The Big Bang Theory states there is no single point at which the universe was created. Since at the beginning of space and time there were heavily oscillating waves. The waves then began to expand after the Big Bang. That is why the theory states that since these waves expanded, the oscillation expands, therefore one heavily oscillatiing spatial point, now becomes expanding waves of space. Hense, the universe was created everywhere. At every point on that wave.

The problem is, if you were to circle the point of the oscillation, that is a specific point. As the waves grow, they outgrow the original boundary of the oscillation. But wouldn't that original point of heavy oscillation be some sort of relative point?

That's not how I interperet the meaning of "there is no center to the universe."
If the skin of a baloon were used to represent all spatial dimensions, i.e. the model is missing 2 dimensions, then where is the center? In the nothing of the baloon, not even in the universe...
The big bang happened everywhere at once.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

TravisM wrote
The big bang happened everywhere at once.

Cyrek reply
That everywhere was nothing so I guess you are right that that nothing could be everywhere at once.

By the way, why do you not use the 'raisin bread analogy' which is 3 dimentional rather than the 2 dimentional balloon?

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aka Michael Cyrek

Around 14-15 billion years ago, the entirety of our universe was compressed into the confines of an atomic nucleus. This singularity is the moment before creation when space and time did not exist.

Quantum theory suggests that moments after the explosion at 10 to the minus 43 second, the four forces of nature; strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic and gravity were combined as a single "super force".
During this creation and annihilation of particles the universe was undergoing a rate of expansion many times the speed of light. Known as the inflationary period, the universe in less than one thousandth of a second doubled in size at least one hundred times, from an atomic nucleus to 1035 meters in width.

So, what do you mean by no single poînt? Agree with cyrek1.

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How this compressed "material" came into existence in the first place?

This singularity...
is the moment before the transformation of a pre existing "something"

Do you mean than there was not even space for -something -compressed into the confines of an atomic nucleus?

cyrek:
Travis didn't use the rasin bread analogy because it's really difficult to demonstrate the lack of centre in something which clearly has a centre. He's obviously chosen to assume that the universe has n>4 dimensions. That's not an assumption I personally feel comfortable which at this point in my education, but he's using the proper analogy to demonstrate it.

Star Pilot:
Well, if you assume all of the "something" started out as energy, which doesn't take up volume, per se, then this compression is trivial.

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"Isn't that just...bread?"

I don't think so. I think the theory suggests that everything in the universe was at a single point when the universe was created. So everything WAS at the "center", and still is.
I'm... not following you here.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

That's not really a question you can answer. Not now anyway. It is also essentially irrelevant to the mechanism that drove it to "bang" anyway. We know it was there because we are here, but we don't have to know why it was there to know what happened to it afterwards. That doesn't mean the "why" isn't imporant, it's just not important to the discussion of what happened after.

Thanks UT. I prefer to think of gravity as a manifestation of a physical fourth dimension. It works to explain things in my mind easiest. And, exactly what I was thinking, a rasin bread has an edge, in the pan, in your oven. There's already volume in that bread analogy.
You have to imagine that NOTHING exists except the balloon (..be the balloon ) Air, in the balloon analogy, is nothing, not even volume for things to exist in, and really the spherical shape is just to help with the expansion, it could be any shape.
Now, the 3 dimensional skin of this balloon represents a cross-section of a 4th dimensional sphere (balloons aren't spherical either, but let's try not to talk about the little knotted part... imagine it as spherical.)
For the experiment's sake, let's say we're suppressing the Z dimension, so we have only X and Y across the surface of the balloon, warped through the 'W' dimension, i.e.: positive curvature. A slight depression in the W dimension (such as we would get if we put a penny on the surface of the balloon) could represent the type of distortion gravity might make.
This balloon universe, upon creation, was just a fleck of rubber. This rubber fleck was/is all of the material/energy that will ever be in this universe. As it expanded, it carried energy along for the ride. As energy levels were spread over more volume a threshold was crossed and matter condensed out of this energy into this space...
That our universe appears to have expanded from more of a cube is another story...
[edit to add]
The important part, duh Trav... #-o
The important part remains, no point in space now is any closer to the 'center' than any other point. Every point was the center at one time and still is. Expansion is a term used irresposibly, it's more like, the fabrication of volume, that has everyone's perception twisted on this issue...

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>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

Bigga Wha?

There is another theoretical problem with a sudden expansion of space within nanoseconds from the 'day before there was a yesterday', which surprisingly was not noticed by Lemaitre and company: Since we measure all time from ourselves backwards as we look into space, as distant cosmic light reaches us, means we are on the edge of the Big Bang; then everywhere we look we are looking into its origin, so every point on the 360' sphere at the farthest distance is [towards]* its center. But this creates an irreconcilable paradox: How can we be on the edge of the Big Bang and at the center of the universe, since all points in the universe are its center, at the same time? Anyone, anyone...?

I like this pix of Hoyle's bad boy smirk, he did not believe in BBT either.
Flash, Big Bang, Wallop! What a picture!
:^o

*(in response to later post)

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The words "irreconcilable paradox" have been used since the dawn of science as the precursory statement to all mannor of pseudoscience claims. It's born from the desire to want a nice.. neat.. intuitive explaination for all things. Well I'm sorry but somtimes you just have to wrap your brain around a problem and bear the headaches that come as a consiquence.

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Not a 'pseudscience' claim, but a question of logic. Since when is science exempt from reason? Where is it written that absurd notions are science, and that to question aburdities tosses the question into the trash bin of pseudoscience? Are we back to the 'what is science' question? Why bother to use our minds, when we can invent fantasies and cloak ourselves in wrapping our brains around the irrational?

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That first second was a whopper. Inflation theories are the place to be to deal with the Big Bang problems.


According to mainstream, light could not radiate freely until about 380,000 years ATB. The universe was probably much larger than this in terms of light years at this point in time (recombination). There is no reason to claim we are seeing a "center".

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I know what Lunatik's is saying. In the HUDF (not to bring it up for debate) , we were looking back pretty close to the 'edge of space.' When we do, if we do, see that nothing that would represent the time before stars, then we would be pushing to look beyond that to the surface of last scattering and further still... At some angular resolution at some distance we would see the 'edge' wich would be the "center" back then...
And Lunatik, on paper for fun, start with a point and some where next to it a circle of unit size 1.
If you try to pick an arbitrary location on the point (which represents the infant universe), you're pretty much constrained to it's coordinates, it's edge is the center.
On the circle (which represents the universe after some growth) you could pick any point along its circumference, but only where you drew the circle. That 2D line that arcs around, that is the entire universe. Any point you pick on that circle was the point you drew earlier.
If, of course, that point expanded into the circle on your page... #-o I wish i had graphics on here...
Trav

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Feynman
>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

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?

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"Never say never". We don't fully understand spacetime yet. Particle entanglement seems to defy time and space, for instance.


In the case of "1.", it may make a difference whether or not BB happened. Since you can only see light coming your way, and if the universe were ageless and infinite, you should see light everywhere if the universe had somewhat even distribution of galaxies. You already know about this paradox. [This reminds me of...."if we had some ham we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs". ]

In case "2.", you will see light in the form of microwaves - the CMB. Redshift is a key factor but there are others as well. The evidence favors BB.

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George, this is a very interesting point, about the CMB. Taking it one step further, if we continue to examine the greatest possible distances with progressively longer wavelengths, even beyond the microwave range, what will we see? Since redshift (which may or may not be space-expanding-Doppler related) will continue to stretch wavenlength with distance, it would stand that the further we look the longer will be the necessary wavelength to image anything there. Assuming we have the technological capability to do this, we should either see more galaxies beyond our current viewing threshold, or if BB is true, then we should see nothing. But if we do image beyond the theorized ABT and more and more galaxies show up, no matter how fuzzy, then the whole idea of BB is thrown into doubt. This will be the key experimental evidence for the future to determine whether BBT is true or not. Of course, this would mean we would have to break the 'CMB barrier'. I can't wait!

Cheers, Ivan

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Unfortunately, we have to allow time for that light to reach us. Viewing objects more than 13 or so billion years ago would mean we would have to enter a stargate and go somewhere else to see it ( :wink: ), or wait till it gets here. At some point in our future, the redshift would be so great that the photons would be undetectable. This is speculation on my part as I see redshift as primarily Doppler.

I think it is likely that there are galaxies beyond our light cone. However, I am much better with ice cream cones than light cones.

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This could be one possible solution for Olbers' paradox also in a static universe, couldn't it? If we assume static universe with cosmological redshift mechanism (and I think that in a static universe there should be a cosmological redshift component because we do seem to have redshift distance relation at least for small distances), then the very far away objects would be so redshifted that they would be, as you say, undetectable. The distance to the undetected photons would be huge of course, so the density of the universe between us and undetectable photons limit would determine how bad paradox we would have in our hands (and elsewhere in our skin).

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I suppose it would depend on the cause of the redshift. But if we are assuming some sort of Hubble constant for a static universe, shouldn't we have already seen &lt;2.7K microwaves objects? I suppose you could also send out a light-weight infrared sensor at some %c to blueshift the redshift to make it readable, thereby, testing your idea.

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Good question. Could it be that 2.7K is so dominant that we are not yet able to separate those lower temperature objects from the data? Of course in that case we would have to be able to explain why there is a dominant peak at 2.7K.

Would it work? I'm just wondering if there could be a distance limit where photons just vanish.

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I don't suspect this to be so. Considering the number of decimal places of instrument precision (is it 4?) in WMAP, why wouldn't they be able to see light at a little less energy?

An explanation is required for the "dominant peak" at 2.7K. Does Static Theory have one? (What I know, I've learned from mainly you )

Why not? [Not that it would not prove expansion, however.] The velocity of the photon sensor would introduce a simple Doppler effect (blueshift). This would register a higher energy level for the photon.

I suspect a "velocity limit" is what you are implying and, yes, I would think a photon would reach a point where we can't register it in any way. It's a good question, too. From the point of view of the photon, it might see us be the ones disolving.

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I just realized I am thinking like an engineer and not a particle physicsts. Given redshifted light from a body, I would think they could accelarate particles into the stream (blueshift) and observe the reaction. This has already been done in a sense. For instance, light was found to redshift due to gravity in an experient to test GR involving a crystal and a tall building (you probably know of it).

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George, Ari, very good points. The CMB threshold seems to be at about 2.7 Kelvin, which is pretty close to zero K, so it may be difficult to break that CMB barrier with optical or microwave telescopes, though we might get through there with longer waved radio telescopes? I like the idea of accelerating to some velocity of c, so that all incoming light or em wavelengths would blueshift, so perhaps would become better visible. If we had the technology to do this, as we now do not since chemical propelled rockets do not have that capability; perhaps some sort of gravity drive with continuous powerful acceleration might do it, for example; then we would theoretically open a wider window on the universe, one where we could look beyond its currently visible boundaries. However, this raises another possibility, that once we get to, let's say, 50% of c, the universe now visible to us extends beyond the current margins. The question that comes to mind is this: At 50% of c, did we just enter another universe, or another dimension within this one, so that what opens for us is a kind of relativistic version of space otherwise closed to us? Interesting idea, and if so, then what happens to the CMB at 2.7K threshold? Does CMB rise in temp above the 2.7K, for example? And if we do get there, and we see lots of new stars and galaxies all fully formed, past the horizon of the currently visible universe, and even past the theoretical BB's ABT point, what happens to BBT? My guess is that it has to be reconfigured all over again. Of course, if it never happened in the first place, meaning redshift is non-space-expanding-Doppler, what does this do to String Theory? It too may have to get reconfigured. Like I said before, can't wait to get there!

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One thing we have to remember is that there is a limit how far we can see. We are surrounded by galaxies, so in a certain distance all of our line of sights are covered by galaxies (or surfaces of stars, does this sound familiar? ) and we can't see further. So those below 2.7K objects might be behind this barrier.

If we look far enough we encounter following limits:

A: Star coverage limit - Explained above.

B: Black hole coverage limit - We are also surrounded by black holes, which are notoriously good radiation blockers.

C: Undetectable photons limit - Photons coming from further than this distance are redshifted beyond our detection abilities.

D: Vanished photons limit - Hypothetical limit I suggested earlier. Photons are redshifted so much that they have vanished and can't be detected by any means.

Question is, which limit we encounter first when we look far away?

- If it is limit A (and still assuming static universe) then we have Olbers' paradox.

- If it is limit B then we have quite good situation; no Olbers' paradox, we don't expect to see objects redshifted &lt;2.7K, but we still need to explain CMBR. Black holes emit Hawking radiation which is said to be black body radiation, so maybe CMBR is just Hawking radiation from our black hole cover.

- If it is limit C then we can use George's redshift cancellation apparatus and probe little further to see what limit comes up next.

- If it is limit D then the situation looks quite similar to limit B's case, but we need to come up with CMBR explanation.


You're right, we would be able to see that. One thing further, when they measure CMBR they carefully filter out all the radiation coming from ordinary matter, so would this filtering block out also &lt;2.7K objects?

Probably not since that peak is just our speculation here, but maybe you mean explanation for CMBR? They usually claim that they have that explanation. For tired light models the explanation generally seems to be related to redshifting mechanism; during it's journey the light loses it's energy (redshifts) by particle interactions so that the lost energy transforms to lower energy photons which we then see as CMBR. I don't remember how Arp's model explains CMBR.

Maybe you should consider using better sources of reference.

I was relating that "would it work" question to my pondering of vanishing photons, so I do think that your suggestion works, but as usual, I expressed myself poorly.

No, I don't know about that. But you probably are not talking about Galileo Galilei, I don't think it was crystals he was dropping from Pisa's tower. :wink:

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Looking beyond the CMB would be like trying to read the name on a camera at the instant it's flashbulb goes off at you. Assuming BBT is valid, the "flash" at recombination (when light was unleashed) happened simultaneously due to the isotropy conditions. I believe the temp. was around 3000K which peaks in the orange. [I doubt it would have actually looked orange but I kinda like the "orange flash" phrase anyway. And why not, we call the sun a yellow star, but that's another thread ]


Due to the limiting "flash" which is now the CMBR, it wouldn't make any sense to spend the money for that purpose. See how important cosmologists are (otherwise they might have).

Choose your vector wisely, what you gain one way you loose the other. Regardless, there may be regions that we are receding from us at c or beyond, so these may not be observable even with a 99%c ship. (Getting the news back to Earth presents another issue of time) [/quote]

I doubt String Theory is dependent on Doppler. Brian Greene explains redshift as "akin" to Doppler in his "Fabric of the Cosmos".

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A - Olber's Paradox is unstudied by me. I figure one good cloud becomes a "monkey wrench" in the idea.

B - Black holes are much less numerous and stars are in front of nearly all of them. They also lens to reveal objects behind them.

C - Light beyond the CMBR would be hard pressed to be strong enough to be visible to us as the CMBR is nearly a perfect blackbody radiator. Therefore, it does have intensities on either side of the 2.73K level. It would be like observing the heavens at noon time. Of course, we do see the moon but nothing behind the CMB (which supports BB Theory, IMO).

D - I'm not so sure. I think Lunatik is ready to blast off for that experiment.

[see "C" above]

Tired Light theory has been shown to be invalid as it relates to BB redshifting. There are a threads here and sites on this, or see Cougar.

I still want to learn more mainstream first. And, I feel more comfortable with players of stringed instruments. :-({|=

. True. But they were both testing the influences of gravity. [However, it is debatable that he actually dropped anything from Pisa. I think people confussed his message to drop his pizza order and... :wink: ]

A certain crystal will react to a very very specific light wavelength. By shinning light into it from above, any blueshift due to gravity would be detectable even over a short elevation. This was done and it is in accordance with GR.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

Then you should read Edward Harrison's "Darkness at Night". It's a very good book, and it's mainstream book too, so you don't have to be afraid of becoming infected by any wacky ATM thoughts.

Possibly. It certainly looks that way, but we don't know it for sure. If I would have to quess, I'd say the actual limit would be a combination of A and B.

Do they lense more energy than they suck in?

This depends on the cause of CMBR, doesn't it? I mean that in static universe case it could turn out to be just some kind of local radiation (I'm not suggesting this, just speculating). I was suggesting these limits from static universe point of view. If we would look at this from BB point of view, there would be two more limits; the 13.7 billion year limit and the CMBR limit.

I would say there's strong arguments against it, but yes, you might be correct. I just tried to offer you some info on CMBR mechanisms of static models, but that was the only one I remembered. And for the record, there currently is no specific model that I believe.

Today ATM, tomorrow...

Ok, next they should do lab experiment on space expansion and it's effect to the wavelength of light.

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