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.

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Sisyphus,

"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

Are you serious, or is this a wind up? I would have hoped it was clear that I wasn't suggesting that we literally travelled back in time.

 

I am rather disturbed by your statement "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" since this is completely at odds with known science.

 

How do you then explain the perfect Black Body spectrum of the CMBR, and how it so perfectly fits the harmonics? How do you explain the formation of large scale structure?

 

Furthermore, you seem to be denying the idea of the universe being infinite ("we can see the whole universe, edge to edge, top to bottom"). If it is not infinite (that is, if you can go so far that you run out of matter, into 'empty space') then your model has a special frame, where the boundary is stationary. What is worse is that you appear to put us right at the centre.

 

This is just wrong. We know that we see 13.7 billion light years away, to the surface of last scattering, but that isn't an 'edge of the universe' in a literal sense, it is our horizon. Its spatial position is particular to us as observers, and will be in a different place for someone looking out from a different star. Just like the horizon you see when standing on ship is centred about you, and the world doesn't end at that horizon.

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

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Severian,

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

You are ignoring inflation.

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

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We can't quite see the 'edge of the universe'. As we look foruther and further away, we see further and further back in time because the light takes a long time to get to us (and was therefore emitted a long time ago).

 

If we look far enough away, you might think that eventually we will be back to the big bang (the 'edge of the universe', or at least the edge of our horizon). But that is not quite true. For a long time (though a short time on cosmological scales) the universe was opaque to photons, so light couldn't travel freely. Our satellites such as COBE, WMAP and Planck, see only back to the time when the universe became transparent to photons (the 'surface of last scattering').

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

Something to consider:

 

We assume we are the intelligent species of the universe because we have not detected any other intelligent life forms out there so far. This is a great, great big assumption. We assume this primarily because of the lack of identifiably civilized radio wave transmissions.

 

How long have we been using radio transmissions??

 

How much longer will we be??

 

Wouldn't light be a much better method of communicating for a highly intelligent species?? Our use of radio waves may be ancient technology. It may be like looking for smoke signals! LoL!

Rockman,

 

You are a man after my own heart. And add these considerations:

1. Why does intellegent life have to exist in our time scale? Their lifetime could be a minute or a million years.

2. Why does intellegent life have to exist in our size scale? They could be as big as an ant or a planet.

3. Why does intellegent life have to sense electro magnetic waves in the same way we do? They could "see" gamma rays and "feel" gravitational and magnetic fields.

4. They could be so different from us in their structure, senses, thinking, goals and needs, that they would not even recognize us as intelligent life. Much less have any requirement to look for a way to communicate with us.

 

The beings fueling up off the power lines and moving on, could be analogous to a couple of us picking some apples off a tree and not even noticing, or caring that some leaves sensed our presence.

 

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

...thus using terms like temperature for the singularity is utterly meaningless, because there was no other thing in existence to compare this primordial state to.

 

Alan

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

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Important 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

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Maybe a few or several billion years to the right.

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Is WMAP and COBE a map of the universe? It look like a globe but with hotspots?

 

I have read that it is a map of our known universe. Is that true?

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

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What edge of the universe?

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

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We can't quite see the 'edge of the universe'. As we look foruther and further away, we see further and further back in time because the light takes a long time to get to us (and was therefore emitted a long time ago).

 

If we look far enough away, you might think that eventually we will be back to the big bang (the 'edge of the universe', or at least the edge of our horizon). But that is not quite true. For a long time (though a short time on cosmological scales) the universe was opaque to photons, so light couldn't travel freely. Our satellites such as COBE, WMAP and Planck, see only back to the time when the universe became transparent to photons (the 'surface of last scattering').

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.

Martin,

Thank you for the information. It throws a couple of wrenches into my model. I had not considered that the Hubble "constant" changes. Raises some questions though about how various figures and measurements were arrived upon and made. For instance, if we don't know what we are looking at, and we make assumptions about it's age and distance and structure, based on previous assumptions (made when we also didn't know what we were looking at,) it seems we could be multiplying our errors and omisssions.

Have to go to work.

Regards, TAR

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Martin,

Thought about your post off and on all day, driving, lunch, breaks and when I got home, after working on the lawn mower, I reread your post about 6 times, reading Wikipedia posts on time horizons and cosmic background radiation, the size of the universe, how many galaxies there are, how old and how far, etc. etc.

And suddenly something started making sense. By the measurements you gave me, the current universe (locations a b and c) are 45 billion lys apart. 13-some billon years ago, they were 41 million lys apart. At that time, the cosmic time at all three locations was 330-360 million years ABB (after Big Bang.) Images of the time of last scattering would reach our location (b or the location that would become the Milky Way) coming from a in a little over 41 million years, let's say 45-90 million years. The time at b, when we see the last of the last scattering at a, is now 450 million years ABB. Meanwhile, c (also at 450 ABB) is looking toward b and sees b's first photons at the time of last scattering, emerging from the wall that appears to c to be receding at the speed of light. Little does c know that to b, the entire universe is crystal clear with photons streaming in from all directions. (Can't tell you what c sees when she turns around though, her being at the end of the universe and all.) Fast forward another 60 to 100 million years to 550 ABB and check the situation again. We (b) take a look over at a and see a region of space that looks about 60-100 million years older, development wise, and is a bit more red shifted and a bit farther then the 41 million lys it was last time. Meanwhile (still 550 ABB) at c, she looks at us and we (b) look to her, pretty much like a looks to us. But when she © looks at the region of a, she sees the last of the last scattering disappearing from the universe forever, and emerging from that last wisp of scattering, is region a, crisp and clear, looking a bit more red shifted than b, but not a day older than 330-360 million years and what, about 100 million lys away.

Fast forward to the present. We (b), along with a and c are now 13.7 billion years old. We each are 45 billion lys away from each other. We (b) had watched a and c age along with us. When we were just 41 million years old we first saw them emerge from the cloud, we watched them develop along with us but each million years they were looking a little more red shifted, farther away, and seemed to be aging slower and slower. Then they red shifted into infrared, and we couldn't quite make them out anymore. When we look in their direction now we see they have red shifted into the microwave range.

What do you think?

Regards, TAR

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Wow, I just reread my post, and it doesn't express the thoughts I was having.

I had a lot of insights last night, and formed a model in my head that made a lot of sense to me, answered a lot of questions, opened the door for a lot of predictions, and ruled out some ideas which, to me, no longer fit with reality. For instance, the idea that since the farther away an object is, the older it is, we should be able to, if we can look far enough, see the beginning of the universe. I concluded last night, that this is a false hope. I thought I was proving it, along with a dozen other insights, with my post last night. In rereading my post tonight I see that everything going on in my head was not relayed to the computer screen. And it does not read anything like the "ahah" moments it grew out of.

Regards, TAR

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Bascule,

"Isn't the answer to the question "what exists outside of the visible universe" unknowable? If something exists outside the visible universe, isn't it impossible for it to be causally linked to us?"

My hypothesis could be wrong. But if it is correct, which it seems to me to be, so far, then you start with the premise that everything in the universe has to be causally linked, and figure out afterward what the link is, and how each item in the universe should look to us. So for instance, let's say we figure the universe to be 13.7 billion years old, and let's say it could be 600 billion lys wide. At first blush, it would seem that that location of space is locked away from us by time and distance, because if we sent a message to it, the message would take at least 600 billion years to get there, and the reply would take another 600billion years to return, and that is only if the universe would average the same size that it is now for the next trillion years. So it seems unlikey the two point could be causally linked. But that is just the way it seems. The time and distance that is our enemy in considering any two way communication with a distant object are are friends when considering if there ever was one way linkage. For if the universe expanded to 1000 times it size in the last 13.5 bys then it was 1000 times smaller 13.5 billion years ago. A 600million ly wide universe, although still expansive, might have two way communication possibilities. A message could be sent from one end to the other in 600 million years, if the universe would stay the same size. But it didn't. I am not so good with caluclus, so just sticking with ratios and making rough estimates, let's say that from the moment the message was sent,the universe would double in size every 1 billion years. So the message travels for a billion years, and finds itself 1 billion light years away from the sender, in a universe that is 1.2 billion years wide. 200 million ly short of its target. So like any good photon does, it keeps going for another 200 million years, traversing 200 million lys. But in that time, that 200 million ly stretch of space stretched 20 percent so its still conceivable that it is 40 million lys from its target. Its on the downhill stretch now and that 40 million can be covered while the expansion only adds another 5 percent or about 2 million miles which it should be able to cover in 2 and a bit million years. But it made the trip. Took 1.242 billion years. But it made it. From one side of the universe, to the other. Now the return message might or might not make it. My figures are too vague and my figuring to feable but at this point in the excercise, we are in a universe 1.5 billion lys across that will be 3 billion light years across after the return message covers its first billion miles, 6 billion light year across after 2 billion ly of travel, 12 billion across after 3, 24 billion after 4...seems to be fighting a losing battle. So although it appears there was a time, early on in the universe, when one way communication was possible. There also seems to be a time at which a photon leaving one end of the universe would not make it to the other end, ever. (unless the universe at some point in the future, slows its expansion drastically, stops or shrinks.) But we still have the guess that that first, one way message, could have been sent, from one side of the universe to the other. And if this is true, then the entire 13.7 billion year old universe is populated by locations in space that can see every other location in space. Because each location sent out a continuous stream of photons (starting around 13.4 billion years ago) and if the first photon could reach every location in space, some portion of the following ones could do the same. And the visible universe, is the entire universe. Its just a matter of figuring, when we see a location in space, which portion of that 13.4 billion year history of photon emissions we are seeing.

Regards, TAR

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P.S. Bearing in mind that by "visable" I mean a photon strikes us. It does not have to be in the visible spectrum. It could be stretched out to infrared, microwave, or radio waves.

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correction: I used 330-360 million years after big bang as the time of recombination, or last scattering, and Martin, you gave me a time of 380,000 years for that era. Off by a factor of 1000. Pretty bad. But its even a better number for my argument. Light could make a 41-82(plus expansion) million light year trek well before the universe's 550 million year birthday. Probably closer to it's 200 million year birthday.

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Early on in the universe, right after the last scattering, each location in space saw the wall of fog, of the last scattering receed from their location at the speed of light, until each location could see the entire universe edge to edge. The clumps of matter at the farthest edge (to each observing location) were the last to emerge from the fog and looked to be 380,000 year old clumps, while each observing location was 200 million years old and probably a massive population III star in some stage of its development. As the universe aged, this type of effect continued to exist. Each location would see its stage of development spread out to the edge of the universe at the speed of light, and at all times, could see to the very edge of the universe.

But the edge of the universe kept getting farther away and locations at the edge though still developing were appearing to develop at a slower and slower rate, and they were red shifting more and more. All the billions and billions of stars that Olber was looking for ARE lighting up the night sky, lighting it up in the microwave frequency. And they are probably the population III stars we've been looking for, to boot.

Regards, TAR

Martin,

Read half the article and skimmed the rest. I think the solution of the riddle is to be found in a little bit of each of many of the solutions, but mostly in reframing the question. All the solutions seem to have a major flaw in that the question has an anthropic bias, and an earthly bias, in that we are wondering why we haven't been able to zoom our telescopes in to an extraterrestrial Cape Kennedy, or intercept a radio show on the Alpha Centauri interplanetary football finals. Combine the fact that the signs we are looking for, may not be the traces left by other civilizations, with the fact that we may already have already seen signs which we have ignored, misinterpreted or dismissed, and the paradox sort of dwindles away.

Our ideas of what life, intelligence and conciousness are, are very anthropically biased.

Do you think the sun is alive? Do you think a tree is intelligent? Do you think an ant colony is conscious? Why do we not have SETI type programs aimed at comminicating with these types of entities?

So my answer to the riddle is "no, we are not alone", and "yes, we have seen signs", and "probably" we will eventually be contacted by, or notice, or visit, extraterrestrials, but most likely they will not be what we expected.

Our evolution from the first mitochondria to our present form, was dictated by the special characteristics of Earth. The temperature, the pressure, the elements in the air, water, rock and soil. Dictated by the other life forms that evolved beside us. Our evolution as a civilization was dictated by finding ways to utilize our surroundings to ensure survival and reproduction. Each technological advance and social progress was built on the body of knowledge and philosophy that previous members of our species laid down. Our civilization would be different had it not been for Plato, Hitler, Newton, Pasteur, Mohammed, Einstein, Confucius, etc. etc..

That WE would be different, given a few small changes in our past, and given that WE do not recognize the life, intelligence and conciousness in the entities we HAVE run into in the universe already, I would say there is little chance we will run into US, anywhere else, but here.

Regards, TAR

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By the way, I do think I saw some alien crafts when I was 18, out on a farm in PA. It was during a party in the early 1970s, so all the observers were either intoxicated like I was, or stoned, but at least a dozen people, witnessed the same thing. 5 or 6 lights were hovering over a powerline that we knew ran through the woods behind the farm. Maybe about 1 or 2 miles away. Several of us stood together talking about the lights and what they could be for 5 or 10 minutes. We heard no sound, and figured we were close enough that we would have heard them if they were heliocopters, so we figured they were probably aliens, and were considering what we should do, others came from the house and mostly we decided it would be best just to put out positive "vibes" and not be scared or involve the authorities (we did have illegal substances about), or be aggressive in anyway or find our way over there. After several more minutes, they left, one by one, starting out, and then zipping out of sight in a manner not familar to us or any technology we were aware of. We figured they just fueled up, off of the magnetic flux surrounding the high voltage AC lines, and went off about their business.

ydoaPs,

Nice drawing. More entertaining, but not as useful as, the university version.

Regards, TAR

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/all200.gif

If you get a little strip of dots down the left side of the page, put your cursor down near the bottom of the strip and you should get a little "expand to regular size" icon. Click on that, and see a fantastic compilation of all the observations made and work done to date. (I would particularly like to talk about the lines at z=0.76 and z=1.69.)

Regards, TAR

Martin,

Thanks so much for your reply. This Lepton felt pretty good to read it.

I am still perplexed by much of the math required to properly model the universe and figure out how things can and can't fit together. And I am completely lost with the 10 dimensional stuff. Even your mention of a hypersphere sent me scampering to Wikipedia, and left my head spinning with the symbols, transformations, jargon, and references to named equations that I am just not learned enough nor bright enough to fully comprehend, much less delve into, in terms of their subtleties and implications.

So I, like most people who are outclassed, figure that all this dark matter, dark energy stuff was just made up to make the equations work. And I think in terms of Euclidean geometry, analogies to common experience and common sense. Not much of a scientist, really, although, when I understand it, I am fully appreciative of the great body of knowledge that a large number of great minds have gleaned from the study of, and the mathematical investigation of, our universe. And I rely on others to answer the questions I have, pertaining to my hypothesis.

The first question is, how big was the universe, when it became transparent to photons?

The second question is, how long would it take a photon to traverse that distance, if that distance was increasing at the Hubble constant?

Thanks again for entertaining my thoughts.

Regards, TAR

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ajb,

"Inflation?"

Was this the answer to what I couldn't put my finger on? If so, then I wasn't clear. I was trying to imagine what effects, on the appearance of b, my scenario should have. For instance should it appear younger or lengthened, faded, move in slow motion, or dissolve into radio waves or something. I have not thought it through. Gives me a thought though. I wonder if it would yield anything, to focus on a small patch of microwave "background radiation" and put it through a computer simulation that would "up the frequency" by the right multiple to put it into the visible spectrum, and "see" if it looked like anything?

Regards, TAR

Please help me test my hypothesis against known observations and proven science.

My guess is, that at the time the universe became transparent to photons the universe was small enough that a photon emitted at one end, would have been able to reach the other end, even counting for the expansion of space, within 13.7billion years. If this is true, then once two locations in space are thusly causally linked, they will not, indeed cannot, become unlinked, due to the fact that C is the speed limit of the universe, and no location or object can outrun an already arrived photon. Thus as object b receeds from a, a continues to receive b photons at lower and lower frequencies, gamma rays becoming x-rays, x-rays becoming ultraviolet ... visible ... infrared ... microwave ... radio waves of longer and longer wavelengths. When a and b's recession from each other exceeds the speed of light, the flow of photons will not stop. Photons just about to arrive at a from b will still arrive. Only something about the relative age or the apparent age of b will change. Something I have not put my finger on yet.

Regards, TAR

The big bang erased all trace of whatever existed before it. I doubt there was "nothing" before the big bang, but there is no way to prove it. It is hard to imagine what existed then. Something certainly existed before the big bang, the conditions that caused it.

AirBrush,

So far I like your answer (to Swaha) the best.

Regards, TAR

Klaynos,

So still, I have a few questions. One is, when I read a finding, like "the universe is 158 billion light years wide", is that statement assuming a universal "now", and imagining the universe when all objects and locations in space are 13.7 billion years old?

Regards, TAR

Klaynos,

I am just trying to get a good picture of what did and is happening in the universe (generally speaking.) We will not see what is happening "now" anywhere in the universe until the light of the events get to us. We will have to wait 4.3 years to see what is happening "now" on Alpha Centauri. (But we can see now, exactly what was going on on Alpha Centauri 4.3 years ago.) We can only surmise that the rest of the universe is most likely pretty much like it seems to be around here, with strings of galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and voids. The objects we see 13 billion light years away, most likely tell us what things around here were like those billions of years ago. Those objects are no longer what occupies that location in space, that population III star, or whatever we see(in infrared) has long since become whatever population III stars became, and that location of space is probably inhabited by the children objects, or grandchildren objects of that population III star. "Now" meaning what that location of space is like, 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang.

I have wondered several times, in my readings in the last couple days, what people mean, time wise, when they say "the universe consists...". Are they talking about what is around here and figuring that is what the rest of the universe consists of as well, or are they making their measurements and calculations based on what they observe far away (and hence long ago.) If it is the latter, then they should be saying what the universe consisted of.

Regards, TAR

Klaynos,

Thanks for the response. I think I have not, before, but do now, understand the role of expansion in imagining what is and has gone on in the universe. It has to be happening at a really rapid pace, though, to explain everything. Let me do some reading on expansion.

Regards, TAR

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Did a little reading. At 13km/s/Mpc, I suppose those far away objects that we are finding are receeding at what my rudimentary math, would put at about 1/2 the speed of light. But what sticks in my craw still is the fact that long ago, those objects were much closer to our location in space. Logic would suggest that object a can not be seen by object c because the expanse of space, now, is wider than light can travel in the time it has had to travel anywhere since the beginning of the universe. But, if we are talking about the objects a and c, that we are measuring, now, 13 billion years after the start of the universe, at 10 billion light years distance from us respectively, we are really talking about the image of a and c, when they were 3 billion years old. Now, if it took the light from 3 billion year old c, 10 billion years to arrive at our (b) location, it is going to take more that 10 million years more, to cover the distance from b to a across an already daunting and expanding distance. So I have no problem accepting that the light from 3 billion year old c, will never reach a's location in expanding space. However, this does not suggest that the light from location a never has, and never will, reach location c. The light from a 1 billion year old "location a" left "location a" when a-b-c where much closer together, and has had 12 billion years to make the trek to location c. Although I have not done the calculus, my intuition suggests that the light from 1 billion year old location a has already had the time to reach location c. How old location c was, is or will be, when the light from 1 billion year old location a reaches it, even if it is in the form of "background radiation", rather than an identifiable object, is not as important as DOES it. If it does, then I would guess that every location in space has a view of every other location in space, even if the view is of the location at a very very young age.

Regards, TAR