Where are the discussions about current problematic issues in science?

No need to remove it. I remarked that my only authority is that I am the thread starter. So far, my requests that we stay on topic have been intended to try to stay on topic.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Right, and as soon as you start deviating from the script, you're off in la-la-land where there's as much evidence that Bob the Leprechaun makes it all work as there is for any other proposal that fails to make quantitative predictions. If you're throwing out General Relativity based on purely speculative qualitative grounds, this isn't the proper section.

The universe is moving towards clusterization and away from equalization, so I still don't see why you'd be attached to such a concept. In general our universe isn't a fluid, even if that works as a good analogy or approximation in certain situations.

Actually I made a serious booboo, in that the Newtonian approximation of an exterior energy shell wouldn't have any effect whatsoever on the inside, the gravity would cancel out everywhere. So all that's left is to show that your idea, to first approximation, would lead to a slowing expansion of the universe rather than an accelerating one, and I'll try to get around to mathematically demonstrating that shortly.

Again, if you want a scientific discussion, you can't just say "let's just throw away half of the established facts in nature for argument's sake".

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Yes and hubris is probably putting it mildly. Lately all the trash talking is coming from hardcore narcissists. They're really easy to nail, starting with the ones that disparage you, of all people, after you've said something intelligent that they can't possibly understand. I have just about all of the worst offenders on ignore, although I peeked into q_w's posts when I saw you engaging him. If I recall, I think he is a former teacher (of science?) in a Christian school, so I suspect there is an unstated religious motive to his line of inquiry, although obviously that doesn't reconcile some of the rather odd opinions of physics that he promotes. But I'm still curious as to the motives of all such folks. What really makes people think they are so smart--especially when they haven't even gotten anywhere with their own education? Some kind of compensating is going on. But they post here like that have no sense of self whatsoever, not to mention the world around them. Drugs maybe? I'm sure that's what I would do if I were high--log on to a science board and just rail away.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

In all of these discussions that attack science, or the few icons of science lay people can name, it's always cast as a problem in physics, but the actual content of what cranks/antagonists are posting is entirely a different thing. They have virtually no interest in empirical data, they don't seem to have any idea what the background is (like what motivated Einstein to address relativity in the first place) and of course they have to disparage math because they simply are math illiterate. That leaves the content of their posts as questions about what they believe, which is usually a mixture of wrong answers and absurdities.

Speaking of janitors, my guess is that Einstein would not have trusted any of these folks to carry out his trash, worried that any notes he might discard would end up being appropriated to some other cause--like to support claims of an aether, or to drum up some wild ideas like we're seeing here. Might make for a good movie though. Like A Beautiful Mind but in reverse. A really dull, mixed up one, but in his delusions the patient lives in a reality in which he has achieved rock star status. The bad guys would of course have to be folks like you, who are working for the Prime Sentinel or whatever, to suppress them and maintain control of The Matrix. Except we'd have to call it The Scalar because that's as far as they got in math

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

You have it all backwards, Einstein's the real bad guy in this whole mess, it just takes a fresh outside perspective in order to understand why.

[video=youtube;RzE7IzOZmQ8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzE7IzOZmQ8[/video]​

You get a free cookie if you can find that on Youtube in English.

 

Actually I have cookies disabled. But hey that was unfair. It came up on Google at first attempt. Except for the doctoring and some mirror imaging it closely resembles the German.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

[video=youtube;OrQxkNR1GFA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrQxkNR1GFA[/video]​

 

Well, I toyed around with the idea of the universe as some sort of Newtonian bubble made of concentric spherical shells of varying density, I pushed it pretty hard, and I'm finding that it simply doesn't work, for so many reasons. For one, all existing evidence points towards the observable universe having a uniform density (homogeneity), in which case it wouldn't matter what's on the outside, and distant stars would actually accelerate towards the center faster than objects closer to the center, meaning that even the relative acceleration would be opposite to what's observed. Secondly, even if you disregard uniform density and very carefully chose the individual shell densities so that the relative accelerations matched within some neighbourhood of Earth along a given direction, you wouldn't be able to match them along any other direction and the universe would look decidedly different at different angles, violating its observed (approximate) isotropy.

Then we get to a point where the model keeps getting more and more complicated in an attempt to account for every objection, which makes it contradict with more and more established facts in other areas, and one needs to ask what the point is when General Relativity with a few tweaks works pretty damned well in nearly every way possible. As soon as we start inventing vague, arbitrary new laws ("energy density equalization") without describing them and their predictions in detail, assuming they'll simply work like magic if someone eventually models those details, it ceases to be a scientific discussion worthy of being posted in this section and more of another ridiculous attempt at divination. I don't think the math & physics section was intended for people to post help wanted ads looking for mathematicians to do all the work for them on the arbitrary assumption that everything will magically fit together at the end.

 

You could offer this as an explanation for the expanding universe, but not as an explanation for dark energy. Dark energy is said to cause the increasing expansion of the universe, and is said to remain at a constant density. This is in breach of conservation of energy, and is IMHO a clear signal that there's something wrong with the dark energy hypothesis as it currently stands.

 

The evidence is the same, raw redshift data and the intensity of standard candles that indicate accelerating separation.

Maybe, but the mathematics of general relativity is very good, and the best we have to predict the relative motion of objects. No need to throw that out. We are all talking energy density.

The clusters and the galactic structure that is emerging as the universe evolves is stringy, but the strings of galactic structure, and galactic "walls" are themselves moving away from each other on a grander scale.

I can't argue that.

The current consensus has evolved, and GR was not based on redshift, accelerating expansion, or the CMB. This thread, though not scientific, is based on evidence that was not available when GR was formulated. My non-scientific thread is a question about if the effect of the scenario would be like dark energy. In other words, what would be the effect of a layman science enthusiast's speculation that there was pre-existing space when the Big Bang occurred, and the expansion we observe, evidenced by the raw redshift data of galaxies and the intensity of certain standard types of quasars, was expansion into low energy density space surrounding the high energy density of the hot dense Big Bang ball of energy. Would the effect be a possible explanation of the phenomenon called dark energy? I'm not throwing out the EFE's, I think they are great.

 

Testing, one two:

 

I agree, but the OP went on to say, "... and the acceleration of expansion might be explained by the growing imbalance between the force of energy density equalization and the force of gravity, since equalization might lead to objects moving away from each other, and gravity has an inverse relationship to distance."

 

Nice images. Can you put the small grid circle in the center of the large grid circle, and post that image. I will be able to use it when and if I go into detail on the force of "energy density equalization".

 

I'll throw in some crank controversy:
There is a number of things about this energy thingo that come to mind:

1. There is no consistent definition of energy that can be applied uhm ...consistently.. [vat dis tis ting called energy? ]
2. There has been no accounting for the energetic value of photons invisible or visible spectrum propagating universally. [ which I find utterly amazing to be honest]
3. There so no solid hypothesis that I am aware of that explains the "great attractor" phenomena.

How is it possible to do solid Astrophysics [re cosmic expansion] if the above issues are unresolved?

 

You have to forget about gravity. But not about general relativity. Take a look at the stress-energy momentum-tensor:

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Public domain image by Maschen

See the energy-pressure diagonal, and the shear stress? Does that remind you of anything? Here's a clue courtesy of Kip Thorne.

Not easily I'm afraid. But note this:

 

Qunatum_wave: I've started a thread sketching it out. See Dark Energy. Some posters may be antagonistic, but the references are good and I'll be surprised if anybody can point out any errors. There's a bit of a problem at the moment in cosmology in that some cosmologists are saying the universe is infinite and always has been, and then using this to promote multiverse psuedoscience. It's a problem because an infinite universe can't expand. The pressure is counterbalanced at all locations. It contradicts big-bang cosmology.

 

Thank you Trippy.

 

http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/

The above links to an article from NASA that sums up dark energy (and dark matter). It is not a done deal. There is room for discussion and room for better ideas.

Concerning Dark Matter:

 

One reasonable explanation for dark energy are these are photons that lie beyond radio waves. Radio waves have frequencies from 300 GHz to as low as 3 kHz, and corresponding wavelengths ranging from 1 millimeter (0.039 in) to 100 kilometers (62 mi). If we go below this, we would not observe anything, since this energy would not interact with the equipment and the source would be unclear.

Radio waves; Collective oscillation of charge carriers in bulk material (plasma oscillation). An example would be the oscillatory travels of the electrons in an antenna.

Plasma oscillations, also known as "Langmuir waves", are rapid oscillations of the electron density in conducting media such as plasmas or metals. The oscillations can be described as an instability in the dielectric function of a free electron gas.

The dielectric function of a material describes the electrical and optical properties versus frequency, wavelength, or energy. It describes the polarization (electric polarizability) and absorption properties of the material.

Langmuir waves were discovered by American physicists Irving Langmuir and Lewi Tonks in the 1920s. They are parallel in form to Jeans instability waves, which are caused by gravitational instabilities in a static medium.

 

See the NASA article wellwisher: "One explanation for dark energy is that it is a property of space. Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing... "empty space" can possess its own energy". There's no photons in this empty space, real or virtual. But it still has energy because energy is a property of space. Think about a steel coil spring. Compress it. Where is the energy stored? In the irons atoms? No. In the carbon atoms? No. It's in the bonds. In the field. In the spaces between the atoms. It's in the space.

 

Until you have a working model that can correctly and precisely predict these phenomena, I'd argue that they constitute evidence against whatever you're proposing rather than evidence for it, when GR with a few tweaks already works almost perfectly.

I don't fully understand what you're trying to refer to with this concept of "energy equalization", because you haven't hashed it out in any significant detail. At face value it doesn't sound at all like any feature emergent from the GR picture, and you can't just toss whatever features you want into a mathematical model and expect it to remain self-consistent. So by my understanding of what you're proposing, adding this concept of "energy equalization" to the picture means all the GR equations would have to be tweaked or completely replaced in some fashion to allow for it.

All the same, if the galaxies are clustering up at the local level, why would energy density shift over towards a uniform distribution on global scales? A priori there's no reason to contemplate such a picture, it doesn't emerge from General Relativity as it's presently understood, and in terms of physical evidence, the universe is already statistically homogeneous and isotropic, which means there's no varying energy densities to shift around anyhow, on global smeared out scales it's already uniform as is.

Well, the best I could personally do with the time and knowledge available to me was to picture a finite bubble universe operating under Newtonian gravity (which is still legitimate as a weak-field approximation to GR) with energy densities varying at different radii from the center, and there are several reasons why it doesn't appear to have any chance of working as far as yielding the features you're looking for, let alone predicting redshift, CMB and all the rest. To apply General Relativity in its full form directly to this picture would be exceedingly difficult and well beyond my present capabilities; it's a nightmare to work with even in the simplest possible cases of uniform energy density or eternal universes containing nothing but a single spherically symmetric black hole, and to go beyond that you basically have to resort to computer modelling and numerically approximating solutions which frequently don't differ much from the Newtonian prediction.

My current understanding of topology isn't sufficient to tell you what would happen in a closed spacetime where there's a limit to how far space itself extends, but in all honesty it doesn't seem to me like any of your ideas are particularly revolutionary things that no theoretician would have already tried to play with, and if placing some kind of boundary on spacetime to make it loop back on itself with varying energy densities and all the rest looked like a promising approach, I'm pretty convinced it would have already been attempted and published. Well, I did what I could with the tools at my disposal, and if you think there's something important I missed, I'm happy to take another look. I think exercises like this one right here are valuable for showing why scientists don't put much time or stock into certain concepts, but beyond direct modelling attempts I don't think there's any scientific legitimacy to qualitative verbal speculation any more than you could announce the sum of a series before you've made any attempt to calculate it.

Edit: So let's please stick to what we can mathematically model to one degree or another and compare directly with real evidence, and leave the "maybe this, maybe that" preaching to Philosophy, Alternative Theories etc. where it belongs.