The size of this universe

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ok.

 

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I will try one more time, paddoboy.

In just the previous few pages you have stated :

paddoboy, would it be at all possible for you to allow the people that "can get their head around" the concept of infinity, or that are more than "just a Layman" or that "are working/have worked as professionals" in the fields of science and cosmology, to share their knowledge and learning without you having to implicitly state that they are wrong!

You have openly admitted that you are only a "layman" and hold no "professional" status - what is the problem that you cannot allow the "more than just Laymen" or the "learned and Degreed" or the "Professionals" to utilize the knowledge and skills that they have worked hard and long and diligently to accrue?

I am not attacking or belittling you, paddoboy. I am just trying to get you to "look at this as scientifically as possible".

As an analogy : If you were to experience a major problem with your own Cardiovascular system would you consult ;
1.) - a layman ?
2.) - a seemingly "reputable web-site" ?
3.) - a Professional ?

If your honest answer to the above analogy is anything other than "3"...well...

 

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Write4U

Yes, the article is very relevant to our current discussion.

"In short then, a singularity represents an infinity and we generally don't think nature is infinite. "

This is exactly what I am trying to point out. In Nature we just don't see any infinity. When our math indicates an infinity it usually means we are not understanding something fundamental in our application of that math. If a BH actually does go to an infinity, it is doing it outside of the Universe, likely in the Quantum realm, where uncertainty means the Singularity cannot form(as we currently understand it. The Singularity turns out to be a cloud of possibilities instead of a point).

paddoboy

Physics is a complicated thing, it's hard sometimes to explain in a simple, easy to understand manner so, often, the scientist oversimplifies, leading to misunderstanding. It is extremely hard for our minds to visualize something which contains itself, but that is what the Universe does. The CMB is the "inside" appearance of something we are used to calling the outside of a container. The Universe we see in the CMB is the appearance the Universe had when it was at it's smallest(~300,000 years after the Bang), yet we see it today as the largest thing of all time. The Universe was physically smaller the farther away(back in time)you look outward, and the Universe we see relatively closest to us is the largest it has ever been(and it will be even larger in the future), yet what we see is exactly the opposite. So the smallest(the actual size of the Universe just after Inflation)became the largest(the CMB in a sphere with a radius of 13.7 billion lys) and the largest(the huge galaxy clusters sweeping up masses of stars and galaxies in the dense early Universe we see just after the CMB)has become the smallest(our dinky little star over four light years from the nearest neighbor in a Universe that becomes larger and full of more empty space over time).

In a very real way, every single proton has gone from being a point that contained the energy equivalent of everything in the entire Universe, to a point that contained the energy equivalent of a single proton in the exact center of a stupendous inflationary event, to being "born" as a proton(by some process I don't know well, it involves anti-matter or something)from that energy equivalent according to E=MC^2, each seeing all other protons(among neutrons and electrons and whole families of sub-atomic particles)travel away from it, to being just one proton among(insert extremely large number here)s of others being jostled and moved by physical forces, being clumped into one element or another(hydrogen or helium, with a lithium atom here or there), joining with electrons to become a complete atom(and incidentally making spacetime transparent to electromagnetic energy waves, releasing the radiation of the CMB), forming stars, which cooked up heavier elements and planets until just now being part of something someone just scraped off the bottom of their shoe. Every single point/proton in the Universe experienced some variant of that same story. Going from being all(the Singularity)to being an anonymous carbon atom in a bit of dog doo is the ultimate demonstration of an increase of entropy, I think.

Grumpy

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@ Grumpy

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Grok'd!

 

Ignoring our troll.....
Grumpy:
It appears you are describing the Observable or Visible Universe.
I have checked out Thorne, and I was mistaken. He doesn't actually refer to it, one way or the other.
But please read my last post in the manner that I posted it in.

 

paddoboy brings up a valid and pertinent point : All Posts should be read entirely in the manner in which they were Posted in - and not in any other manner in which any reader chooses to perceive it as having been Posted in.

Mis-perceptions, can and do sometimes lead to delusional thinking, especially in such intellectually demanding fields such as Theoretical Cosmology!

 

Again Grumpy comments on the following?


______________________________________________________________________________
Did the Universe expand from a point? If so, doesn't the universe have to have an edge?
No. The Big Bang was not an explosion IN space. It was a process that involved ALL of space. This misconception causes more confusion than any other in cosmology. Unfortunately, many students, teachers, and scientists(!) mistakenly picture the "Big Bang" as an explosion that took place at some location in space, hurtling matter outward.

In reality, ALL of space was filled with energy right from the beginning. There was no center to the expansion, and no magical point from which matter hurtled outward. The confusion arises in part because of the amazing conclusion that the OBSERVABLE portion of the universe was once packed into an incredibly tiny volume. But that primordial pellet of matter and energy was NOT surrounded by empty space... it was surrounded by more matter and energy (which today is beyond the region we can observe.) In fact, if the whole universe is infinitely large now, then it was always infinite, including during the Big Bang as well.

To put it another way, the current evidence indicates only that the early universe - the WHOLE universe - was extremely DENSE - but not necessarily extremely small. Thus the Big Bang took place everywhere in space, not at a particular point in space.


http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/seuforum/faq.htm#s1



and from the same link........


It is a common misconception that the Big Bang was the origin of the universe. In reality, the Big Bang scenario is completely silent about how the universe came into existence in the first place. In fact, the closer we look to time "zero," the less certain we are about what actually happened, because our current description of physical laws do not yet apply to such extremes of nature.

The Big Bang scenario simply assumes that space, time, and energy already existed. But it tells us nothing about where they came from - or why the universe was born hot and dense to begin with.

 

Grumpy>>>>
I have reached a conclusion.
Not too often I am critical of the sciences [especially cosmology/Astronomy/Astrophysics etc] but I reckon its about time they all got their act together and refined the language used, meanings and Interpretations.
Again, I see opinions we don't know, its infinite or its finite.
Your posts make sense to me. As do others. The Interpretation though is sometimes different.
Again, no one can get their minds around something that is Infinite.
Again, even if you are correct, a finite Universe raises many logical questions....

Can I raise another issue here as an example?
On another forum, very recently, we were discussing ETL in the Universe.
My many posts stated words to the effect that although the down the line mainstream view is we don't know, The near Infinite extent [if not Infinite] of the Universe/space/time, the vast numbers of galaxies and stars, and the stuff of life being everywhere we look, was ample reason to overwhelmingly suggest that the chances of ETL was overwhelming. The non zero chance of us being alone, if it were true, would raise many more questions.

Now most agreed with that concept, except for one very knowledgable scientist, who would not have a bar of it.
He would not go further than to say "WE DON'T KNOW"
We consquently crossed swords and had a bit of a free for all.
I still to this day stand by my statement, and he still stands by his.

Over to you.

 

IMHO,
Most of the questions about infinity can be answered by applying the "The Qualitative Infinity of Nature" , where infinity is not found in physical expression, but in an infinite potential for expression.

http://www.cosmometry.net/david-bohm

 

Interesting Write4U.......

To Grumpy brucep, Walter and others.....
Just been checking on some data fro the Planck.....
How do the following extract anomalies fit in with the Universe being Infinite or finite? [if they fit in at all]


______________________________________________________________________________
"But because precision of Planck’s map is so high, it also made it possible to reveal some peculiar unexplained features that may well require new physics to be understood"

"One of the most surprising findings is that the fluctuations in the CMB temperatures at large angular scales do not match those predicted by the standard model – their signals are not as strong as expected from the smaller scale structure revealed by Planck"


"Another is an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky. This runs counter to the prediction made by the standard model that the Universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look.

Furthermore, a cold spot extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected."

"The asymmetry and the cold spot had already been hinted at with Planck’s predecessor, NASA’s WMAP mission, but were largely ignored because of lingering doubts about their cosmic origin."


“The fact that Planck has made such a significant detection of these anomalies erases any doubts about their reality; it can no longer be said that they are artefacts of the measurements. They are real and we have to look for a credible explanation,” says Paolo Natoli of the University of Ferrara, Italy.


"One way to explain the anomalies is to propose that the Universe is in fact not the same in all directions on a larger scale than we can observe. In this scenario, the light rays from the CMB may have taken a more complicated route through the Universe than previously understood, resulting in some of the unusual patterns observed today."

above extracts from.....
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Planck/Planck_reveals_an_almost_perfect_Universe
______________________________________________________________________________

 

Interesting that you would Post that Link, Write4U.
A lot of people do not fully understand the implicate and the explicate, let alone the concept of any reciprocity between them.

I hope you do not take it wrong, when I say that you appear to be somewhat like myself : in that the more I learn, the more I realize, that indeed, there is so very much more to learn.

 

Origin has detailed your many misconceptions in the rest of your post, but missed the above.

DE only appears over larger scales, because at the galactic and galactic groups level, it is overcome by the gravity from the above average matter/energy density within those regions.
But again, I'm sure this has been explained to you before.

 

paddoboy

Yes.

Well the Singularity was an edge, as is any BH's Event Horizon. Otherwise, no.

It was an explosion OF spacetime where none previously existed, all of it.

It took place at every point in space, and each one they saw themselves in the center of it. It did not explode into anything, it was everything that exploded including space and time

Correct.

There was no single center, every point saw itself as at the center with everything else moving away from them. The same view is still available through any good telescope today.

Every bit of that is not based on any information I know of. What came out of the BB was spacetime plus contaminates, there was no space and no time before that. And no matter or energy. What came out of the BB is the entire Universe. This is where your cite's train of thought derails and it is simply wrong. There is much of the Universe that we will never see as they are today, measurements indicate they are over our light horizon. But we do see the entire Universe as it was when it was 300,000 years old, it's projected all around us as the CMB. THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, not just a visible part. In fact, the Visible Universe refers to the fact that we see things as they were, not as they are now, it is not a subdivision of a bigger Universe, it is the whole Universe as we see it now. And as it has been 13.7 billion years since those furthest photons were released, the Visible Universe is almost exactly 27.4 billion lys in size. There is much of the Universe that has evolved since it released the CMB we can see and they are not part of our Visible Universe as they are today, but we can see those same parts of the Universe as they were then. ALL OF THEM. This is what is meant when say we see the large scale structure of the whole Universe in the CMB, we see the whole Universe and it's large scale variances in that radiation.

Current evidence indicates a hot dense early Universe that occupied near zero volume, all you have to do is run the Expansion backward to see the truth of that, this guy is simply wrong and either does not know or understand current evidence or is deliberately publishing crank material.

It is a fact that the Big Bang was the origin of the entire Universe.

No, it is silent only about what started the process, not on how it proceeded.

True. But that is a limit imposed by technology and lack of data, not a lack of understanding of high energy physics. The LHC has only been in existence for ten years, give it a little time.

Utter know-nothing non-sense. The Big Bang theory specifically posits that energy, matter, time and space DID NOT EXIST before the Big Bang Inflated it into existence. This guy is a crank, not a knowledgeable source.

Not a failure of Big Bang theory, it has nothing to say about what caused the event, only about how the event proceeded. There is likely to never be any information available within our Universe about conditions before the Universe existed, that does not mean we should throw up our hands and give up on understanding the Universe that we can see, is it?

Grumpy

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Totally in agreement....

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I was always taught that what existed before t=10-35th seconds and the BB, was a quantum state of space and time, unknown to us.
What existed afterwards was space and time as we know them.
That was conveyed to me a while ago, by a GR theorist and an Astronomer on another forum.
Again I reiterate, its about time they all got their act together and refined the language used, meanings and Interpretations.


What effects on cosmology today do the "anomalies" as detailed in the Planck data, and as I have listed have, if any?
I do realize that they probably aren't that critical in the greater scheme of our picture of the Universe/space/time.

 

Grumpy...May I ask what field you are in?

I see the disciplines of Astronomy/Cosmology/Astrophysics/Astrobiology and those who partake in them in awe and respect, because their everyday job consists of dealing with concepts so intense and overwhelming that it's a wonder their skulls don't implode through sheer vertigo.
I suppose generally speaking, at least for a layman, it's best not to contemplate the full scope of the universe on a day-to-day basis because it makes a mockery of basic every day chores.”

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Plus my Mrs is sternly asking why this and that isn't done, and to get my head out of the clouds and back home where I live on good old mother Earth.

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Just ran across this historic synopsis of this subject. It has some interesting additional info about the BB and it sounds authoritative although I don't know the source. I downloaded it to my library for future reference.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG1JpC5jels

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nByekIx7XXw

The creators may be associated with NASA (just a guess)

 

You think a persons ignorance is an insult? If I say I'm ignorant about a certain subject I'm insulting myself? If I say you're ignorant of a subject I'm insulting you? Ignorance is the main subject over most these threads.

 

The universe is big. Also it has been mentioned to me that should we travel off one side of the universe, do we come out the other side? :S