Lakon
There are "Open Letters" and other "petitions" from groups representing crackpottery in almost all scientific fields. We usually have to deal with them in the Evolution subjects, but there are also anti-Big Bang groups as well. While 218 "Scientists and Engineers"sound substantial, a superficial look into their actual backgrounds usually shows that the "Scientists and Engineers" are speaking out of their specialty, don't have any training or knowledge in the subject being criticized or are vaporware. Like the "Pilots and Engineers for Truth" they are bogus, with very few actual "Pilots or Engineers" at all(and those few being known to be crackpots). And while I wouldn't ask my bus driver to explain the physics of anything, somehow the driver of an aircraft knows a lot about the physics of 911. The main thrust of most of these groups is to stir controversy(where there should be none)in order to get you to purchase their books(where their money comes from). There are always scientists of a lesser grade(to put it kindly)who may actually believe the dreck they publish, Erich von Däniken made a good living doing this but if you ever talk to him you find yourself looking around in panic, searching for several beefy guys with a straight jacket and a stun gun, he's absolutely nuts. Even when these types of groups are legit, it usually is caused by the politics of a dying paradigm that these scientists cling to. The older we get, sometimes, the less we are able to accept new things when we spent most of our professional life promoting the loser out of the competing theories. The Big Bang has had a lot of detractors for this reason, including even Einstein for a short time(he thought the Universe was static), Arp never recovered from this behavior, Einstein learned new things and moved on. This is why Arp(a respected scientist who just got too old to change his world view)is the most prominent name on the list. While there are legitimate scientists who refuse to accept reality, that doesn't make them right(there is no authority in science and if every scientist in the world thinks differently, the scientist who shows by his work that what he says is true is still right). Einstein faced exactly that situation when he first published his paper on Relativity.
The Universe all came out of a dot the size of a period, it was all in contact, therefore smooth. The Big Bang was not an explosion, it was an expansion and as it expanded(especially during Inflation)it maintained this smoothness as can be seen in the Cosmic Background Radiation, which is smooth(homogeneous)to parts per billion, it only had slight differences in density that seeded the formation of galaxies, gravity did the rest. Homogeneous is a charactistic of the Universe, but it is a snapshot of the entire Universe at any one instant in time. Conditions evolve over time, changing the form of the Universe, so the Universe is not homogeneous over time(IE comparing two different areas separated by time does not show homogeneous character), but if you compare two different areas that are the same age(IE only separated by space)you will see homogeneity. As to where the Big Bang occurred, point your finger at your nose and at the beginning that point was in the very center of the singularity. This is true for every point in the Universe. And the Universe is expanding away from your nose equally in all directions. This doesn't make sense to us as we live inside a four dimensional framework, but the Universe IS a four dimensional framework, it contains itself, finite but unbounded. There really is no edge to the Universe, every point sees itself at the center of the Universe's expansion, it's all relative to your frame of reference. And by looking "way over there" we are really looking "way back there" at a point in past time, because whatever we are looking at is no longer where we are seeing it, nor is it still in the condition we are seeing it in. QQ is right only in that everything we see is in the past, he is wrong in that the information contained in that light is just as fresh(and relevant)as it was a second after it came into existence, and the information does not deteriorate even a little bit because photons experience no time, they don't change and they don't get tired. To the photon it's emission and it's absorption are the same event happening at the same time. Oh, The reason we look for information in the past is because that is when the events happened. It happened here too, but the light from that time from our neighborhood is long gone(it happened here 13.7 billion years ago). Time is a dimension exactly analogous to length, width and depth. It is hard to think of time this way because our everyday experience deals with minuscule bits of time "distance", the "distance" character of time takes huge distances to become noticeable. It took careful measurement of the moons of Saturn on different sides of Earths orbit to determine light speed by measuring the time delay difference of the two distances to show the effect for the first time(by the way, it takes about 30 minutes for light to get to Saturn IIRC).
It depends on whether those galaxies or clusters are bound to each other by gravity. Andromeda has a blue shift, meaning it is moving towards us because we are gravity bound to it and that overwhelms the Dark Energy(whatever it is)that is trying to push them apart. An hour, day or year time span is probably beyond our ability to detect a difference, but the history shown by our observations, compared over thousands and millions of years leave no doubt it is occurring.
The thing is your are having a problem with distance in time. We can see the differences at large distances in time, our instruments are unable at present to do the same at "microscopic" distances in time like one year or even one century except at very close ranges in space(it's about huge distances, resolving power and precision of measurement rather than a problem of theory). They are moving, but they are too far away to see such small changes. And the galaxies we see way back in time are moving at significant fractions of lightspeed RELATIVE to us. They see themselves relatively stationary as we speed off in the distance. This is EXCLUSIVELY a result of the expansion of space between us, not our movement(or theirs)through local space.
Watch the video on this page to get just an idea of how big space is, it only shows the closest 150 light years but will blow your mind.
http://phys.org/news/2013-03-astronomers-remote-reconnaissance-solar.html
Oh, and bookmark the homepage of this place, visit it every day. Go to space/earth and then astronomy(my favorite) and you will find astounding photos, videos and articles that are almost always good science.
Grumpy
Hi Grumpy. I watched the video. Fascinating. I've seen something similar starting at the electron level and going out to the galactic - also fascinating. Thanks for the reply. I appreciate you taking the time to elucidate all this. Will respond to some points soon.
