tar

Thanks to all for your posts. And keeping me honest. I tend to carry my logic far past the point, without properly inspecting the bridges from conclusion to next premise. I don't do the white noise test, at least not rigorously. I am just learning that this is indeed a science board, and scientific method must be adhered to, inorder to reach any valuable conclusions. Mooeypoo, I am not so sure that the subjective view and the scientific view need to be studied separately. Perhaps the two are more compatible than they seem. I accept that the studies show that indeed there is no Magic in prayer. That is to say, that congregations, cannot, by uttering words to themselves affect the health of a stranger. There is no mechanism through which this can be accomplished. If there were, then prayer would not have failed the test. My argument is based around looking for a mechanism by which prayer indeed might affect reality. And in my search, I found found human will. I surmised that if human will can affect reality, which I take as stipulated, then a rather easy link between praying for something to happen, and willing it to happen, could be made, without too much fuss. Here I throw in an untested bit, that willing something to be so, will actually result in the required actions and manipulations of reality needed to actually affect reality in a manner that will result in the desired outcome. After applying the white noise test, I find I may be assumming too much. In fact, the fact that the prayer was said in the first place, could easily cause the willer to leave it the hands of God, expect a miracle, and NOT take the required scientifically proven actions. My mechanism would only be sure to work, if the prayer was said, set the will of the prayer toward the desired outcome, and was followed by actually changing the situation in scientifically proven ways. I can not provide a scientific reason for this part of the mechanism to work. I can just guess, or hope that consciously or subconsciously the sayer of the prayer would do things and cause others around, to do things, that would help. But still, even though my hypothesis is weak, and I will discard it, for the moment, I would like to keep open the possibility that prayer is a part of a mechanism, that is actually scientifically definable. It may involve laws, and institutions, governments, religions, love, positive thinking, human wills and subjective thoughts of ones connection to the human race, the universe and an immortal spirit of some kind. But if it is a mechanism, a real mechanism, involving molecules that when put together, exhibit some emergent properties (humans,) then we can and should be able to approach it all, scientifically. Regards, TAR

Mooeypoo, I do not know what is stipulated and what is under discussion here. Reasoning is no good without premises, and if I reason to a point using good stipulated premises, I would think the reasoning is sound. Evidently though this is more phisophical than scientific, by your reactions. However, if there are details about the study, that show it is not directly addressing the situation Clairvoyant was talking about, you still say the study disproves my hypothesis. This is very weird and disturbing to me. Are you after the "truth"? Regards, TAR

iNOW and moo, I need to provide quantitative data. This is difficult. As seen by the study cited, the setup of the trial, introduced quite a number of conditions, that separted the IP tested, from the 30 seconds of prayer that Clairvoyant was talking about. The prayers in the study were said on behalf of strangers, which is not the same thing as a bedside prayer. The patients were informed or not informed that they may or may not be prayed for by strangers. There was no mention of what effects this notice or lack of notice had on believers as opposed to non-believing patients, and there was no possible way to stop somebody from praying for a group, or prove that nobody snuck an undocumented prayer in for somebody that wasn't supposed to be prayed for. Basically, the holistic effects of bedside prayer by a loved one, was not tested. I do not have the resources to set up a trial, nor do I think that the prayer, by itself, is what has real effect on a situation. My hypothesis is that prayer by a loved one, is more effective than lint picking in helping the patient. I would have to establish scientifically that having somebody at your bedside, to watch over you and make sure the equipment was working, and alert the nurses if you were looking a bit yellow or something, was better at avoiding complications than not having a loving eye peeled. I would then have to establish scientifically that wishing the patient would recover without complications would increase the likelyhood that you, the loved one, or a surragate would be present to monitor the situation. I would then have to prove that praying for an outcome, correlated with a desire for the outcome. I would then have to prove that desire for the outcome is correlated to the loved one taking actions consistent with increased likelyhood of the outcome. If successful in establishing the correlations scientifically, I would then need to find if picking lint, or praying was more effective at focusing ones will on an outcome. And that would just be to check out, one possible effect of prayer on the situation. There could still be other lines to check out. Regards, TAR

Mooeypoo, Where has it been proven that prayer does not help? Regards, TAR

Martin, Do we have estimates of the size of the Earth's location's observable universe at each of the billion year marks since the Big Bang started? Regards, TAR

Padren, "I challenge you to come up with a single reason why prayer is better than collecting lint as a means of helping someone heal that is not based on a fallacy." I realize you were challenging Clairvoyant, but I will take the challenge. Actually I gave a valid reason, in my previous post. There is no reason for you to compare prayer to lint picking, other than as an ad hominum attack which is in itself a falacious logical tactic. Regards, TAR

Clairvoyant, Does getting involved in Science mean that you can't believe in God ? I guess it depends on what your definition of God is. Is your God figurative or literal, for instance. My personal test for whether or not a person's God is real or imagined, is whether or not the attributes of that God apply to everybody and everything, regardless of people's beliefs or imagined conditions. If the God you pray to requires that you believe in him/her/it, inorder for him/her/it to answer your prayer, then your belief is the deciding factor, in which case, its an imagined God to which you pray. A real god, on the other hand, would have a consistent response, regardless of your beliefs. Although this does not discount the ability of prayer to affect reality. If you pray, your own will and attention is focused on determining a certain outcome. Your prayer will affect your own actions and body chemistry, and probably the actions and body chemistry of those around you. Everyone may act in the appropriate ways to guide the situation toward your desired outcome. So your 30 second prayer could certainly make a difference. But it's your will that would have been done. Regards, TAR

Hermantc007, "Magic or not?" No magic. The thing about reality is that everything fits together. Everything has its causes and it consequences. It all has to add up, the consequences all have to play out. The laws of nature don't change because we want them to, or wish or pray them to. Science's job is to figure out the laws and the relationships and hence find ways to use the laws of nature to our advantage. On the other hand, we have dreams and magic, and superstitions, and imagination which follow internal human rules, and need not fit together, need not have consequences. In dreams we can fly, walk on water, open the bathroom door and step out on the stage of the Metropolitian Opera house and open clouds with a zipper and find our lost teddy bear inside. And the human mind can convince itself that impossible things are true. But the test of any idea of how reality is, is not valid, when performed in the human mind. There anything is possible, and things need not fit together, they need not touch all the bases, they need not work. The test is only valid if it is performed in reality, where everything HAS to fit together. That is why scientists ask for evidence. Not the kind your logic or your imagination provides. "Show me an example of magic happening in reality", where EVERYTHING fits together, and ALL the rules HAVE to be followed. If you can show me such a thing, then it isn't magic, is it? Its real. Not that reality does not exhibit strange and wonder combinations, and emergent properties. But when we uncover something in reality we are sure to find with it, a mechanism, a set of rules by which real things combine and interact in real ways, following all the laws of nature. No magic. Not in reality. Only in our dreams, and imagination. Regards, TAR

Martin, Do we have estimates of the size of the universe at each of the billion year marks since the Big Bang started? Regards, TAR

Pangloss, OK, I fullfill all the critera of a psuedo-scientist. Send my two threads, this one and my hypothesis:all space is causally linked, to the speculation section. I will continue to think about it, and read, and try and put 2 and 2 together. I admit that the chances of me seeing it right and you seeing it wrong are very very slim. But I would like a last word, a summation of my thoughts, which I still believe are consistent with observation and fact and the Big Bang Theory. WMAP after they released the 5 year survey, gave us a powerful amount of new information about our Universe. We have only had a year or two to study it, and think about it and fit it into our model of the universe. Much of the "fitting" that is being done is based on our previous notion that the background radiation was the left over heat, from the big bang. Hence it must be an image of the surface of the last scattering, that is just getting to us now. I do not think that forcing our recent findings into that mold is correct. It doesn't work out. We were AT the surface of the last scattering when it happened, 13.7billion years ago. We can't just be seeing it now, we already saw it. The furthest matter from us could only have been 84,000,000lys away at a maximum and we would have seen that matter by the time we were 100,000,000years old. And once we see some matter, it has no physical way to leave our view. Space can expand all it wants, as fast as it wants and we are forever linked to that matter by the stream of photons it is emitting. That matter can congel, form stars, a galaxy, a quasar, but still it continues to send out an unbroken stream of photons. The stream of photons can be stretched from gamma rays to radio waves, it can become less and less luminous, the angular size can lessen, the photons can arrive at longer and longer intervals, but no physical law in the universe will remove that piece of matter from it's radial position in our skies. Once we see it, we will always see it (and it, us,) till it stops putting out photons, and even then the photons will continue to arrive at our location for 10s of billions of years. So we see the whole universe, every light emitting part of it. But we see NONE of the current universe, and none of the universe as it looked to us, in our past. We only see every part of the universe, as it looks to us now. Regards, TAR

Pangloss, I am disappointed that you want to run me off. If my questions are inappropriate for this area of the board, I understand. But where else, better than here to test my hypothesis, and its consequences? I am afraid that if you send Rockman and me to the speculation and psuedoscience section, we will just muck about, with no adult supervision. On the other hand, I can't answer Rockman's questions without using the model of the universe I am constructing, which seems to me to fit together well, but which evidentally is invalid because it challenges some widely held beliefs. And I don't want to make it sound like science, since it is not tested, but I would still like the opportunity to find out where my model diverges from known science. I think I have some valid, important, useful insights to add to our understanding of the universe. If they have already been had, then they have not been had by everyone because people believe stuff that is not possible to fit into what we know are facts. For instance here is a piece of the Wiki article on "observable universe size." "This means the universe has expanded to 1292 times the size it was when the CMBR photons were released. Hence, the most distant matter that is observable at present, 46 billion light-years away, was only 36 million light-years away from the matter that would eventually become Earth when the microwaves we are currently receiving were emitted." Is it not obvious that photons emitted from matter 36 million light-years from the matter that would become Earth would make the trip, even through expanding space, in under 40million years? Therefore, those cannot be the photons we are seeing now 13.7 billion years later, those photons passed this way 13.7 billion years ago. There is a frame shifting error there somewhere, and I am trying to sort it out, with the help of the minds and knowledge that frequent this board. I am not engaging in psuedo science and speculation. Please don't move this thread. Help me sort it all out, so it all fits together, without breaking the laws of physics and logic. Regards, TAR

Sisyphus, Thank you for responding. This topic has filled my thoughts since three weeks ago, when I had some "aha" moments, and had some insights that cleared up a lot "problems" that had been barriers to my visualization of the universe. I still think I might be seeing it correctly, taking everything that has been discovered, into account. Following all the laws of physics, and staying consistent with the Big Bang Theory. I was, when I had the insights, and still am, eager to share them. I have tested them against everything I have read in the last three weeks, and everything I have learned and thought about over the last half century. I honestly expected an instant acceptance of the insights and looked forward to working out the consequences or unearthing the flaws with people like you, and Martin, and DH, and Severian. I still hold that hope, but now realize it might not be so easy. After all, my conclusions as to what the microwave background radiation is, are not the conclusions currently being drawn. I am trying to figure out why that is? So let me try this. You said, " In other words, light emitted from an object 84,000,000 ly away when the universe was 300,000 years old is just reaching us now, 13.7 billion years later." Would you entertain a slight change in your statement, that would conform with my insights? Or I suppose, let me make a similar statement, but change one important word and change "light emitted" to "emitted light"? Emitted light, from an object 84,000,000 ly away when the universe was 300,000 years old is still reaching us now, 13.7 billion years later. Regards, TAR

Diagram is a rough depiction of our universe. The bar on the left representing the current, mind's eye universe, 96,000,000,000 lys wide, and the shortest bar on the right depicting the 330,000 year old universe, 84,000,000 lys wide. The bars inbetween representing a doubling in the size of the universe every 1,370,000,000 years. The surface of the large cone depicts what we see when we look out into space. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedSisyphus, "Originally Posted by rockman Actually, I believe what Tar was saying is right." Sisyphus, you replied, "It isn't, though. I'm not just making stuff up." Then you corrected his understanding of expansion. My understanding of expansion was not Rockman's. However, my conclusions do seem to contradict the understanding of others here in terms of some assumptions they have, that to me, are impossible if the Big Bang, inflation, the last scattering and the subsequent expansion of the universe for 13.7 billion years is in fact, what happened. I am completely satisfied that that is what happened. I am not arguing with it. I am just thinking that it can't happen twice. We cannot see our location in space at the time of the last scattering. We (the matter that makes us up) were there, and it happened 13.7billion years ago. And since the universe was 84,000,000 lys wide at the time, a local observer, anywhere in that 330,000 year old universe would only have to wait a Maximum of 84,000,000 years to see most all the post last scattering universe, and probably all of it, before the universe was even 100,000,000 years old. If no local observer in the universe, when the universe was .1 billion years old, could see the last scattering. How could we now be seeing it, 13.63 billion years later? We can't be. So it must be something else we are seeing. Regards, TAR

Quota was exceeded so original diagram was deleted and replaced with this one.

What is the conventional meaning of "causally linked"? If an object in space is "visible" to our equipment, then photons from that object are striking our eqiupment. Is this sufficient proof that that object is causally linked to our equipment? Would it be correct to assume that an observer located on that object, in the current, mind's eye, 13.73 billion year old universe, would "see" the Milky Way as a "younger" object, the same age, redshift and distance away, as the observer on the Milky Way sees the object? Is the fact that that object sees us (at some age,) and we see it (at the same age that it sees us,) proof that our location in space is "causally linked" to that location in space? What is the conventional meaning of "distance" to that object? Distant object then, to the Milky way then? Distant object then, to the Milky Way now? Or current object to current Milky Way? Regards, TAR

Severian, I do wonder though, where my model breaks down. I was not considering that the universe was infinite as you are mentioning. If this is the current stance of modern science, I did not know it, before I read your post. From all the pieces of info I read, it seems finite. Scientists talk about a radius of the current universe. Scientists talk about how many ly wide it is, how many particles are in it, it's total mass, and energy content and so forth. That sounds finite to me. Where does the infinite part come in? I was born in 1953, and the scientific model of the universe was different then, go back another 50 years and it was different again. We have not yet arrived at the complete model, and considering its size and age and the difficultly of observing what is happening in it, very far away, I would venture to guess, that there will always be questions, always surprises, and always new information that would force a rethinking of our current model. That being said, the model in my head, is different than the model in your head. My model is finite in time and space. You have an infinite universe in yours. But we only have one universe to consider, and it is the same one that we both fit into our models. So consider for a moment the surface of last scattering. You say it still exists in the current universe, we are observing it, in the heat of the microwave background, and we can't see beyond it, because it defines the point in the history of the universe when photons were free to travel at the speed of light. But to this location in the universe (the Milky Way) which was here at the time of the last scattering, the "surface" of the last scattering receeded from us, at the speed of light. The "surface" was in the shape of an expanding sphere, with the Milky Way at the center and the fog of the moments before the last scattering receeding at the speed of light. Since the universe at the time of the last scattering is figured to have been about 84,000,000 lys wide, the increasing sphere, denoting the surface of the last scattering would have eventually reached the closest edge of the universe, and then as it continued to expand, eventually reach the furthest as well. By my figuring the last view of the surface of the last scattering occured before the universe was 1 billion years old. So in your model, we can't see beyond the surface of last scattering, because that is when light first traveled at C. In my model we can't see the surface because it doesn't exist anymore to any observer in the universe. And I figure the background radiation gives out a black body radiation signature because its the average output of billions of 5 to 10 billion year old stars that were a billion miles away or more from the Milky way 5 billion years ago. Regards, TAR Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedSeverian, If nothing can be smaller than Plank, and nothing larger than C, and the universe is 13.73 billion years old, then all equations should replace their zeros with Plank and their infinities with 13.73billionC. So a-a=P/C. Regards, TAR

DH, I am trying hard, not to ignore any well tested theory, and certainly not any laws of physics or the massive amount of detailed observation and calculation done by thousands and thousands of brilliant minds over the years. I am trying to test my hypothesis and the consequences of it. Trying to solve a riddle so to speak, and I think my guess, might have some truth in it. And so far, in my mental tests, a lot of my thinking seems to make sense in regular old expanding Euclidean space, following all the laws of physics and perception. I am assuming that the Big Bang did take place (in fact, in a sense, it is still going on.) I do believe the matter and energy that makes us up was there(here), and since we are here, a small part of it is still "here"(there). I am assuming inflation did occur, and anti-gravity overcame gravity and pushed everything apart in a fraction of a millisecond and the universe grew to 1000 times it size. And the momentum, (of everthing pushing away everything) even after gravity regained its footing was sufficient to grow the size of the cooling and plasma to a diameter of 84,000,000 lightyears by the year 330,000ABB. And I am supposing that gravity pulled close things together, even as the other forces continued to in general make the universe continue to expand. I am accepting the fact that the universe has grown in size a thousand times since then, and now (in the Godlike minds eye) could be 96,000,000,000 lightyears wide. I don't think I am ignoring inflation. I think I am counting on it. I accept the Big Bang story, as much as I have read of it, and been told by Martin. I start my mental image at that 330,000 mark, when photons were set free at the time of the last scattering. I put myself at the location of the Milky Way(here) at that time, and ask myself, what would I see? I certainly would not see the whole universe because (from the Godlike perspective) it "just" went transparent, it would look perhaps like a fog. But a second later I could see 300km, because the photons from one light second away (and everywhere inbetween) had the time, and the ability to reach my eye. I imagine I would experience a sphere of clarity expanding at the speed of light, with the fog receeding at the same speed. Now the Milkyway's location shouldn't be in the center of the universe, cause the odds are against it, and it probably isn't near the edge, because the difference in what we see looking one way or the other in the year 13,730,000,000, would be too obvious, so for my mental excercise, I put myself somewhere between the center and edge, and figure that after 25 or 30 million years I would see a small "whole" in the fog, about 25 million lys away, where the Milky Way's location in the universe is closest the the edge. That location would look to me at that moment to be around 330,000 years old, because I am seeing the first photons that location ever emitted. I know that I(the Milkyway's) location is 25,330,000 years old, and I figure by the redshift of the light (compared to the light from closer objects) that that location has been moving away from me (for 25,330,000years), and that the light was traveling for 25,000,000years(cause that is how long I watched till I saw that first light from the edge)... So DH, I give myself that situation, and project it forward to today, and try and figure out what that location, at the edge of our universe would look like to us today. How old would it look? What kind of redshift would it have? How far away would we figure it to be? How far away was it, in the year 25,330,000, when we first saw it, and basically, how should it appear to us now that it is 25,000,000,000 lys from us. I have proven to myself, and I hope to some here, that my hypothesis may well be correct, that all space is causally linked. Obvious to me in two ways. One, if we see it (with radio,microwave,infrared,visible,ultraviolet,x-ray, or gamma), then photons from it reached us, from it. We are linked. And two, by my scenario above where one edge came into view by year 25,330,000, and the other probably by year 1,000,000,000, we could easily assume we have been photon linked to all the universe for a liberal 12billion years. Which leads me to my current hypothesis, that the microwave background radiation is the thick edge of the universe, all the stars and galaxies, that we saw (had we been alive then) when the universe was 1 billion years old, redshifted 1000 times from visible to microwave, from THz to GHz. If correct, we should "see" infrared radiation coming from beyond the furthest visible locations, infront of the microwave background. Anybody here know, what we "see" in that region? Do we have infrared telescopes? And even if correct, this hypothesis would not mean that the microwave background radiation is not the leftover heat, from the big bang. It would just mean that we are too. And I have high hopes, that if I am correct, and we start trying to resolve the stars we are seeing, rather then taking their temperature, (how much heat are we receiving from Alpha Centauri?) we will find that the hotter spots are closer areas (higher frequencies) of the (rather wide and massive) edge, and colder areas are further distance, redshifted to lower frequencies. With this info, we can figure our position in the universe, the shape of the universe, and its size. With that, we can fine tune our equations and figure out this gravity thing, and be a step closer to unifying all the forces. What do you think? Regards, TAR Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Severian, I think this is incorrect. We don't "look out", photons come in to us. We don't look back in time, it just takes photons from far away, a long time to get to us. We can't see back in time, nor can we see forward in time. The photons we see are the one's arriving at our eyes or instruments, now. When you see someone a mile away, he is standing there in your now, you don't consider you are looking into YOUR past to see him, even though the photons he was reflecting took some time (a very small amount) to get to you. But consider watching a tv show where one correspondent is talking to an anchor half a world away, and every once in a while, they step on each other because the delay in the communication, mostly happening at the speed of light with signals bouncing off satellites and relay stations and zipping through solid state circuitry, proves that the one's "now" is not the other's. If the sun blows up now(speaking universally), we won't see it for seven seconds. Do you consider that the sun shines in the past? Or is it shining now? If we see a star, its shining now. Even though the light took 7 years to get here. 7 million, 7 billion years. It is still the same. It's the photons hitting us from our present universe. We only have one universe, and each star in it only has one location. And the material in each star is 13.7billion years old. Now we see a location 5 billion light years away, as the location's material looked in year 8.7, but that is just a fortunate circumstance that allows us to speculate upon what our sun might have looked like 5 billion years ago. We are looking at that star's past, the universe's past, but it's photons are hitting us in our present, we are not looking into our past. And if you would kindly refer to my earlier two dimensional diagram of the universe and draw a 45 degree line back from our current position on the left most bar, you will see that we can look into the universe's past only so far. Once our present sight line runs to where it is not intersecting any age universe, then no bar to the right of the last bar to intersect our sight line is visible. No photons from those ages can reach us. They already did. They are in our past. Remember, that is where our galaxy was when the universe was that age. We already saw that age. All of it. Regards, TAR

The location (little spot) on our sight line is located past the point where increasing light travel time equates to an equal subtraction of age of the location observed. So how old is that location? How should it appear to us? Which spot on the current universe bar does that locaton correspond to? Regards, TAR

Here is a crude diagram depicting the universe, from the Big Bang moment on the right, to the expanse of the current universe on the left. Each bar depicts the size of the universe in 1.37 billion year increments, each bar is double the size of the bar to it's right. Pick a spot on the bar on the left for the Milky Way's location now. Having been in a a proportional position in each bar in each epoch, you can draw a line back to the point at the right, depicting Milky Way's location in the universe since the beginning. Since we cannot see into the past, nor into the future, draw a 45 degree line from Earth, now, no longer than 13.7 billion lightyears long. (the distance photons can travel in the time since the beginning of the universe.) This line depicts us looking out radially from our position. When we see an object along that line, we are seeing an image of that location in space, meaning, all the photons that were heading toward our location from that location at that time. Regards, TAR

Found some more evidence today to possibly support my hypothesis that all of space is causally linked. I was doing some reading in Wikepedia, and off of links posted in this forum, testing my hypothesis against observation and theory. Was trying to see what a diagram of distance/time (two dimensions of four dimensional space were dropped for drawability) with grid lines every billion years of cosmic time and distance lines drawn the other way. I was so confused. I was supposed to measure the length of the curve of the photon crossing the grid lines at 45degree angles drawn from the quasar to the Earth and know how far the photon had traveled. I had no idea what I was allowed to hold constant and what I could vary, to study the drawing and its implications for the time period 380,000-1billion years, that am interested in investigating. And then to make thing worse, they had a curve drawn from the Earth line to the quasar line parallel to a time line. Couldn't be a photon, cause photons can't get from the Earth line to the Quasar line instantaneously, so I decided the drawing wasn't going to help me. Either they got something wrong, or I didn't understand the setup. I tell you this story because I realized later driving home, that we have a full scale, real time model to use to test any hypothesis, or idea. The universe it's self. Looking at the universe and testing the implications of our ideas strips away any errors in the frame shifting that can so easily occur when model is applied to model or formula is applied to formula. Consider how many times people have figured that we can see back in time to the big bang, or into the future if we look a little to the right. The fact is, the whole universe (if my hypothesis is correct) is here, right now for our inspection and exploration. Our past universe is no longer directly viewable, and our future universe has not happened yet. When we look through our telescope and see that quasar, and say, "that's really probably a spiral galaxy by now", we have frame shifted, and set up our minds for a paradox or two. Now we have this spiral galaxy, off to the right in our minds as a separate location in our universe, than the quasar we are looking at. Well, and I can say this with a high degree of confidence, that we see a quasar going on in that location in the universe, and if we look there tommorow we will see it still going on. Real photons from that quasar are striking our equipment. We are causally connected to that location in space. The spiral galaxy we project onto the 13.73 billion year old "current" universe does not exist for us, except in our model and our imaginations. How can the same location be both a quasar and a spiral galaxy, at the same time? It can't be. So pick. Reality, or model, but don't confuse the two. And I am sure reality will fit good models more consistantly than bad models will fit reality. Besides, if you have to twist reality into epicircles to fit your model, its probably time to question your model. We have only 13.7 billion years of light travel time to work with when we are looking at the background microwave radiation. Some of the 13.7 can be assigned to time and some can be assigned to distance due to expansion, but it HAS to add up to 13.7 billion years or less. If you think its 13.7 year old heat, cause that's how it measures, I guess it could be. But couldn't it also be billion or two billion year old objects on the edge of the universe whose light has traveled 12 billion years to get to our equipment? Wouldn't it measure the same? The black body radiation chart is the same shape as a star's. The only problem is stars are usually visible in the THz range. The background radiation is in the GHz range, 1000 times slower. Isn't the fact that we see photons from the edge of the universe evidence that we are causally connected (by photons) to the edge? And if we got causally connected to the edge at the year 1 billion or so, wouldn't that give the edge region plenty of time to expand and redshift our (the Earth's location's) view into the microwave range? Regards, TAR

Well we do have something to compare it to now! Us! "We" (some precursors of the particles that make us up)were there at the time, and we are still there but now we are humans, that stand a meter or two high, see photons that vibrate in the THz range, hear sound waves of a certain lengths/frequencies, feel vibrations, taste and smell chemical, have memories and brains that developed tools and equipment to enhance all our senses. We live about 80 years and write stuff down and tell each other about what we experienced and figured out. We figured out the earth is round, and rotates on its axis and faces the sun repeatedly in the same period of heartbeats, and seasons of hot and cold repeat themselves about 365 times before the stars look the same again...etc. We have us to compare against what we sense, and we have our minds eye and the power of analogy, to look into the past, and the future. And we have photons streaming in from every corner of the universe, that we can ponder on, and compare. We can call the sun hot, and the voids of space cold, and we can estimate the temperature it was around here when "we" were 10 to the -whatever seconds old. Regards, TAR

iNOW, That is great! Thanks for that second diagram. I had not seen that yet. It's absolutely wonderful. And I have an idea. Pick a spot near the satellite on the disc defined by the last elipse on the right. This disc is the current minds eye universe. Pick a spot on the disc for the location of the milky way. Now draw a line mimmicking the outside curve, all the way back to the same relative point on the elipse of the background radiation elipse. This line was the location of the milky way from the beginning to now. Now insert a teepee with the base at the ellipse of the background radiation and the point of the teepee at the location you picked for the Milky way. Make the thickness of the skin the time between Gallileo and now. This is our field of view. The slice of the universe we see. Regards, TAR Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedImportant correction: I think the base of the teepee has to be on an elipse at the 380,000 year mark or after, I haven't thought it out completely. Regards, TAR Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedMaybe a few or several billion years to the right. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged I think it is a map, a picture of the edge area of the universe in all directions, and by studying the distance, redshift and age of the stuff we find there, we will be able to not only see the shape of the universe, but figure our position in it. Regards, TAR

Airbrush, To try and avoid frame shifting for a moment, put ourselves at the location of the milky way 380,000 years after the big bang. What do we see? Not much, the universe just (for the purposes of discussion) turned transparent to photons, so we see nothing. If we wait a second, we will see anything putting out a photon in a sphere, centered on us, with a radius of 300,000km. Another second and the radius will be 600,000km. Wait for a year, and we will have a clear view of anything putting out photons within a light year of us. Little do we know at this point that the WHOLE 84 million light year wide universe turned transparent on its 380,000 birthday. But 42(plus 42 million years of expansion, we'll give it liberal 5 percent)45 million years later, we will be able to see one end of the universe or the other, the "edge" of the universe. Wait another 42 million years, and no matter what the Milky Way's position is in relationship with all the other locations in the universe, the fog of the last scattering will have lifted completely, and we can see the whole universe, edge to edge, top to bottom. There is no matter outside of our view, no location in space we cannot see (provided it's been emitting photons for the last 87 million years.) And now the year is 87,380,000, at every location in the universe. That first bit of edge we saw 42,000,000 years ago, looked about a day old when we saw it, and now when we look at it, it looks about like the locations right next to us looked when we were 42,380,000. The other edge, the last to clear up looks even younger. (However many million years younger as it was between the time the one edge cleared up, and the other.) So that was the universe, the whole universe, from the Milky Way's location's perspective, and from the mind's eye perspective from the year 380,000, to the year 87,380,000. It is now year 13,700,000,000, everywhere in the universe, from the minds eye perspective, and it's the year 13,700,000,000, from the Milky Way perspective. In the mean time, a few things have changed, every location (from the minds eye perspective) went through eras of star building and destruction and rebuilding and are now (from the minds eye perspective looking pretty much like around here with strings and walls of galaxies and clusters.) And from the mind's eye perspective,we know that it has expanded in the mean time from half the size of the Milky Way to something like 100 billion light years wide. What should this universe look like to us from Earth in the year 13.7 billion? Well exactly like it does. We just have to figure out what we are looking at. What location in space, at what age and at what redshift? But it seems to me, that if the Milky Way could see the entire universe in the year 87,380,000, we can still see it now. After all, the edges never stopped putting out photons. Regards, TAR Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged DH, I'm still working with Euclidean geometry. I figure that if there is a finite amount of material in the universe, and the material exists in a finite expanding volume, then if you head out in one direction and keep going in the same direction, fast enough, you will eventually come to the point where everything is behind you, and nothing is infront of you. That's the edge I am talking about. Is this wrong? Or put another way. Take a moon size piece of the sky, and look into it, if you see something, look further, and see if there is anything behind it, if you see something look behind that... till there is nothing behind it. At that point, you would be looking at the edge. Is this wrong? Regards, TAR Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Severian, I don't think we can see back that far. Not directly anyway. In my example of the universe (above) the last scattering was history from both the mind's eye perspective, and the location of the Milky Way's perspective. Gone, not to be directly seen again, anywhere in the universe, ever. And that example was, from the minds eye perspective, 13 billion years ago. That era may have had the time (from the minds eye perspective) to go over the edge, as well. Of course I have never seen a photon get to the edge of the universe, so I don't know what it does when it get's there, but I would imagine it follows the rules of physics and gets absorbed by something and reemitted, or follows some magnetic, gravitational field extending from the last matter, around in a loop and heads back the way it came, or in some manner is reflected back at the angle of incidence or something, so information that ever got to the edge, is probably still available in some manner. Regards, TAR

Impossible? No, I don't think so. It's on the contrary, obvious that it can be no other way. People, including me, have a tendency to frame shift when talking about the universe. And it's often difficult to tell if someone has frame shifted, when thinking about an object in space, in terms of where and what it is. Its important to talk about two distinct and often confused nows. There is the personal, human now, in terms of what we see, when we look out into the expanse of space. And there is the universal, god like perspective, minds eye picture, of what the universe "looks like", NOW. The two are often confused, and the translation from one to the other is not impossible, it just isn't always done, and often isn't done completely.