Thanks again Sam. Maybe you can give me one laugh per day?

__________________
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Well, look, do you know of any real scientific explanation for this “space is expanding” business?

And I mean some real scientific papers about it. Like where does the new space come from or how does the old space stretch? How come the space just “expands” where the scientists need it to expand to keep the galaxies from “moving” faster than “c” relative to the earth, but it doesn’t expand here locally?

I’m getting tired of being conned about this. I want to see some real science papers about it, and some common-sense explanations. I don’t want to hear, “’cause Einstein said so”, or “dat’s relativity!”, or “just ‘cause”, or “it’s just one of the mysteries of nature,” or any other baloney like that. It’s time for them to put up or shut up.

Not for an observational result it isn't. Those can sit around for thousands of years before someone comes up with a satisfying explanation for the data.
Look at how long it took us to figure out that the sun's warmth comes from nuclear fusion.
Hubble's correlation between distance and velocity only goes back to the late 1920's. The cosmologists will be doing great if they can come up with an explanation better than vague hand waving about colliding branes and extradimensional leakage anytime in the next five or six centuries.

I AM in The General Public, thank you very much.

How about I just show you the Example my Professor gave us in Science Class Last Year.

Notice, each point moves away from its neighbour at the same rate, however, the further away a point is, the Faster it Appears to Move.

__________________
If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

Excellent. What you’ve described is the basic mathematics of the separation of particles in an explosion, with the particles moving apart in all directions in a spherical manner from a Euclidean center. Their start speed is the same as their end speed in your diagram, if you go with this sequence 1:3, 2:6, 3:9, 4:12, 5:15, 6:18, 7:21, 8:24. And I don’t think your professor has any justification to go in an accelerated sequence. The Hubble expansion has different speeds at different distances but not acceleration. You have not shown any “expansion of space”. You’ve shown the movement of galaxies “through” space. This expands the “spatial distance” between the galaxies by means of the movement of the galaxies through space, but it does not “stretch space” or “add any new space” to the space in-between the galaxies.

This is what you’ve described in your chart, but without the acceleration, and this represents the basic Hubble expansion:

Hey Sam, how do you explain space expanding? Cause you keep asking everyone else, but I want to know if you have an answer yourself.

The “expanding space” story is phony as the “tooth fairy” story. It was invented only as an attempt to salvage Einstein’s 1905 “speed limit”.

The galaxies appear to be MOVING THROUGH SPACE, just the same as they appeared to be doing before the high-c galaxies were discovered. The same as they did in the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s.

The “speed limit” of Lorentz, which is now attributed to Einstein, most likely applies to masses moving through strong gravitational and other fields. It most likely does not apply to large galaxies that are moving through empty space and are separating from each other and are not moving through any fields.

I don't know if a "projectile force" started the motion or some kind of "sucking" force or if some kind of outer "vacuum force" is pulling them, but "space" is not "expanding".

And yet, there is no known center as found in a simple explosion. So once again we should refer the illustration page from astronomer Ned Wright.

We don’ t know of any “center” because we can’t see any “outer limits”. We are somewhere inside the universe, and it’s really big. In order to tell in which direction is the center, if there is one, we must be able to see the outer edge or “boundary”, if there is one.

It’s similar to the way astronomers finally discovered the location of the center of our galaxy. They had to do a lot of calculations regarding the apparent and proper motion of many stars. This is how they discovered that we live inside a galaxy, that it has a center, that it is spiral in shape, and that it is rotating.

To say that our universe does “not” have a center, simply because we don’t know where it is, would be like a 16th Century astronomer saying that we live inside a “circular universe” because they see the Milky Way loop around the earth. Herschel thought we were in the center of a “ring shaped” universe. That’s because he didn’t know about the motions of the stars, and he didn’t realize we were revolving around the center of a much larger galaxy than he was aware of in the 1700s. Some astronomers in the 19th Century said we lived in an "infinite" universe and they didn't know our galaxy had a center. They didn't even know it was a separate galaxy. Some thought it was the whole universe. In 1916 Einstein said all the stars were "fixed", because he didn't know they were moving.

Don’t believe any astronomer who tells you they know “exactly” how big and how old the universe is. This estimate changes about every 20-50 years, and it has been changing for the past 500 years. It has changed all during my lifetime.

Ned Wright doesn't know whether there is a center or not.

Shouldn't you be posting your against-the-mainstream views in the Against the Mainstream forum? Some people come to General Astronomy to get mainstream answers, but your responses and endless threads stand to leave them confused, or worse, assuming something you said is mainstream. If they want nonmainstream answers, they'll go to the other forum where you can give them your answers.

Ian Goddard,

What is going to confuse them the most is your checker board example, with a Euclidean checker board that has no center, and the x= = =x example above. This is not the way the universe works. And I see teenagers all over the internet begging for people to explain to them what’s really going on, because they can’t understand all this hocus-pocus nonsense about “expanding space”.

For 50 years the astronomers and the university text books said “the distant galaxies move through space”. Only when astronomers found superluminal galaxies that seemed to violate Einstein’s proclamation about the “speed limit”, did some start claiming that the galaxies are really “stationary in space” and it is “space” that “expands”. That’s a crackpot theory. That’s just plain nuts. Stationary galaxies that do not “move through space” but that are “carried along by expanding space” is a recent crackpot invention in astronomy that I didn’t have to put up with during the first 50 years of my life.

When I built a 6 inch telescope when I was 14 years old in 1956, I didn’t have to put up with any of this new-age mysticism baloney in astronomy.

Ian Goddard,

Why don’t you explain the physical process of how “space expands”? How does it “expand”? Is new space added to the old space? If so, then where does the new space come from and how does it get out into deep space, but not here in our local group?

If you think “space expands”, then tell us how it “expands”.

Cosmology concepts and theories have indeed changed, and seem to be changing more rapidly in recent times. The point is, there is no evidence that the universe was born just like a conventional spherical fireworks explosion, filling a pre-existing space. If it were, observation and physics would be different from what is observed.

I certainly don’t know how it started. This question has been puzzling mankind for the past 50,000 years. But this “expanding space” nonsense is new and it’s designed to keep Einstein’s “speed limit of ‘c’” seem wrong. That’s all it’s for. This didn’t start until a decade or so ago, when they began finding galaxies with redshifts that suggest they are superluminal. Before that, they went with the “explosion theory”, although they didn’t like it very much. They avoid the “explosion” idea right now just by not talking about the “beginning”. That’s why Eddington invented the “balloon model” in the 1930s, to take the general public’s mind off asking questions about “the beginning” and where the "center" was located. Eddington said in a book in 1933 that we are located "in the skin of the balloon", and that was baloney too.

Do you mean "accelerating expanding space" instead of "expanding space"? Hubble was the first to detect the so-called expansion of space.

Like I said before, Sam5, every now and then you give me a gem that reminds me why I keep coming back.

Wrong. Have a look at the pretty pic of the fireworks. Place yourself on one of those flaming balls. Notice how the other flaming balls are moving away from you at different rates depending on where they are in relation to you. The ones parallel to your direction of motion (in front of you and behind you) are moving away from you faster than the ones perpendicular to your motion.

By viewing a small piece of that firework, you can figure out the direction of the center.

Which is quite a different result than what you'd get if you carried out the same measurements while standing on a poppy seed embedded in a rising loaf of bread. You could not use the motion of the poppy seeds to find the center of the loaf.

No offense, but you guys are trying to over simplify the structure of the universe here. Don't think of the universe before the Big Bang as a point-like singularity that contained all the matter and energy in the universe. That singularity also contained all of *space and time.* Similarly, don't think of the Big Bang as simply some cosmic firework that threw that matter out into empty space. Therefore, the Big Bang was also the beginning of the expansion of space and time.

Taking this a step further, approximating the expanding universe as the surface of a balloon works fine - in *two dimensions.* The catch is, the universe is *at least four dimensions.* It is physically impossible for the human mind to visualize a four-dimensional object. Our brains just aren't wired that way.

Anyway, if the Big Bang marked the expansion of space and time, then the universe has been steadily expanding for about 13 billion years. As the universe expanded, it cooled causing it to increasingly look more and more like it does now. If the universe cooled at the same rate (and there's no reason to