of the interaction of the fundamental forces.
So although the galaxy itself is expanding at close to the speed of light the effect at the edge of their influence is less.
The combined effect of this 'cellular' expansion within the balloons is to give the impression of things moving at faster than light speed.
The other interesting thing about the distinct bands is that (if I've read Penroses recent paper correctly) is that they could be vestiges of previous BBs.
Now... reading Penrose is fraught with pitfalls and I may have over simplified his principle idea and the paper is quite new and I was not in on it, so I start from just his much earlier vestigial original on this.
It is matter of the speed of light.
It is a constant and is not violated.
To explain the apparent increase in the speed of far distant groups of galaxies, we need to take the analogy of the balloon a little further.
First, there are distinct bands of red shifted speed of expansion, there are 5 of them.
So, we must think of 6 balloons, each inside the other like Russian dolls.
In the space between each balloon there are Galaxies and each galaxy is expanding within the laws we know here, so the whole structure of the 6 balloons is expanding as a result of the expansion of the little 'balloon' of each galaxy in that layer, light has to pass from the most distant to our detectors.
By way of explanation, the little balloons representing the galaxies are not representative of the mass of the galaxies themselves but their effect in space by din't of the interaction of the fundamental forces.
So although the galaxy itself is expanding at close to the speed of light the effect at the edge of their influence is less.
The combined effect of this 'cellular' expansion within the balloons is to give the impression of things moving at faster than light speed.
The other interesting thing about the distinct bands is that (if I've read Penroses recent paper correctly) is that they could be vestiges of previous BBs.
Now... reading Penrose is fraught with pitfalls and I may have over simplified his principle idea and the paper is quite new and I was not in on it, so I start from just his much earlier vestigial original on this.
Throughout human history, we have always had to modify our universe view. In Copernicus' time, and for aeons before, the Earth was the centre of an unchanging Universe. 50 years ago Steady State Theory was the accepted norm. Then came Big Bang, but as we became better at measuring things the inflationary model of Big Bang theory was dreamt up to plug the void so to speak. As I said earlier it's all a bit "make - it - up - as - you - go - along" theory.
Until something simple, pure and truly elegant comes along, I remain sceptical. There'll be something else along next week
Until something simple, pure and truly elegant comes along, I remain sceptical. There'll be something else along next week
ewenm said:
2 things here. Firstly, there was no visible light at the big bang, that comes later as it is generated by fusion reactions in stars so the first generations stars need time to form, so any expansion prior to that won't be "recorded" by light. Secondly, thinking of "expansion" or "inflation" in terms of "stuff moving apart against a static background" is flawed. You need to think of the background and the stuff expanding/inflating (the dots on a balloon analogy).
That said, the "inflationary period" is a theory that fits the observed evidence but it still feels like a fudge to me. Of course, a lot of advanced physics is counter-intuitive and yet demonstrably accurate so a theory "feeling like a fudge" isn't a valid reason to reject it.
You're assuming there was no black body radiation at the big bang? I thought that was near enough settled as the source of the cmb. I.e. due to expansion of the universe this black body light is now redshifted to the point where it is in the microwave part of the spectrum (and that one way we can estimate the size of the universe).That said, the "inflationary period" is a theory that fits the observed evidence but it still feels like a fudge to me. Of course, a lot of advanced physics is counter-intuitive and yet demonstrably accurate so a theory "feeling like a fudge" isn't a valid reason to reject it.
Edited by ewenm on Wednesday 13th June 11:33
Edited by budgie smuggler on Wednesday 13th June 14:11
Edited by budgie smuggler on Wednesday 13th June 14:12
ewenm said:
Would that have been visible light?
Edit: Anyway, Gene V has explained it far better, and helped claify my understanding of it.
My understanding was the photons in the early universe were "trapped" in a sort of high energy "soup" and were only released once things had cooled to a certain point, allowing them to break free? Sort of similar to the how the light we see from the Sun is made of photons that have spent thousands of years migrating to its surface?Edit: Anyway, Gene V has explained it far better, and helped claify my understanding of it.
Edited by ewenm on Wednesday 13th June 16:04
mattnunn said:
Basically God had an idea, then he thought about it for a bit, then when he had all the constants and mathematics sorted it sprung into being
hornet said:
mattnunn said:
Basically God had an idea, then he thought about it for a bit, then when he had all the constants and mathematics sorted it sprung into being
However time as a procession of causality has existed since the first thing 'moved', time is a result of motion or movement and that pre-dates us hugely.
There is only our Cosmos, we can speculate that there are others but that is all it is, speculation.
Plus, for a photon there is no time at all, there is simply space and that is compressed to an instant also, its life, its journey, its entirety is compacted to an instant.
The light form the edge of the Cosmos may have travelled 13.7 billion years to get here as far as we are concerned, but for the photon its just an instant, and the journey that for us is a time beyond literal comprehension in its longevity, is for the photon an equally incomprehensibly small instant in time.
Time is fluid and relativistic, it is not static, it is not a 'thing' as such, time could more easily be seen as a consequence, not an item.
There is no God, there is just existence and we can see that to a photon that is so short as to be very nearly non-existence!
The Cosmos is too wondrous to be dismissed by the moronic 'God did it', that is such a corruption of the true beauty in the complexity and nuance of existence that it's an impoverished viewpoint.
In short if you think having a God to make all this is awesome, then the reality is going to totally f
k your brains out... God comes a very poor second to reality.http://209.160.41.193/Images/Avatars/240.gif
Edited by Gene Vincent on Wednesday 13th June 20:06
I think I've asked similar question as the OP on the internet before too.
I can understand that with expansion/inflation being faster than the speed of light that we can now look back at the original EM wave emissions not long after the big bang.... but why are we told that light speed in not surpassable?
If it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate anything with mass to light speed then I take it this was not the case during the early periods of the universe.
But the thing I still can't get my head around is that when they say with more and more powerful telescopes they can see further and further back in time and can see closer and closer to the big bang origin.....does this mean with a powerful enough telescope yet to be developed that they could in theory see back to the singularity itself (or read that to be the very first EM wave transmission after the big bang) ???
I can understand that with expansion/inflation being faster than the speed of light that we can now look back at the original EM wave emissions not long after the big bang.... but why are we told that light speed in not surpassable?
If it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate anything with mass to light speed then I take it this was not the case during the early periods of the universe.
But the thing I still can't get my head around is that when they say with more and more powerful telescopes they can see further and further back in time and can see closer and closer to the big bang origin.....does this mean with a powerful enough telescope yet to be developed that they could in theory see back to the singularity itself (or read that to be the very first EM wave transmission after the big bang) ???
AJI said:
But the thing I still can't get my head around is that when they say with more and more powerful telescopes they can see further and further back in time and can see closer and closer to the big bang origin.....does this mean with a powerful enough telescope yet to be developed that they could in theory see back to the singularity itself (or read that to be the very first EM wave transmission after the big bang) ???
That's part of my issue with all of this.Back from the Pub quiz... 8th win in a row... murmurrings of discontent.
The more powerful the telescope just adds to the 13.7 billion years... so if we make a super-duper hyper-vision one a century from now it might see 20 billion years and the age increases at the 'front end' of the 'ageing' maths.
So if the inflationary period is unchanged we just add 6.3 billion years to the 50billion.
This is very likely to happen.
Apart from Cosmic Background Detectors no telescope along the lines of a Hubble can look back into the inflationary period.
This is done with pure maths, we can work out what happened in that time by colliding toys like CERNs accelerator, when we smash things at huge velocities with added energies we create some of the conditions that were in the inflationary period, not exactly, but close enough for us to have a 5sigma confidence level as to their accuracy.
We will learn more and although a Hubble can't look in that temporal direction it can see star formation and supernovae in the larger Cosmos now, this also gives us clues as to what exactly happened in the inflationary period, it is nowhere near as cut and dried as the info from CERN but it does often provide a place to start.
The variable in the inflationary period is not likely to be refined for a while yet, we have issues with the maths, most especially in the resolution of the split point and effect of the production of a Higgs-like element.
I don't have much faith in the particle that will inevitably called Higgs as in my opinion it is not the cause for or the vector for the property of mass.
Quantum Field Theory does appear to work but the very absence of a strong Higgs signal is a stumbling block for me, it should be abundant and it's not. Therefore there is an error in the maths of the Field for this interaction.
My stance has been, for more than 15 years, that its absence is as a result of our failure to define Gravity, our belief that gravity is bent spacetime is I feel fundamentally wrong and that gravity is a closer to an effect like time, a genuine 5th dimension with supraluminal interactions and these interactions provide both gravitation and mass.
I'l get off my particular hobby-horse and let you mull over the answer to what you really wanted to know and vexed you.
Cheers
Gene.
The more powerful the telescope just adds to the 13.7 billion years... so if we make a super-duper hyper-vision one a century from now it might see 20 billion years and the age increases at the 'front end' of the 'ageing' maths.
So if the inflationary period is unchanged we just add 6.3 billion years to the 50billion.
This is very likely to happen.
Apart from Cosmic Background Detectors no telescope along the lines of a Hubble can look back into the inflationary period.
This is done with pure maths, we can work out what happened in that time by colliding toys like CERNs accelerator, when we smash things at huge velocities with added energies we create some of the conditions that were in the inflationary period, not exactly, but close enough for us to have a 5sigma confidence level as to their accuracy.
We will learn more and although a Hubble can't look in that temporal direction it can see star formation and supernovae in the larger Cosmos now, this also gives us clues as to what exactly happened in the inflationary period, it is nowhere near as cut and dried as the info from CERN but it does often provide a place to start.
The variable in the inflationary period is not likely to be refined for a while yet, we have issues with the maths, most especially in the resolution of the split point and effect of the production of a Higgs-like element.
I don't have much faith in the particle that will inevitably called Higgs as in my opinion it is not the cause for or the vector for the property of mass.
Quantum Field Theory does appear to work but the very absence of a strong Higgs signal is a stumbling block for me, it should be abundant and it's not. Therefore there is an error in the maths of the Field for this interaction.
My stance has been, for more than 15 years, that its absence is as a result of our failure to define Gravity, our belief that gravity is bent spacetime is I feel fundamentally wrong and that gravity is a closer to an effect like time, a genuine 5th dimension with supraluminal interactions and these interactions provide both gravitation and mass.
I'l get off my particular hobby-horse and let you mull over the answer to what you really wanted to know and vexed you.
Cheers
Gene.
Gene Vincent said:
Blib said:
Oh no. I'm lost again.
30 bn light years away but only 13.3 or 13.4 bn (light) years ago.The difference is due to the period of inflation.
Blib said:
Gene Vincent said:
Blib said:
Oh no. I'm lost again.
30 bn light years away but only 13.3 or 13.4 bn (light) years ago.The difference is due to the period of inflation.
Gene Vincent said:
Plus, for a photon there is no time at all, there is simply space and that is compressed to an instant also, its life, its journey, its entirety is compacted to an instant.
This is the one thing I've always struggled with. I'm sure the equations can prove it, but I just can't get my brain round it. If a photon feels no time, yet we say it has taken 13 billion years to reach us, what exactly has the photon experienced on that journey? Indeed, is it even valid to describe it as a journey in the first place? What does the universe look like from "Johnny Photon's" point of view? Too late to be thinking about this stuff!
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