I agree with Dave. That site is just plain looney. And when the best evidence you can provide is the ramblings of someone called “Dali” on the Internet, you have a long way to go in supporting your case. Did you even notice that the other sections on the site are for “Flying Saucers from Andromeda,” “Men In Black,” “Crop Circles and Cattle Mutilations,” “Astral Projection,” and so on?
Beastal, you just don’t seem to have any idea of how to evaluate evidence. And as far as I can see, your rejection of the lack of a “cause” in quantum interactions is just the product of a blinkered mindset on your part. You just can’t seem to imagine that something outside the norms of everyday existence might be true. And yes, it’s silly to dismiss an idea when all the dismissal is based on is your own prejudices.
I have to rush in and defend Beastel. Not because I read Dali’s Loony Theory of Gravitons. Please, Beastel, be more skeptical of your sources! Reading that stuff gave me a bad case of bowl movements. That theory is like the Theory of Grinx that speculates that the reason we do what we do is because we have an infinite number of alter egos (or Grinx) in other space-time dimension who do the exact opposite of each other. Que?!?
Beastel, you’re not out of your mind for thinking all things must have a cause, including quantum fluctuations. For example, Einstein is noted for having said “God does not play dice”. You belong to a long and proud line of Humian descendents. The problem with yours (and other Humians) is that your world view is so stringently deterministic that things like “free will” become illusory foam. And also, 70 years of experimental data on the most basic level have defied your spin on things. QM (quantum mechanics) is so far the most appropriate scientific model for describing things on a sub-atomic level. The QM model first uses a deterministic approach that would be to your liking, calculating all potential evolutions of the wave function (Schroedinger’s equation). But when a measurement is made we apply a procedure called state-vector reduction to determine the potential outcome. This state vector reduction is known as “collapse of the wavefunction”. It’s at this level that QM becomes (from a Humian perspective like yours) oddly indeterministic!
Now, reconciling this with a wider epistemic system (system of knowledge) is yet another ball game. The fundamental question is what is actually happening when we make a measurement “causing” (careful with how you interpret that Beastel!) the collapse of the wave function. To turn the problem into something a little more vivid, Erwin Schroedinger came up with a famous thought experiment you may be familiar with. Let’s imagine we lock a cat in a hermetically closed black box that can’t be penetrated by any force whatsoever in the Universe. The black box is hooked up to a phial of poisonous gas. The release mechanism of the phial is controlled by some QM event (like the decay of radioactive material). If the event occurs, the cat tragically dies and if not, the cat happily lives on licking its beautiful paws. We wait until there’s a 50/50 chance for the event to have occurred and then open our superbox. Opening the black box is like making an observation (or measurement). It “causes” the wavefunction to collapses. We will at that moment find out for sure whether the cat is still alive or has sadly died from our inhumane experiment. The question is, during the time before we opened the box and thereby “caused” the collapse of the wavefunction, was the cat dead or alive? Or was it both? Or neither? Remember that Schroedinger’s equation is inherently deterministic and fulfill all evolutionary possibilities prior to any measurements!
There’s nothing illegitimate about thinking that QM is somehow incomplete and therefore introduces oddly spontaneous forces like the collapse of the wavefunction. But so far, despite your friend Dali’s well intended attempts to save us from ignorance, QM is the best approach to things on the sub-atomic level. I, myself, would also argue that even on the observable level (often called the Newtonian level) nothing is inherently deterministic. Let’s say I’m trying to get from A to B. All I know is that I should take Route 1. Suddenly, Route 1 ends and splits into Route 2 and 3. Which way do I go? Will the choice I make be determined by everything that happened to me up to that point? Or will I just “randomly” select one or the other? What “causes” my wavefunction to collapse? Is there a cause? Or is there only effect?
ETHIC
Beastal’s problem is not that he intuitively feels that all events must have a cause. Most people do (and so did Einstein), and in fact in the macroscopic that’s the way things behave. Beastal’s problem is that he assumes his own thought processes necessarily reflect something fundamental about the way the Universe works.
I don’t think the light of SD-type enlightenment is best spread by turning the flame on those who ask stubborn, impertinent, or otherwise naughty questions, Colibri.
If we are not allowed to assume that our “own thought processes necessarily reflect something about the way the universe works,” what then is the justification of such things as Great Debates, the Straight Dope, science, philosophy, learning?
What is the alternative to the cited assumption? To say that my thoughts may or may not reflect ect etc? If I am not allowed to assume that, necessary, some truth is present in my thoughts, then the “may or may not” of the preceding sentence amounts to the claim that nothing whatever is determinable-as-truth. (Including the “fact” that I just wrote that sentence; including the “fact” that words have a meaning.)
Beastal is entirely reasonable to ask why some phenomenon that he believes he observes in the midlevel world “breaks down” at some point. The best response is to ask him to reexamine certain specific assumptions, not something as general (and necessary!) as the belief that reality is to some degree a humanly-knowable thing.
Come now. I might have been critical, but I didn’t flame him. And I and others have been going on for three pages now rather patiently (IMO) trying to respond to his questions. But for the last page or so almost all Beastal has said pretty much boils down to “I just can’t believe it!” without providing any real basis for his belief. And his citation of that “Dali” page just shows he hasn’t paid attention to anything that’s been said about scientifically valid evidence vs opinion.
I think you are missing my point, or maybe I expressed it poorly. What I intended to indicate is that just because something seems intuitively correct, doesn’t make it so. Certainly it seems to be “common sense” that heavier objects should fall faster than lighter ones, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.
Have you read the whole thread? I and others have been asking him to examine specific assumptions, and providing cites and links, since page one. And I am of course not disputing that reality is to some degree “knowable” - otherwise I wouldn’t be a scientist - just that “common sense” is not a very guide.
My apologies if I misread you, Colibri. I was reacting in part to your characterizing Beastal via a third-person aside, a mode which (in my mind) always comes across as a put-down.
Then again, looking further back, are you really pleased with the tone of the following? “Beastal, you just don’t seem to have any idea of how to evaluate evidence. And as far as I can see, your rejection of the lack of a “cause” in quantum interactions is just the product of a blinkered mindset on your part. You just can’t seem to imagine that something outside the norms of everyday existence might be true. And yes, it’s silly to dismiss an idea when all the dismissal is based on is your own prejudices.” IMHO, this comes across as csicoppery: “Dude, you’re not only wrong, you must LIKE being wrong, and GET A WHIFF OF YOUR MOMMA!” Wasn’t it the Amazing Randi who said that?..
Bygones.
On the substantial issue, I think we’ve both attempted to identify the assumptions that lead a person to presuming that a spatial volume must necessarily be contained “in” something not itself.
I am a little confused.
Ok, let’s say we put a human outside the universe.
Now, a human experiences something in relative time, if he moves his hand around, he sees his hand moving.
This is in theory time. Now, if he was outside of space time, he would not be able to move right?
So how can light coming from space-time break into ‘nothingness’?
Would that mean the light would simply ‘die’?
Or, if the universe is expanding at an ever accelerating speed, how can something that is confined by space-time(the universe itself, being space-time, should be governed by the laws of physics no?) move at a higher speed than light? Does light ever reach this ‘edge’? Or is the nothingness always a few steps ahead? Shouldn’t there be something in between the two? Like a middle boundary between space-time and ‘nothingness’.
Even though something like that may exist, I don’t grasp the concept of it’s edge.
How can something end in space-time, then morph or abruptetly end in something that has no time or space?
It seems impossible for the two to ever break into eachother, or even affect eachothers existence.
Also, I have a question about the big bang.
If this big bang happened everywhere at the same time, or whatever, how can the universe be expanding?
It had to have started somewhere, at one point, or maybe as a ball, maybe the biggest star in existence, exploded, and now it’s expanding. Of course, that would mean all matter in the whole universe would have existed in a small ball some trillion years ago(how long ago was the big bang again?)
Still, the concept of time not existing is something that bugs me.
I always saw time as something that had to exist everywhere.
It is when we get to the basics, only a measurment system for moving matter.
For time to not exist, we would have to have no matter at all.
I don’t think there exists any matter that is frozen in time.
Nor do I think there exists any anti-matter that is frozen in time.
So this is where I lose it. How can matter animated in time expand into ‘nothing’ that has no time? It’s just not possible.
The universe can’t be expanding. Or at least, it can’t be expanding into something that is timeless.
No for arguments sake, let’s say it is expanding.
What would happen at the moment moving matter hits ‘zero-time’?
Either the matter would freeze outside the universe’s barrier, and simply stand there, forever. Or, nothingness would decrease, and make up space for the matter.
Because, they can’t exist at the same spot. It either has time, or it doesn’t.
Anyway, I think I can go on forever, hopefully someone here will give me something that makes me think in other directions, cause I hate being lost in my own thoughts and not having any way of escaping them.
Through most of the thread I have been addressing Beastal directly. My “aside” came in response to other people also discussing him in the third person. I previously made similar comments to him directly.
You’re not looking very far back. I’ve been trying to get Beastal to examine his basic assumptions from my first few posts, to little avail. Yes, I’m probably getting a little testy after having tried to get the same point across a half dozen times without notable success.
I don’t think it makes much sense to consider something “outside the universe”. There is no time or space outside the universe, the universe is all there is. It’s like asking you to consider someone just north of the north pole, the premise is inconsistant with the rest of the situation.
There is no “boundry” at the edge of the universe. There is no edge to begin with. An analogy is where is the edge of the surface of a sphere? There is none. The sphere can even expand, created more surface, but there is no edge, or is anything expanding faster than physics would allow.
As mentioned before, there is no edge, so this isn’t an issue. You also seem to have the idea that something exists “beyond” the universe, and this doesn’t seem to be accurate. There isn’t any there there.
No, it didn’t start at a single point because space-time didn’t exist yet. When the BB occured, it create space-time, all of it, so the BB happened everywhere at once. Don’t think of it as an explosion, it was a creation. The concept of expanding usually implies expanding into some already existing space. This is not the case in cosmology, the universe expanding is actually created more space. The current estimates of the BB IIRC is 15-20 billion years.
But time and matter were created at the same time. The cosmic egg that was the origin of the BB wasn’t a ball of matter sitting in empty space. While not an easy read, Steven Hawkings “A Brief History of Time” will help explain some of this.
I’m going to pass on this one, because frankly I don’t understand what you are trying to say. I think you still have the idea of the universe exanding into “empty space” and that’s just not the proper way to look at things.
Don’t know if that helped, I’m certainly no expert at this or at explaining it.
Thank you Telemark. I’ll read Stephen Hawking’s book then come back with more opinions
Just like to add one thing, I’m starting to get my head around the idea that there really isn’t anything at all outside the universe, it certainly makes things easier.
Btw did you know ‘Telemark’ is a county where I live?
It’s not just that there isn’t ‘anything’; it’s that there isn’t anything or nothing. We can’t see it so it is impossible for us to say what it is. The completely unobservable is, by definition, unobservable.
I apologize ahead of time for the exceedingly disjoint nature of this post. I thought, though, that since others may have had similar thoughts it would be good to try to fight all the ignorance I could spot. Unfortunately this has caused my response to turn out rather ugly, but I think it’s still valuable.
Impossible by definition (already covered), but let’s try to run with it.
There are two definitions we’re working with here… observable and unobservable. The unobservable places (that we have no way of knowing whether they exist or not) may or may not have “time” as you or I know it. It’s impossible for us to say what actually goes on there.
[QUOTE[So how can light coming from space-time break into ‘nothingness’?[/QUOTE]
We don’t know. We don’t even know if it’s possible as it would seem to violate the conservation of energy to some extent, but then again, maybe not. It’s all in the way you look at things. We don’t know what happens when light passes from this universe into “elsewhere” (at, for example, the black hole singularity). We have no way of explaining it since we can’t observe it.
The expansion of space is not confined by the speed of light. This is one of those peculiar things that gets avoided because it’s not trivial to explain. Basically, if space expands faster than the speed of light, no matter is expanding faster than the speed of light. However, there is a problem of whether space itself keeps energy. If this is the case, then it can’t expand faster than the speed of light in its reference frame. But that’s pretty weird ether nonsense by now, and so it’s not apt to apply. To give a basic explanation: if space expands faster than the speed of light (as it did during inflation) then stuff ends up outside of our universe more and more. We don’t see the stuff because it can never communicate with us (as the speed of light is the cosmic speed limit).
Again, the answer is dependent on your understanding of “nothingness”.
This is a bit too illucid for me to tackle.
Welcome to the club. However, the edge is simply defined by the amount of time the universe has been around. It’s the “observing limit”, if you will.
Some scientists like to talk about phase transitions of space in vacuum energy density, but I suspect you are trying asking about a misconception you have about what the boundary of the universe “consists” of.
See “raisin bread” model for details.
Total misconception about stars. Get that one out of your mind. Stars didn’t come into existence until approx. a billion years AFTER the Big Bang. The Big Bang did start at one “point”, but that’s where the entire universe was at the time. Said “point” no longer exists, or actually still exists, it just has gotten a whole lot bigger. Talking about a “ball” isn’t necessarily completely looney. Some scientists speculate that said “ball” had a diameter of a Planck Length. That is, however, speculation and nothing more.
Depending on the deceleration parameter and the Hubble constant the Big Bang occurred some 13 to 15 billion years ago.
Again, welcome to the club. And yet, GR tells us that time and space are interconnected and are not a given grid that is forever frozen as a standard of measurement. The universe is not in a steady state, despite the fact that such a state would be a bit more philosophically pleasing to the materialist.
Nope, it is more than simply a measuring system. Time is a dimension that is orthogonal to the rest of the dimensions, but carries with it (in the metric) a different sign. Weird, I know, but true, nonetheless.
In our physical universe, this might, perhaps, be true. But we’re still really looking for the connection between the creation of the two. For now, the best we can say is, “can we get back to you on that one?”
Time marches on in our universe, so it’s impossible to do the experiment required to test that hypothesis.
But what about frozen in imaginary time?
Matter isn’t expanding. 2) The vacuum has time 3) I think it’s time for you to begin reading some cosmology books. It’s not a good idea to say what is and what isn’t possible if you haven’t read about what’s been tried.
The old question: “What is the universe expanding INTO?” is a bit of a Zen koan. It’s not expanding into something. It’s not even expanding into nothing. It’s just expanding. You’re trying to put a basis outside of what we can observe. There is no way to do that. And, by the by, the evidence is overwhelming that the universe is expanding. So ridiculously overwhelming it’s pretty foolish to deny it’s expanding.
That point would be the beginning of the universe. It was infinitely dense and infinitely energetic at that time. Impossible for us to probe the infinite limit. All we can do is ever reach upward in energy.
Huh? I lost yah there. You’re beginning to write yourself into a corner (or at least in circles).
Time is ubiquitous. There was never a “time” that it didn’t exist.
No, you will eventually have to stop. It’s inevitable.
I just want to thank you for your great responses. I have been following several threads that you are actively contributing to, and your ability to break down the complex into nice non-physicist bite sized pieces is refreshing.
JS Princeton
Bravely done! I just have one comment. Isn’t the “raisin bread” analogy slightly misleading if you think of the raisins as galactic clusters or some such? Isn’t space actually expanding on a local scale as well? For example, I know my computer monitor is bound to me so that the distance between me and my monitor isn’t changing, but isn’t the space between my computer monitor and me also expanding, albeit on a tiny scale?
Truth Seeker, all of space isn’t expanding in the same way. It’s expansion occurs in the multiplicative sense and not in the additive sense. If everything was expanding uniformly, then everything, you, me, your computer, the distance between you and your computer, rulers and any other distance mesurement you’d care to name would also expand. Everything would happily expand along with the universe and we would never know that anything was expanding at all. This is actually why raisin bread is a good conceptual (if not altogether correct) analogy. Think of the raisins as being of a scale that they aren’t effected by the general flow. Galaxies themselves actually stay pretty much the same size from when they started out until today as the Hubble Flow is a cosmological effect. What happens is stuff that is further away goes faster away from us than stuff that is close by. This means that your computer moniter will not budge but the Coma Cluster is leaving you behind!
In another sense you are right. Space seems to have the intrinsic property that it is expanding, but as the expansion is occurring (rougly) according to the Hubble Law (v=H*d) with H being on the order of 50 km/sec per Megaparsec (which is an incredibly long scale length… but I leave it to you to figure out exactly how long), there is really not that much expansion to speak of on the small scales of, say, the Milky Way Galaxy.
Truth Seeker, all of space isn’t expanding in the same way. Its expansion occurs in the multiplicative sense and not in the additive sense. If everything was expanding uniformly, then everything, you, me, your computer, the distance between you and your computer, rulers and any other distance mesurement you’d care to name would also expand. Everything would happily expand along with the universe and we would never know that anything was expanding at all. This is actually why raisin bread is a good conceptual (if not altogether correct) analogy. Think of the raisins as being of a scale that they aren’t effected by the general flow. Galaxies themselves actually stay pretty much the same size from when they started out until today as the Hubble Flow is a cosmological effect. What happens is stuff that is further away goes faster away from us than stuff that is close by. This means that your computer moniter will not budge but the Coma Cluster is leaving you behind!
In another sense you are right. Space seems to have the intrinsic property that it is expanding, but as the expansion is occurring (rougly) according to the Hubble Law (v=H*d) with H being on the order of 50 km/sec per Megaparsec (which is an incredibly long scale length… but I leave it to you to figure out exactly how long), there is really not that much expansion to speak of on the small scales of, say, the Milky Way Galaxy.
“…the evidence is overwhelming that the universe is expanding. So ridiculously overwhelming it’s pretty foolish to deny it’s expanding…”
I’m perfectly willing to accept this. But the only evidence of which I am aware is the red shift. I gather that alternative explanations of the red shift have come up pretty lame…but is there other equally compelling evidence of the standard space-is-expanding model?
For example, peering with our instruments into distant space, do we detect hydrogen atoms in the vacuum being more densely packed? Or galactic clusters closer together the further out (and thus “back”) we look?
I am aware of the evidence of the Big Bang from universal background radiation, but not sure whether this is interpreted as demonstrating the expansion hypothesis or not. It seems the two could be independent.
