I notice you apparently simply dropped the argument about measuring the size of the galaxy with a light beam.
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Originally Posted by brodix
I'm not claiming expertise. In fact, I'd happily qualify as making up stories, if they, at the very least, help me to better understand what's going on.
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If you base these stories on known physics, no problem. If you simply make up stories which strongly contradict known physics, big problem.
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Originally Posted by brodix
When I first started reading physics, thirty years ago, I had no further expectation. The idea which started me on this concept was a point Hawking made in his book, A Brief History of Time, that for the universe to be as stable as it is, Omega had to be very close to 1. Being a simple-minded sort, I immediately thought a convective cycle(rising heat/collapsing cold) would explain that relationship far more neatly then the anthropic principle.
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And again, I can't follow you at all. How on earth should such a cycle explain the stability of the universe? How did you arrive at that idea?
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Originally Posted by brodix
Given the level of the popsci I was reading at the time, the idea which first occurred to me was that mass and the space it defined were being drawn into black holes, into another dimension and re-emerging as vacuum fluctuation.
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What is "drawn into another dimension" supposed to mean?
And where did you get the idea from that space can be "drawn into black holes"?
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Originally Posted by brodix
This way, the expansion was integral to the space
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What has the stuff above about mass and matter being drawn into black holes and then re-emerging to do with expansion??? And in what way is this "integral to the space"?
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Originally Posted by brodix
and not simply that everything was flying apart from a singularity.
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This sounds like as if you have fallen for a very common misunderstanding of the Big Bang theory: that the Big Bang happened at a single point, and everything flows away from that point. But the theory doesn't say that.
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Originally Posted by brodix
I'm almost surprised at the number of occasions I've witnessed amateurs suggest some version of balanced relationship between this expansion of space and the contraction of gravity.
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Sorry, I still don't understand what this is supposed to mean.
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Originally Posted by brodix
I thought a flat or open universe simply meant that it wouldn't contract back to a point?
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It also implies infinite volume (well, for the simplest possible topology). And obviously also that it never came from a point.
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Originally Posted by brodix
If expansion is a property which is balanced by gravity
and assuming all gravitational effect is currently in effect, it presumably would neutralize the expansion of space, so that the universe as a whole isn't getting any bigger, because these two effects cancel one another.
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Essentially you are saying that a force and a velocity cancel each other (if I understand you correctly). That does not make sense.
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Originally Posted by brodix
Pardon my ignorance, but could you give a thumbnail?
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What you described is (roughly) right for a spherically symmetric (around one single point), static spacetime. But the universe is not static and also not spherically symmetric (not around one single point - one could say it is spherically symmetric around
every point), but dynamic, homogeneous and isotropic. Two quite different types of spacetime (although the first can be embedded in the second). Hence what you described simply does not apply to the universe as a whole.
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Originally Posted by brodix
Obviously, or there would be no BBT. The idea is whether radiation/light is actually the source of the cosmological constant. I don't see it as disproving Einstein, but rather tying a couple of the loose ends to each other.
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But the effects of radiation have been "tied into" the BBT essentially right from the start (suggestion: before coming up with an "alternative idea", first look up if scientists haven't already thought of that decades ago!). What effects radiation has on the development of the universe is very well understood. And accelerating the expansion definitely isn't one of its properties - like mass, it slows down the expansion!
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Originally Posted by brodix
Yes, but first you have to figure out what causes it [cosmological constant], before you can really figure out what it does.
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I beg to differ. By doing measurements and using some general properties, we can indeed figure out "what it does", without knowing what causes it. Knowing that would probably help in figuring that out and perhaps lead to new insights - but this knowledge is not
required for finding out its basic effects.
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Originally Posted by brodix
I'm trying to tie the concept of convection to this larger process. In fact, convection would be an aspect of this larger process. Matter cools and falls until it does it heats up and rises.
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In some systems, yes. But convection is by far not a universal process which would occur everywhere.
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Originally Posted by brodix
In the convection cycle, this energy would then cool down and fall back to earth.
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What does it mean to say that "energy cools down"?
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Originally Posted by brodix
What would be the comparable aspect of the cosmic process? The light, having been redshifted off the chart.....
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What's this supposed to mean?
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Originally Posted by brodix
to the mass which starts condensing out of the most ethereal intergalactic gases to eventually falling into the galactic vortex..... (story making any sense?)
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You could start making sense by presenting evidence that such a "condensing of mass" is possible.
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Originally Posted by brodix
In a cycle, like a wheel, one side tends to be the same diameter as the other.
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Yes, but why should there be a cycle? What should cause the cycle to come into existence and remain stable?
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Originally Posted by brodix
IF it is space that is expanding lightwaves and not the galaxies flying apart,
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Well, that's roughly what the Big Bang theory says: lightwaves expands because they travel through expanding space. Again, I suggest that you first look up what scientists actually say before coming up with "new" ideas.
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Originally Posted by brodix
then the reason the furtherest galaxies appear to be receding at the speed of light
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Err, they don't. In fact, they appear to recede at velocites far greater than light. That's possible since we aren't talking about "real" velocities here, but about apparent velocities which are due to the expansion of space. Read e. g. this:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/co...y_faq.html#FTL
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Originally Posted by brodix
is because the light from them has crossed the most space and the effect is compounded, so that the further light travels, the greater the multipler effect, thus the faster the source appears to be receding, NOT because these galaxies are traveling fastest because they are at the dawn of the universe and everything has been slowing down since then.
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Your explanation isn't that far from the usual Big Bang explanation. Again, I suggest you look it up. Try e. g. this:
http://www.astronomycafe.net/cosm/expan.html
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Originally Posted by brodix
The additional expansion for which dark energy was proposed and has recently been shown to compare to the cosmological constant,
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(1) Calling this an "additional expansion" is quite strange wording. The term one should use is "accelerating expansion".
(2) This has not "recently" been shown to "compare" to the cosmological constant. It has been clear right from the start that a cosmological constant can explain these observations.
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Originally Posted by brodix
means that something is augmenting the presumably slowing expansion, such that the space itself appears to be expanding.
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The expansion has been described as "space itself is expanding" already decades before the discovery of accelerated expansion. The observed acceleration has nothing to do with that.
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Originally Posted by brodix
If it is a lensing effect
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I already pointed out that lensing has nothing to do with redshift.
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Originally Posted by brodix
and not the galaxies actually flying apart from one another, then you don't need the massive amount of energy required to actually be pushing them apart.
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Wrong. When space itself expands, it nevertheless has to "overcome" the "gravitational attraction" between the galaxies (for illustrative purposes, I'm using a mixture of Newtonian physics and GR here; describing this entirely in terms of GR is more confusing than enlightening).
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Originally Posted by brodix
Would you have a link to the study of active black holes? It sounds interesting.
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There are lots of studies on active galactic nuclei (which are active because they contain active black holes). I just went to arxiv.org and searched for the term "active galactic nuclei" in the abstracts of the astrophysics section. Result: more than 1000 papers! ("active black hole" brought only 10 papers) However, these are scientific papers, submitted to very specialized journals, and hence not comprehensible to a layman with knowledge of only popular-level science.
I don't know about articles in the popular scientific press, sorry. But a quick Google search brought up these pages, which look quite interesting:
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/sc..._galaxies.html
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/sc..._galaxies.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_galaxy
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Originally Posted by brodix
Part of the reason Inflation theory was proposed was to explain how the CMBR would be so even, at 2.7k, across the universe, when this would require information traveling faster then the speed of light. Possibly this level(2.7k) is due to a natural phase transition, such as the density above which some effect causes the radiation to start condensing into elemental mass.
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That would imply that everywhere where we have radiation of a lower temperature, mass should appear spontaneously, right? But physicists have already done quite a lot of experiments at lower temperatures (leading e. g. to Bose-Einstein-condensates). And the matter used in the experiments emitted radiation, AFAIK, which would have been then at temperatures lower than 2.7 K (if it was in thermal equilibrium with the matter - I don't know that for sure). No mass was ever observed to appear spontaneously in these experiments.
BTW, what about conservation of energy? Radiation of low temperature "consists" of photons of low energy. At 2.7 K, the energy of the photons is very probably even below the rest energy of the neutrinos, the lightest known particles. So what particles do you propose "condense" there?
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Originally Posted by brodix
Stories came long before the math. No story, no math.
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I beg to differ. Most of modern physics works quite well without stories, and it was even only possible to come up with it when it was realized that not everything can be described with nice stories.
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Originally Posted by brodix
Quantum theorists have this notion that it's only the math that makes sense. It only means the story lays beyond their comprehension and they only see the highlights.
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And you know this how, precisely?
I
heavily recommend Feynman's book "The Character of Physical Law" to you. Especially chapter 2, about the relation between math and physics, and chapter 7, about the search for new laws of nature.