Godfree wrote:chaz wyman wrote:
Yes, but so is everywhere else. If you travel in one direction you would eventually come back to where you start, space is contiguous. This solves the problem of infinity, and what is at the edge - there is no edge.
xenuwonder wrote:
Utter fantasy.
It's enjoyable to indulge in such fanciful and biblical ideas of a limit to our universe but I tend to be a little more mature when thinking about such topics.
Biblical? I really don’t see that; on the contrary, it is the bible that invokes the idea of infinity in reference to god’s power, knowledge and presence. In other words, god is everywhere and since god’s presence is infinite, everywhere is therefore infinite. Is that mature enough for you?
xenuwonder wrote: Please tell me what the circumference of the universe is. I'd be awfully chuffed to know.
Wouldn’t we all? It is not currently possible for more reasons than you can shake a stick at. For one thing it depends on which version of the big bang you are trying to size; ex nihilo, colliding branes and globular multiverse spring to mind. The last two are effectively infinite universe theories, but since they both make predictions which may be impossible even in principle to obtain evidence for, much less ‘prove’, a simple application of Occam’s razor leaves the ex nihilo, out of nothing, ‘Cor blimey, where did that come from?’ version as the most defensible.
But even that is really tricky; you might believe Alan Guth’s inflation period, in which case there was a brief time when the universe was expanding faster than the speed of light, how long for and what speed exactly are moot points. Then there is the difficulty that chaz alludes to, whatever the big bang, and hence our universe is made of, it expands. It started as a tiny point, a moment after it began to grow, when it was the size of a marble say, every single point within it was trying to grow; every secondary point was identical to the original point. When the original point was the size of the Earth, every secondary point was the size of a marble and every point within that was trying to grow. You can keep doing that a hundred, a thousand, million times, which would only take you to tea time. For every one of those points in points in points in points etc, everything around it has been expanding for 13.7 billion years.
Godfree wrote:The bb is the best fit , to what , it doesn't best fit the observational data,?!
It fits the observational data beautifully; it explains motion, it accounts for the cosmic background radiation and it explains red-shift without recourse to photon decay.
Godfree wrote:the bb theorists are constantly coming up with weird science to try and explain things like , " why are the galaxies distributed evenly" , etc
Science is weird. What weird science do you have in mind?
Godfree wrote:" why can we see large old galaxies in our oldest images ",,???
We can’t. The oldest image we have is the cosmic background radiation. The reason we have galaxies in our oldest images in the visible spectrum is that they are the only things big enough to see from such a distance. The most distant one is about 12.91billion light years away, giving it at least, 800million years to form; more if you take the expansion of space into account.
Godfree wrote:I think the one word that sums up mans problem with coming to terms with the scale of things , is ,,,,EGO ,,,
I shan’t tell you the one word I think sums this claim up.
Godfree wrote:the universe was made for us by god ,,,and god said there was a beginning ,
hence the western christian democracy , model of the universe has a beginning ,, how pathetic ,,,
I shan't tell you the string of words I think sums this claim up.
Godfree wrote:so Chaz me old mate , have a go at answering what made the something ,
if there was a beginning , then before it there must have been nothing ,
otherwise it's just a continuation and not a beginning ,
so from what are you going to make the something , the universe ,
and remember you are starting with nothing , explain please,,???
It’s a freak of nature. In an earlier post you wrote:
Godfree wrote:if we base everything on theory , then observation is pointless ,
What else would we base our theories on?
Godfree wrote:if we base everything on observation , we can be deceived , or draw incorrect conclusions from what we observe .
Indeed, always have, probably always will. The only philosopher that scientists pay much heed to is Karl Popper. He argued that no amount of supporting evidence will ever prove a theory, on the other hand, it doesn’t take much to falsify it; thedoc’s modified Olber’s paradox and gravity are serious problems for infinite size and age. We know that eventually everything grinds to a state that is for all practical purposes a halt. The moon always shows the same face to the Earth because gravity has stopped it spinning (technically it rotates as often as it orbits), Mercury has the same relation to the sun. The tidal forces from the moon are slowing the Earth’s rotation by one and a half milliseconds a century. In an infinite amount of time, everything stops and yet here we are spinning away. The suggestion that ‘It has always been here.’ solves the issue of where it came from just isn’t good enough.
Godfree wrote:There are many problems with the theory of the bb ,
True, but at least it does away with the problems of an infinitely old universe.