Posted on 08/25/2016 7:40:44 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Our solar system is in a unique area of the universe that's conducive to life, says John Webb and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales, who have carried out intensive study that threatens to turn the world of theoretical physics upside down.
The team studied the fine structure in the spectral lines of the light from distant quasars from data from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile with stunning results that showed that one of the constants of nature --the Alpha appears to be different in different parts of the cosmos, supporting the theory that our solar system is in a part of the universe that is "just right" for life, which negates Einstein's equivalence principle, which states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere.
The "magic number," known as Alpha or the fine-structure constant, appears to vary throughout the Universe, concluded the team from the University of New South Wales, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Cambridge.
"What they found threatens to turn the world of theoretical physics upside down," said theorectical physicist, Paul Davies of Arizona State in an article in Cosmos this past January. "On the face of it, α has slightly different values in different parts of the Universe, implying that the fine structure constant is not a constant at all, but varies over cosmological distances and times."
"This finding in 2015 was a real surprise to everyone," said John Webb of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailygalaxy.com ...
there must be a force to account for it, and it sure isn’t gravity, the weak force, or the strong force, so what is it?
It's not an "accelerating inflation". Inflation supposedly occurred in the very earliest stages of the BB, the first ridiculously tiny fraction of a second. It was something that was later added to explain away the flaws with the standard Big Bang model (see below). However, Inflation itself has serious flaws. Many cosmologists say it's too contrived.
===============================================
The standard cosmological model is the "big bang", and while the evidence supporting that model is enormous, it is not without problems. Trefil in The Moment of Creation does a nice job of pointing out those problems.
| 1. The Antimatter Problem |
| 2. The Galaxy Formation Problem |
| 3. The Horizon Problem |
| 4. The Flatness Problem |
=================================================
|
Triggered by the symmetry breaking that separates off the strong force, models suggest an extraordinary inflationary phase in the era 10-36 seconds to 10-32 seconds. More expansion is presumed to have occurred in this instant than in the entire period ( 14 billion years?) since. The inflationary epoch may have expanded the universe by 1020 or 1030 in this incredibly brief time. The inflationary hypothesis offers a way to deal with the horizon problem and the flatness problem of cosmological models. |
Lemonick and Nash in a popular article for Time describe inflation as an "amendment to the original Big Bang" as follows: "when the universe was less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second old, it briefly went through a period of superchanged expansion, ballooning from the size of a proton to the size of a grapegruit (and thus expanding at many, many times the speed of light). Then the expansion slowed to a much more stately pace. Improbable as the theory sounds, it has held up in every observation astronomers have managed to make."
| Inflationary theory |
| Early universe chronology |
| Inflationary implications of WMAP [The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe] |
“It’s not an “accelerating inflation””
Well, accelerating expansion, call it what you will. It’s happening and that means the problem remains. You can’t have an acceleration without an associated force, even though scientists don’t seem in any hurry to address that issue.
If the expansion is accelerating, it simply cannot be dismissed as an after-effect of the big bang, or the expansion would be either stable or decelerating. Acceleration means some undescribed force is currently driving it.
Yes, I’m aware of that explanation, however it is a cop out.
Why? Because what is required is a force, and energy =/= a force. Mass and energy are equivalent, so if you add energy to mass you just get more of what you already had, you don’t get acceleration.
The nature of space-time is apparently such that it need not necessarily follow the ordinary laws of physics. ie, galaxies can and do expand away from each other faster than light speed. This is so because the galaxies are not actually moving through space but rather that the space between them is growing larger. The 'dimensionality', or 'measuring stick', is increasing in magnitude.
(Assuming your post isn't sarcasm)Sure it will.
That's one of the reasons Inertial Navigation Systems "drift".
Ever heard of a Foucault Pendulum?
Energy = Force x Distance
Well, what you talk about doesn’t actually violate relativity, since you are dealing with different reference frames, such as the old thought experiment with two ships leaving earth in opposite directions, each traveling 0.9c. If you imagine a stationary observer with a universal reference frame, it seems to violate relativity, but there is no universal reference frame in relativity, so it’s just an illusion of a violation.
On the other hand, acceleration requiring a force isn’t a principle that varies with reference frames or depends on relativity. It’s simply basic mechanics. Something is accelerating the matter in the universe, and it doesn’t matter how that acceleration is transmitted, through the expansion of space or otherwise, it still requires a force.
I take the false religion of evolution very seriously since I used to be a believer. The theory starts with the big bang and ends with humans pondering it. But when it comes to probability most people have no clue about the actual probability of a bacterium falling together at random. Since evolution believes mathematical craziness, then the probability of Hillary visiting a star or simply evolving there is similar math and fits right into the conversation.
No, work = force x distance. Energy is the capacity to do work, but a force is still required.
Not true, at least according to theory. It is space-time itself that is expanding or accelerating. The objects (galaxies, etc), although moving further apart with time, are not actually moving *through* space but rather remaining where they are, outside of local gravitational movements/interactions.
Dec 2015
by Fraser Cain
Question: How Can Galaxies Move Away Faster Than Speed of Light?
Answer: Einstein’s Theory of Relativity says that the speed of light – 300,000 km/s – is the maximum speed that anything can travel in the Universe. It requires more and more energy to approach the speed of light. You could use up all the energy in the Universe and still not be traveling at light speed.
As you know, most of the galaxies in the Universe are expanding away from us because of the Big Bang, and the subsequent effects of dark energy, which is providing an additional accelerating force on the expansion of the Universe.
Galaxies, like our own Milky Way are carried along by the expansion of the Universe, and will move apart from every other galaxy, unless they’re close enough to hold together with gravity.
As you look at galaxies further and further away, they appear to be moving faster and faster away from us. And it is possible that they could eventually appear to be moving away from us faster than light. At that point, light leaving the distant galaxy would never reach us.
When that happens, the distant galaxy would just fade away as the last of the photons reached Earth, and then we would never know it was ever there.
This sounds like it breaks Einstein’s theories, but it doesn’t. The galaxies themselves aren’t actually moving very quickly through space, it’s the space itself which is expanding away, and the galaxy is being carried along with it. As long as the galaxy doesn’t try to move quickly through space, no physical laws are broken.
One sad side effect of this expansion is that most of the galaxies will have receded over this horizon in about 3 trillion years, and future cosmologists will never know there’s a great big Universe out there.
You can read more about this in an article I did called the End of Everything.
http://www.universetoday.com/13808/how-can-galaxies-recede-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/#
A inertial guidance system drifts only because its frame of reference changes.
A gyroscope does not precess unless the frame of reference within which it operates moves.
Forget the Foucault Pendulum.
Buy a gyroscope and do the experiment for yourself.
Mount the gyroscope in any orientation on its tripod support. It will still have two, mutually perpendicular axes of free rotation.
Spin up the gyroscope on a stationary table. Observe it for fifteen minutes. It will not precess.
See post 93.
“It is space-time itself that is expanding or accelerating.”
Sure, that’s fine, but I don’t think it solves the problem. There is still an acceleration to the expansion. Acceleration just doesn’t happen without some continuous application of force. If the big bang simply set spacetime to expanding, it would not be accelerating. Something must, right now, be continuously acting on spacetime to increase the velocity of the expansion. Not an event billions or trillions of years in the past.
The metric expansion of space is the increase of the distance between two distant parts of the universe with time. It is an intrinsic expansion whereby the scale of space itself changes. This is different from other examples of expansions and explosions in that, as far as observations can ascertain, it is a property of the entirety of the universe rather than a phenomenon that can be contained and observed from the outside.
Metric expansion is a key feature of Big Bang cosmology, is modeled mathematically with the FLRW metric[clarification needed], and is a generic property of the universe we inhabit.
However, the model is valid only on large scales (roughly the scale of galaxy clusters and above). At smaller scales matter has become bound together under the influence of gravitational attraction and such things do not expand at the metric expansion rate as the universe ages. As such, the only galaxies receding from one another as a result of metric expansion are those separated by cosmologically relevant scales larger than the length scales associated with the gravitational collapse that are possible in the age of the universe given the matter density and average expansion rate.
At the end of the early universe's inflationary period, all the matter and energy in the universe was set on an inertial trajectory consistent with the equivalence principle and Einstein's general theory of relativity and this is when the precise and regular form of the universe's expansion had its origin (that is, matter in the universe is separating because it was separating in the past due to the inflation field)[citation needed].
According to measurements, the universe's expansion rate was decelerating until about 5 billion years ago due to the gravitational attraction of the matter content of the universe, after which time the expansion began accelerating. The source of this acceleration is currently unknown.
Physicists have postulated the existence of dark energy, appearing as a cosmological constant in the simplest gravitational models as a way to explain the acceleration. According to the simplest extrapolation of the currently-favored cosmological model (known as "ΛCDM"), this acceleration becomes more dominant into the future.
While special relativity prohibits objects from moving faster than light with respect to a local reference frame where spacetime can be treated as flat and unchanging, it does not apply to situations where spacetime curvature or evolution in time become important. These situations are described by general relativity, which allows the separation between two distant objects to increase faster than the speed of light, although the definition of "distance" here is somewhat different to that used in an inertial frame.
The definition of distance used here is the summation or integration of local comoving distances, all done at constant local proper time. For example, galaxies that are more than the Hubble radius, approximately 4.5 gigaparsecs or 14.7 billion light-years, away from us have a recession speed that is faster than the speed of light. Visibility of these objects depends on the exact expansion history of the universe. Light that is emitted today from galaxies beyond the cosmological event horizon, about 5 gigaparsecs or 16 billion light-years, will never reach us, although we can still see the light that these galaxies emitted in the past.
Because of the high rate of expansion, it is also possible for a distance between two objects to be greater than the value calculated by multiplying the speed of light by the age of the universe. These details are a frequent source of confusion among amateurs and even professional physicists.[1]
Due to the non-intuitive nature of the subject and what has been described by some as "careless" choices of wording, certain descriptions of the metric expansion of space and the misconceptions to which such descriptions can lead are an ongoing subject of discussion in the realm of pedagogy and communication of scientific concepts.[2][3][4][5]
In June 2016, NASA and ESA scientists reported that the universe was found to be expanding 5% to 9% faster than thought earlier, based on studies using the Hubble Space Telescope.[6]
I was more just pointing out that F=Ma doesn't apply to galaxies moving apart due to universal acceleration. ie, you wouldn't calculate the mass of a particular galaxy, then multiply it by the rate of the universe's acceleration in order to arrive at the mysterious "dark energy force" or whatever it is responsible for the acceleration.
Right, but even if you discount the mass, you’ve still got an acceleration curve, and mathematically, that doesn’t happen without some constant additive factor. Normally that is a force, but I suppose it could be something else if we aren’t talking about accelerating masses. Still seems to me that an undescribed fundamental force is the natural suspect.
I guess it just goes back to the mysterious nature of space-time. I mean, we still don't really know what causes gravity, a supposed "curvature of space-time".
Even that explanation leaves much to be desired, yeah. It’s almost circular logic. Ok, gravity is a deformation of spacetime, but that doesn’t explain how a deformation of spacetime translates into the equivalent of an attractive force.
I mean the whole “rubber sheet” illustration only works when you are in a gravity well, so it’s no demonstration at all. If you tried that out in deep space, the bowling ball and ball bearings would all just float off instead of appearing to orbit each other.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.