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Originally Posted by George
Try this...
Pick out a random hydrogen atom in your body. Mentally, go back in time to around 380,000 yrs. ATB and find that atom. Draw a circle around this point about 13.2 billion lyrs. in radius. Now draw a huge circle with a random center where your first circle is enclosed within the larger.
The smaller circle perimeter, with your hydrogen atom center, represents the region we are now observing we call the CMB. It has taken this light this long to reach us and from all directions (as the circle is really a sphere).
The center of the larger circle is erroneous as there is no center but it helps establish the bigger picture, I think.
Is this a fair representation?
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Yeah, I think you and TravisM pretty much see how it is. What concerns me most is that there is no way to see the universe in any direction within these spheres of space that is outside of us being on the tail end. What I mean is that we can only see into the past, but not sidelaterally into the present. This means we are forever stuck looking backwards in time as we gaze into space, which puts us of necessity on the tail end, or the edge, of the universe's expansion.
Now, this does not have to be this way, because if there was no BB and space is not expanding, then we are merely looking at the universe as it is, except that everything we see is old, since time is defined by lightspeed c, thus it takes time for c to get to us. If I took an arc of space, say 20', in any direction, along that expanding cone of space I would be looking back through time until I got back to one of two things: 1. either the light fades out so it is no longer visible, though the 20' arc now covers a very wide area, whether or not BB happened; or 2. there are no more stars and galaxies because they had not yet come into existence, since 380,000 ATB, so that BB did happen. For now, we cannot answer with certainty which it is, though I have my issues with the latter.
The issue is primarily a philosophical one, that the 'tail end' is also the 'center' of the universe, at the same time, since all points in the universe are considered to be its center. This is the paradox. And here is the difficulty with that: within the universe we see, we cannot possibly know which 20' arc area covering the limit of visibility, the outer area of what we see, is the location where the BB happened. Did it happen on the north side, or the south? Are the galaxies seen in one 20' arc the same as the galaxies seen in the opposite 180' direction? Now for the killer paradox: If we proceed with this reasoning further, so that per BB we are actually 'seeing' the very beginning of the universe's creation, though it is now dark, which 20' arc is that point of space where it all began? Is it north of south, or...? Not easy, but it cannot be 'all of the above'!
Now you see why I refuse to wrap myself in a cloak of counterintuitiveness to accept what appears to be a BB. [-( Perhaps it is not what it appears to be, so that BB is not science, but a strange kind of 'pseudoscience' instead?