On Wed, 17 Oct 2012 12:18:06 -0700, "Hägar" wrote:


"Painius" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 16 Oct 2012 13:35:07 -0700 (PDT), Double-A
wrote:

On Oct 16, 12:32 am, Painius wrote:
From Wikipedia...

"Georges Henri Joseph douard Lema tre (17 July 1894 20 June 1966)
was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the
Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). He was the first person to
propose the theory of the expansion of the Universe, widely
misattributed to Edwin Hubble.


Yes, Hubble would have nothing to do with such nonsense!

Maybe not at first - but then, when he did come around and embrace the
proposal, Hubble gave it scientific credibility. He looked out and
saw faraway galaxies that seemed to be rushing away from us at
tremendous speeds. He noted that the farther away those galaxies were
from us, the faster away from us they appeared to go.

So he interpreted his observations of those faraway galaxies to mean
that the Universe indeed *must* be expanding. And it was never
questioned that those faraway galaxies' behaviors had taken place
billions of years ago, that there was no way of telling what those
galaxies were doing right now, that it was the height of human hubris
to glean from those observations that the Universe is expanding NOW.

Astronomers don't have any trouble with the thought that we see our
own star, the Sun, as it was about eight minutes ago, because the Sun
is about 8 light minutes away. They have no problem with the fact
that if the star Sirius were to blow up today, we wouldn't know about
it until about 8.6 years from now, because Sirius is 8.6 light years
away. So why do they have so much trouble with the thought that if a
galaxy is racing away from us, that may have been what it WAS doing
billions of years ago? How can they take that observation and
conclude that the Universe is expanding NOW???

Let me help you out, dumbass. When you look in every direction and all you
see is Galaxies that are red shifted identically for their particular
distance from us, then there is a pretty good chance that the Universe is
expanding. . . .

You still don't get it. You look at a galaxy that is, say, 8 billion
light years away, and it has a certain red shift. You look at another
galaxy that is 10 billion light years away, and it has a bigger red
shift. You find a galaxy that is 6 billion light years away, and it
has a smaller red shift. Those red shifts are indicators of the speed
at which the galaxies are apparently moving away from us.

You say that all galaxies that are 10 billion light years away have
the same red shift, all galaxies that are 8 billion light years away
have the same red shift, and all galaxies that are 6 billion light
years away have the same red shift. So since this is what
observations of galaxies at those three distances yield, then it has
to be obvious that the Universe is expanding - key word, "is".

The light from those galaxies has taken billions of years to reach us,
either 6 billion years, 8 billion years or 10 billion years. So the
glitch in your explanation seems to be that we are seeing those
galaxies as they WERE billions of years ago. How can you possibly
know what those galaxies are doing NOW, based on how they appeared
billions of years ago?

--
Indelibly yours,
Paine @ http://astronomy.painellsworth.net/
"Check it out; life is either a daring adventure or nothing."