qwe
Bluelight Crew
you need to clarify what you mean by nothing in order to make this menaingfulErnestrome said:
Does anyone have a problem with he Big Bang "Theory"?
- Thread starter NoExpert
- Start date
Ernestrome said:
Who said there was nothing or were no things before the big bang?
I didn't make that claim and as I understand it, neither does the Big Bang Theory.
I was merely playing around with some formal logic in relation to what you said here:
Ernestrome said:
Mr. White
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socko said:
Almost every discovery/theory will raise more questions than answers.
Think of all knowledge as an infinite 3d space (given that there are an infinite amount of knowledge to be learned), now put a sphere in this space. Everything inside the sphere represents things we know now, everything outside represents things we dont know and the edges of this sphere are questions we have, linking our current knowledge with what we wish to learn (the unknown outside of the sphere). As each question on the surface of the sphere is answered the sphere expands, encasulating this new knowledge. As the sphere expands, its surface increases, more questions are raised.
I hope that makes sense, its kinda hard to explain
qwe
Bluelight Crew
that view of knowledge actually raises a concern for futurists...
futurists say that our knowledge has been and will always increase exponentially, accelerating faster and faster
but if every answered question raises even more questions, lets apply that to the analogy of the cell:
if it expands too big, the volume is too much compared to surface area, and diffusion cannot take place efficiently. if its too small, the surface area is too little to allow enough stuff to diffuse in. so the cell grows in an S shaped curve, reaching a stable radius
what if the more we learn, the more questions we have... so the increase in knowledge also follows an S shaped curve, rather than a limitless exponential curve? aka, at some point, the questions will outnumber the answers 10^10^10 to 1, and it'll be impossible to progress significantly, there will be a point where we will stagnate and knowledge increase will lessen and lessen, because the more we learn hte less certain and more confused we get
so... does our increase in technology and knowledge and information follow a similar pattern as the cell and other S curves related to surface area? (i doubt it, but it's possible i suppose. it would really bum out all us futurists waiting for life extension technology, though. we thought our 100,000 year lives were gonna be full of awesome advancements in human civilization!)
it would explain why no civilizations have contacted us. perhaps they are there, but for their particular species (the ones near us), they don't even get to reach the ability to send radio waves to other stars, and our intelligence in us sentient beings is rather rare (and, we wont get that much more intelligent if the above is correct)
---
i still like the exponential model, though. more answers, more foundation to build on. more questions/uncertainty, more fields/researchers employed (pretty soon we'll be able to 'program' researchers (aka, computers as smart as us doing the work... they create even smarter compuers... and so on), enabling an insane increase in knowledge per time: exponential growth)
futurists say that our knowledge has been and will always increase exponentially, accelerating faster and faster
but if every answered question raises even more questions, lets apply that to the analogy of the cell:
if it expands too big, the volume is too much compared to surface area, and diffusion cannot take place efficiently. if its too small, the surface area is too little to allow enough stuff to diffuse in. so the cell grows in an S shaped curve, reaching a stable radius
what if the more we learn, the more questions we have... so the increase in knowledge also follows an S shaped curve, rather than a limitless exponential curve? aka, at some point, the questions will outnumber the answers 10^10^10 to 1, and it'll be impossible to progress significantly, there will be a point where we will stagnate and knowledge increase will lessen and lessen, because the more we learn hte less certain and more confused we get
so... does our increase in technology and knowledge and information follow a similar pattern as the cell and other S curves related to surface area? (i doubt it, but it's possible i suppose. it would really bum out all us futurists waiting for life extension technology, though. we thought our 100,000 year lives were gonna be full of awesome advancements in human civilization!)
it would explain why no civilizations have contacted us. perhaps they are there, but for their particular species (the ones near us), they don't even get to reach the ability to send radio waves to other stars, and our intelligence in us sentient beings is rather rare (and, we wont get that much more intelligent if the above is correct)
---
i still like the exponential model, though. more answers, more foundation to build on. more questions/uncertainty, more fields/researchers employed (pretty soon we'll be able to 'program' researchers (aka, computers as smart as us doing the work... they create even smarter compuers... and so on), enabling an insane increase in knowledge per time: exponential growth)
Last edited:
that does make sense. now think of this. consider that the sphere can expand infinitely. that means that the knowledge inside the sphere can expand infinitely also.Mr. White said:
but it's bounded by the sphere so it's finite, right? it's finite and infinite at the same time
alasdair
qwe
Bluelight Crew
finite at any given time. infinite if treated as its total journey through time
i wonder if there will be a point where the very nature of what we are made of and what we live on (some 3d brane) will impede us from progressing further, like a room with no door or other out. EG, we find out that it is technically impossible to get off of our brane and impossible to move our sentient awareness to another physical medium
i wonder if there will be a point where the very nature of what we are made of and what we live on (some 3d brane) will impede us from progressing further, like a room with no door or other out. EG, we find out that it is technically impossible to get off of our brane and impossible to move our sentient awareness to another physical medium
Depersonalized
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What happened before the big bang?
ChemicalOne
Bluelighter
I just wanna say this all makes my brain hurt, but in a good way. 
I'm honestly in awe of the way certain people think.
I'm honestly in awe of the way certain people think.
panic_the_digital
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- 1,174
Reminds me of an article I read earlier today.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26857495/
Mysterious ‘dark flow’ discovered in space
Stuff pulling on matter believed to be outside the observable universe
NASA/STScI/Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.
The galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 (known as the Bullet Cluster) lies 3.8 billion light-years away. It's one of hundreds that appear to be carried along by a mysterious cosmic flow.
View related photos
Space.com
Top 10 strangest things in space
Miniature black holes? Gobbling galaxies? Check out 10 space oddities.
By Clara Moskowitz
updated 2:55 p.m. CT, Tues., Sept. 23, 2008
As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered.
Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."
The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.
Story continues below ↓
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
advertisement
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When scientists talk about the observable universe, they don't just mean as far out as the eye, or even the most powerful telescope, can see. In fact there's a fundamental limit to how much of the universe we could ever observe, no matter how advanced our visual instruments. The universe is thought to have formed about 13.7 billion years ago. So even if light started travelling toward us immediately after the Big Bang, the farthest it could ever get is 13.7 billion light-years in distance. There may be parts of the universe that are farther away (we can't know how big the whole universe is), but we can't see farther than light could travel over the entire age of the universe.
Mysterious motions
Scientists discovered the flow by studying some of the largest structures in the cosmos: giant clusters of galaxies. These clusters are conglomerations of about a thousand galaxies, as well as very hot gas which emits X-rays. By observing the interaction of the X-rays with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is leftover radiation from the Big Bang, scientists can study the movement of clusters.
The X-rays scatter photons in the CMB, shifting its temperature in an effect known as the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. This effect had not been observed as a result of galaxy clusters before, but a team of researchers led by Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., found it when they studied a huge catalogue of 700 clusters, reaching out up to 6 billion light-years, or half the universe away. They compared this catalogue to the map of the CMB taken by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite.
They discovered that the clusters were moving nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph) toward a region in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. This motion is different from the outward expansion of the universe (which is accelerated by the force called dark energy).
"We found a very significant velocity, and furthermore, this velocity does not decrease with distance, as far as we can measure," Kashlinsky told SPACE.com. "The matter in the observable universe just cannot produce the flow we measure."
Inflationary bubble
The scientists deduced that whatever is driving the movements of the clusters must lie beyond the known universe.
A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see.
In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.
"The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation, I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away, that we cannot see even with the deepest telescopes because the light emitted there could not have reached us in the age of the universe," Kashlinsky said in a telephone interview. "Most likely to create such a coherent flow they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe some warped space time. But this is just pure speculation."
Surprising find
Though inflation theory forecasts many odd facets of the distant universe, not many scientists predicted the dark flow.
Click for related content
Sun may be galactic hitchhiker
Satellite spots farthest-out blast
Navigating by the stars
"It was greatly surprising to us and I suspect to everyone else," Kashlinsky said. "For some particular models of inflation you would expect these kinds of structures, and there were some suggestions in the literature that were not taken seriously I think until now."
The discovery could help scientists probe what happened to the universe before inflation, and what's going on in those inaccessible realms we cannot see.
The researchers detail their findings in the Oct. 20 issue of the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
© 2007 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26857495/
Mysterious ‘dark flow’ discovered in space
Stuff pulling on matter believed to be outside the observable universe
NASA/STScI/Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.
The galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 (known as the Bullet Cluster) lies 3.8 billion light-years away. It's one of hundreds that appear to be carried along by a mysterious cosmic flow.
View related photos
Space.com
Top 10 strangest things in space
Miniature black holes? Gobbling galaxies? Check out 10 space oddities.
By Clara Moskowitz
updated 2:55 p.m. CT, Tues., Sept. 23, 2008
As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered.
Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."
The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.
Story continues below ↓
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
advertisement
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When scientists talk about the observable universe, they don't just mean as far out as the eye, or even the most powerful telescope, can see. In fact there's a fundamental limit to how much of the universe we could ever observe, no matter how advanced our visual instruments. The universe is thought to have formed about 13.7 billion years ago. So even if light started travelling toward us immediately after the Big Bang, the farthest it could ever get is 13.7 billion light-years in distance. There may be parts of the universe that are farther away (we can't know how big the whole universe is), but we can't see farther than light could travel over the entire age of the universe.
Mysterious motions
Scientists discovered the flow by studying some of the largest structures in the cosmos: giant clusters of galaxies. These clusters are conglomerations of about a thousand galaxies, as well as very hot gas which emits X-rays. By observing the interaction of the X-rays with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is leftover radiation from the Big Bang, scientists can study the movement of clusters.
The X-rays scatter photons in the CMB, shifting its temperature in an effect known as the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. This effect had not been observed as a result of galaxy clusters before, but a team of researchers led by Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., found it when they studied a huge catalogue of 700 clusters, reaching out up to 6 billion light-years, or half the universe away. They compared this catalogue to the map of the CMB taken by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite.
They discovered that the clusters were moving nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph) toward a region in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. This motion is different from the outward expansion of the universe (which is accelerated by the force called dark energy).
"We found a very significant velocity, and furthermore, this velocity does not decrease with distance, as far as we can measure," Kashlinsky told SPACE.com. "The matter in the observable universe just cannot produce the flow we measure."
Inflationary bubble
The scientists deduced that whatever is driving the movements of the clusters must lie beyond the known universe.
A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see.
In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.
"The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation, I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away, that we cannot see even with the deepest telescopes because the light emitted there could not have reached us in the age of the universe," Kashlinsky said in a telephone interview. "Most likely to create such a coherent flow they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe some warped space time. But this is just pure speculation."
Surprising find
Though inflation theory forecasts many odd facets of the distant universe, not many scientists predicted the dark flow.
Click for related content
Sun may be galactic hitchhiker
Satellite spots farthest-out blast
Navigating by the stars
"It was greatly surprising to us and I suspect to everyone else," Kashlinsky said. "For some particular models of inflation you would expect these kinds of structures, and there were some suggestions in the literature that were not taken seriously I think until now."
The discovery could help scientists probe what happened to the universe before inflation, and what's going on in those inaccessible realms we cannot see.
The researchers detail their findings in the Oct. 20 issue of the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
© 2007 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.
Beenhead
Bluelight Crew
This has always bothered me.
If the big bang was the beginning of the universe it makes perfect sense you could not see more than 13.7 light years. But, how fast did/does space expand? If we can see something that happened 13.7 billion years ago does this imply that space expanded than light moved through it? Space/Time must be expanding faster than light for us to be seeing something that happened 12billion years ago right?
If the big bang was the beginning of the universe it makes perfect sense you could not see more than 13.7 light years. But, how fast did/does space expand? If we can see something that happened 13.7 billion years ago does this imply that space expanded than light moved through it? Space/Time must be expanding faster than light for us to be seeing something that happened 12billion years ago right?
panic_the_digital
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- Feb 28, 2006
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^Yep.
vegan
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- Feb 13, 2003
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- 6,398
who told you
if he has more scoops, i want his phone number
"space is expanding" and "there is no space after the last bit of matter" are 2 very different ideas
the first one is "proven"
the second one is not
"nothing" is not "space"
there could be nothing within space, or no space at all
it would be different
we don't know which one is true
space could as well be curled onto itself
very fast
which means that at the time passes, the less far we wil be able to see in the universe
qwe
Bluelight Crew
Beenhead said:
the space between galaxies is indeed expanding faster than the speed of light
this is no contradiction with the speed of light as a speed limit. first, space is not composed of normal particles like electrons and quarks which are bound by the speed limit. but even if spatial expansion was limited by c, consider the following:
each point in space expands at a rate
then, while any part of space would be expanding less than the speed of light, a line from one galaxy to another could still expand greater than the speed of light because of the combined effect of all the space points expanding
see: things that travel faster than light, a section in the wikipedia article "speed of light"
wikipedia said:
qwe
Bluelight Crew
as for how fast space expands, it depends on the distance between the two objects doesnt it?
space is not expanding in your body, or if it is, the interaction forces between the molecules in your body keep yourself together despite its effect
space between planet and star may be expanding a tiny bit, its effect mostly canceled by gravity
space between galaxies expands quite a bit, though
---
im not entirely sure about my answer, zorn get in here
space is not expanding in your body, or if it is, the interaction forces between the molecules in your body keep yourself together despite its effect
space between planet and star may be expanding a tiny bit, its effect mostly canceled by gravity
space between galaxies expands quite a bit, though
---
im not entirely sure about my answer, zorn get in here
Beenhead
Bluelight Crew
Wow, that was very helpful, as it fell right into how I think about things. For instance If I am meeting someone on the interstate, I am goin 80mph towards them and them 80mph towards me. We are approaching each other at 160mph. Whos not to say that additive property cant go over c. Thanks