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Misconceptions about the Big Bang
Scientific American ^ | March 2005 | Charles H. Lineweaver and Tamara M. Davis

Posted on 02/24/2005 3:54:37 AM PST by PatrickHenry

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To: PatrickHenry

>> Hubble's law predicts that galaxies beyond a certain distance, known as the Hubble distance, recede faster than the speed of light. For the measured value of the Hubble constant, this distance is about 14 billion light-years.

If Hubble's "Law" is correct we will never see those galaxies because they are moving away from us faster than their light is moving toward us. That would be strange, indeed, except for the fact that the speed of light is nothing to our all-powerful God -- He who created the heaven and the earth and all its host -- He whose power is beyond our comprehension since we are mere men with no power, to speak of. Hubble's "Law" is certainly possible. Of course, if the appropriately named Hubble Telescope or some future device proves Hubble wrong, then maybe his calculations were wrong -- maybe he meant 20 billion light years, give or take a few, or a bunch. Or maybe he was a mere dreamer who had no clue about the creation of the universe, though he pretended so and wanted so much to be right. But, no matter, he was certainly fascinated by its incredible beauty and unimaginable vastness, as am I.



121 posted on 02/24/2005 7:33:01 PM PST by PhilipFreneau (Congress is defined as the United States Senate and House of Representatives; now read 1st Amendment)
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To: fortheDeclaration
Causality presupposes an effect and the Universe was either uncaused (always existed) or is the effect of something else.

You're talking out of your hat. Cause and effect necessarily take place in a specified time sequence, which doesn't necessarily apply before the Big Bang. (Nothing is south of the south pole.)

Moreover, there are events that occur in real time that are demonstrably uncaused. Subatomic decays are a whole class of examples. If they were caused by some undiscovered mechanism, pairs of decays would have to obey Bell's inequality. (Look it up if you're unfamiliar with it.) But it's an irreducible experimental fact that some decays violate Bell's inequality.

So either the events are uncaused, or there is some sort of faster-than-light signal that causes the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations that violate the inequality. But faster-than-light signals ipso facto violate causality: if two events have a spacelike separation, the order of the events is frame-dependent (i.e., you can always find a physical frame in which the effect precedes the cause).

The mere existence of EPR correlations is an experimental proof that cause-and-effect cannot be universal.

122 posted on 02/24/2005 7:37:08 PM PST by Physicist
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To: 2ndreconmarine
Are you sure??? I am on travel and don't have my textbooks, but I believe you have quoted the Lorentz transformation from Special Relativity.

Yeah, read my follow-up. I was shooting from the hip, responding to PH's post before I read the article.

123 posted on 02/24/2005 7:38:41 PM PST by Physicist
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To: Physicist
Did the Universe have a beginning or not?

If it did, then it is an effect of something (of God, or the Big Bang etc)

124 posted on 02/25/2005 12:28:35 AM PST by fortheDeclaration
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To: furball4paws
Well, most teachers and writers will look to themselves for why they are not getting across the information.

Evolutionists blame the hearers.

What the real problem is is that the hearers are listening for facts, and what they are hearing is supposition and conjecture, mixed with alot of faith.

125 posted on 02/25/2005 12:35:23 AM PST by fortheDeclaration
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To: Lurking Libertarian
Or possibility #3: the Universe is much, much stranger than it seems like to us.

Oh, without question the Universe is much stranger then any scientist can imagine.

They haven't even gotten near the Third heaven, throne of God Himself.

126 posted on 02/25/2005 12:39:49 AM PST by fortheDeclaration
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To: jwalsh07

It doesn't surprise me you refuse to actually learn anything.


127 posted on 02/25/2005 2:34:17 AM PST by Junior (FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC)
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To: fortheDeclaration
Did the Universe have a beginning or not? If it did, then it is an effect of something (of God, or the Big Bang etc)

That logic is simply wrong on its face. Causality, as you lay it out, is a consequence of time. But time is a physical property of the universe and exists within it. The universe does not exist in time.

Once again, the north-south coordinate has a definite beginning and a definite ending, but this doesn't imply that anything lies south of the south pole. At the south pole, all possible directions point north, including directions that lie at right angles to each other. Similarly, at the Big Bang, in the simplest (Friedmann-Robertson-Walker) model, all possible directions point towards the future. If there's geometrically no past, there can't be a prior cause.

128 posted on 02/25/2005 3:26:07 AM PST by Physicist
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To: Physicist
But time is a physical property of the universe and exists within it. The universe does not exist in time.

This is a very good point. Time being, in essence, a knowable dimension.

If there's geometrically no past, there can't be a prior cause.

I understand the conclusion of this statement, but I can't grasp the meaning of a "pior cause." Do you mean outside of time?

Will you please elaborate, thanks.

129 posted on 02/25/2005 5:25:10 AM PST by sirchtruth (Words Mean Things...)
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To: fortheDeclaration
They haven't even gotten near the Third heaven, throne of God Himself.

You may be correct in general terms, but there are many things I've seen that science has discovered which are at the very least a pin hole's view towards God.

Furthermore, Science might not discover it all, but in the scriptures themselves the clues are enormous for science to use to discover more.

130 posted on 02/25/2005 5:32:36 AM PST by sirchtruth (Words Mean Things...)
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To: sirchtruth
No one is arguing against science, as long as it science.

Evolution is not a science.

131 posted on 02/25/2005 5:48:56 AM PST by fortheDeclaration
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To: fortheDeclaration
Evolution is not a science.

No, evolution is not a FACT!

132 posted on 02/25/2005 6:17:05 AM PST by sirchtruth (Words Mean Things...)
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To: fortheDeclaration

see post 113. Learning is the responsibility of the learner and no one else.


133 posted on 02/25/2005 7:51:19 AM PST by furball4paws (It's not the cough that carried him off - it's the coffin they carried him off in (O. Nash -I think))
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To: sirchtruth
I understand the conclusion of this statement, but I can't grasp the meaning of a "pior cause." Do you mean outside of time?

No. I said that if time doesn't exist before the Big Bang, there can't be a prior cause. "Prior" means "at an earlier time", and "cause" means a specific event at a well-defined place and time. To have a prior cause, there has to be a time at which it occurred.

That's not to say that it's impossible to construct models in which the Big Bang happens in a larger context (i.e., in which the Big Bang can be said to have a cause). Chaotic inflation, for example, has a gigantic number of Big Bangs, each giving rise to many more. Each of those cosmoses can be said to have a cause. My point was that there is no mathematical or philosophical requirement that such an outside context exist, although it may.

134 posted on 02/25/2005 8:32:43 AM PST by Physicist
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To: PatrickHenry

Printed this out for Sir SuziQ. He LOVES this stuff!


135 posted on 02/25/2005 8:52:20 AM PST by SuziQ
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To: Junior
It doesn't surprise me you refuse to actually learn anything.

I did learn something, I learned that the universe In the beginning there were grapefruit and since the grapefruit were abundant, that was good.

136 posted on 02/25/2005 9:28:19 AM PST by jwalsh07
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To: jwalsh07

Your reading comprehension is horrible. Your ability to grasp analogies is equally horrendous. And yet, you seem unnaturally proud of your ignorance.


137 posted on 02/25/2005 9:33:49 AM PST by Junior (FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC)
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To: Junior
And yet, you seem unnaturally proud of your ignorance.

Darwin Central is in a continuous war with agents of the Impervium.

138 posted on 02/25/2005 11:38:31 AM PST by PatrickHenry (<-- Click on my name. The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: PatrickHenry
Cosmologists sometimes state that the universe used to be the size of a grapefruit, but what they mean is that the part of the universe we can now see--our observable universe--used to be the size of a grapefruit.

Observers living in the Andromeda galaxy and beyond have their own observable universes that are different from but overlap with ours. Andromedans can see galaxies we cannot, simply by virtue of being slightly closer to them, and vice versa. Their observable universe also used to be the size of a grapefruit. Thus, we can conceive of the early universe as a pile of overlapping grapefruits that stretches infinitely in all directions.

Correspondingly, the idea that the big bang was "small" is misleading. The totality of space could be infinite. Shrink an infinite space by an arbitrary amount, and it is still infinite.


So the universe was infinite prior to the big bang, and is infinite now, only more so....

I gues the big bang just got bigger.
139 posted on 02/25/2005 11:55:32 AM PST by NonLinear ("If not instantaneous, then extraordinarily fast" - Galileo re. speed of light. circa 1600)
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To: ASA Vet
If there were a Science Forum would the SN's still come?

Pardon my ignorance, but what are the "SN's"? First time seeing that abbrev.
140 posted on 02/25/2005 12:03:57 PM PST by NonLinear ("If not instantaneous, then extraordinarily fast" - Galileo re. speed of light. circa 1600)
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