1 centillion light years away

Sylvia Else wrote:
The theory may break done in areas inaccessible to experiment, but what
of it? Until those areas become accessible, there is nothing but
speculation available, and no basis for changing the theory.

Sylvia.

An unverifiable theory can break dance as far as I'm concerned and it still
doesn't make it any more than speculative fiction. Or a religion if you prefer.

To take a verifiable theory and then stretch it into an unverifiable domain is
a risky faith-based business.

Ah never mind, just call me a crank....

Dave

Sylvia Else wrote:
On 12/07/2010 12:45 PM, David Spain wrote:
David Spain wrote:
[text that didn't format well]

And I get particularly annoyed with Thunderbird's
inability to format text properly. Why can't this
simple program deal with user input CR's and format
around them. Emacs has dealt with this for decades.
Thumbderbird only works on keyboards with no Enter
key.

D a v e

I use Thunderbird, and don't understand the problem you're having.
Thunderbird wraps on input, so you don't need to use the enter key. If
you do press it, then Thunderbird assumes, not unreasonably, that you
want it in your posting.

Sylvia.

I am handicapped by the fact that I learned to touch type in the days when you
darned well better hit that 'return' key when you hear the margin bell go off
if you don't want a nasty smudge at the end of your line. Eventually, like
Pavlov's dog, you get conditioned to anticipating the bell before it goes off
and that habit carries forward.

I don't understand why Thumbderbird presents text one way in the composition
window, with user input CRs seemingly having no effect or worse, a beneficial
effect on the text, and then once posted to a slightly different sized window,
everything is off. Maybe it's because I have Thumbderbird's margins set at 78
columns because of an old Usenet bias.

I wish it worked more truly like a WYSIWIG editor and not appearing one way in
the composition window and another way in the viewer. Surely there is a way to
make that happen.

But Sylvia, you already know I'm a crank by the fact that I prefer Emacs to
Thumbderbird and hence unwashed and not worthy of argument...

;-)

Dave

On 7/11/2010 6:45 PM, David Spain wrote:
David Spain wrote:
[text that didn't format well]

And I get particularly annoyed with Thunderbird's
inability to format text properly. Why can't this
simple program deal with user input CR's and format
around them. Emacs has dealt with this for decades.
Thumbderbird only works on keyboards with no Enter
key.

I don't have any problem with that, and my keyboard does have a enter key.
Are you running Windows or something else?

Pat

On 7/11/2010 7:26 PM, Sylvia Else wrote:



I use Thunderbird, and don't understand the problem you're having.
Thunderbird wraps on input, so you don't need to use the enter key. If
you do press it, then Thunderbird assumes, not unreasonably, that you
want it in your posting.

When I hit the enter key, all it does is make it a new paragraph.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:
On 7/11/2010 6:45 PM, David Spain wrote:
David Spain wrote:
[text that didn't format well]

And I get particularly annoyed with Thunderbird's
inability to format text properly. Why can't this
simple program deal with user input CR's and format
around them. Emacs has dealt with this for decades.
Thumbderbird only works on keyboards with no Enter
key.

I don't have any problem with that, and my keyboard does have a enter key.
Are you running Windows or something else?

Pat

001 With Thumbderbird, I might as well be submitting these posts via Hollerith
002 punch cardds. Damn! Another copy key overstrike in the deck!
003
004 :-)
005 c Dave

Sylvia Else wrote:
David Spain wrote:
Doug Freyburger wrote:

In comparison locations farther and farther away would get more and more
red shifted and at some point the light gets blended with the background
radiation and so is unobservable because it's lost in the noise.

The cosmic microwave background noise first discovered (accidentally) by
Penzias and Wilson.

Yes. Red shift can be caused by distant objects receeding or by distant
light needed to climb out of a gravity well. There may be no actual
difference between the two. I suppose that's where the idea of dark
energy comes from - It is supposed to form the reverse gravity well.

So has anyone tried the experiment of seeing if there is background
noise at a lower freq. than microwave? Or are we so inured of our
precious big bang
theory to even bother to look?

I understand that a number of frequencies have been examined. The
background radiation isn't expected to be at a single frequency - it's
expected to have a black-body spectrum. I believe that as far as it's
been measured, it does, with that temperature being about 3 degrees Kelvin.

The spectrum of the background noise peaks in the microwave range. That
is *not* the same thing as the background noise appearing in the
microwave range. In every range that it can be examined its volume
matches the black body curve predicted by quantum mechanics.

My question was related to that - If the universe is far larger than can
be observed then there should be a cut-off at some very large distance
where objects receed faster than local light (I don't get why relativity
does not appleal to this). If the universe is bounded by relativity
then the farther away the object the more red shifted not just a cut
off. Those two models should yield different black body curves at the
very bottom of the spectrum. But how to detect photons with such low
energies ...

Wouldn't it be interesting to observe harmonic noise at precisely Plank
interval distances? But maybe no one cares to imagine it.

That's at the top end of the electromagnetic spectrum not at the bottom
end. Such noise would be flucuations in the quantum vacuum. It's a
different topic and one that's interesting in its own right if anyone
does ever manage good experiments about the quamtum vacuum that yield
postive energy.

Look, I'm not
proposing an alternative cosmology, but I get a little annoyed with the
smugness of it all. As if we really understand it as well as we think we
do, esp. when we get into energy domains where the theory becomes
impossible to verify through experiment. Dark matter and dark energy my
foot....

My objection to dark matter and dark energy is they get into epicycles.
They are not observed yet they are proposed to explain problems with
edge cases. Relativity solved the edge case problem with classic
mechanics. There are plenty of other sciences that originally emerged
to explain edge cases. At the moment dark matter and dark energy are in
the same type of realm that philostigon was before the discovery of
oxygen - Fire was an edge case in chemistry then. Now it's explained as
plasma one of the states of matter.

The theory may break done in areas inaccessible to experiment, but what
of it? Until those areas become accessible, there is nothing but
speculation available, and no basis for changing the theory.

Dark matter and dark energy are themselves changes in the theory. Until
and unless some other edge case explanation is proposed, until or unless
they are observed, they remain speculative.

Monopoles remain speculative as well. Relativity tells why they have no
need to exist but if they do exist relativity works with them anyways.
One way to view special relativity is that using Maxwells Equations it
solved the problem that monopoles should have been observed but were not
observed. One way among many but it is a valid feature of Special
Relativity.

With a wave of a magic wand I wish for a physicist and mathematician who
works out "dark edge case math" based on the fact that dark matter
should have been observed but has not been observed ...

On 7/12/2010 6:47 AM, David Spain wrote:


001 With Thumbderbird, I might as well be submitting these posts via
Hollerith
002 punch cardds. Damn! Another copy key overstrike in the deck!
003
004 :-)
005 c Dave

01001001 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100
00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101
00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01110000 01100111 01110010
01100001 01100100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100001
00100000 01101110 01100101 01110111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110011
01111001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01101101 00101110

01010000 01100001 01110100

On 7/12/2010 10:20 AM, Pat Flannery wrote:
On 7/12/2010 6:47 AM, David Spain wrote:


001 With Thumbderbird, I might as well be submitting these posts via
Hollerith
002 punch cardds. Damn! Another copy key overstrike in the deck!
003
004 :-)
005 c Dave

01001001 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100
00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101
00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01110000 01100111 01110010
01100001 01100100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100001
00100000 01101110 01100101 01110111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110011
01111001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01101101 00101110

01010000 01100001 01110100

.... - .. .-.. .-.. / -.-. --- -- -- .- / -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. / -... .
/ .-- --- .-. ... . / .--. . .-. .. --- -..

..--. .- -

Doug Freyburger wrote:
Sylvia Else wrote:
David Spain wrote:
Wouldn't it be interesting to observe harmonic noise at precisely Plank
interval distances? But maybe no one cares to imagine it.

That's at the top end of the electromagnetic spectrum not at the bottom
end. Such noise would be flucuations in the quantum vacuum. It's a
different topic and one that's interesting in its own right if anyone
does ever manage good experiments about the quamtum vacuum that yield
postive energy.

It's going to take a good imagination to come up with crafty experiments on
the quantum vacuum. But the strangest part of all is wouldn't it be true that
any 'positive' quantum vacuum energy would manifest itself outside the quantum
realm as a 'negative' energy? In other words if the quantum vacuum energy is
net positive, we get a quantum basis for the expansion of the universe as well
as the direction for the arrow of time AND an explanation for entropy all
rolled into one. I've always considered the unification of the 2nd Law of
Thermodynamics with just about anything about as important a question to
resolve as any GUT could provide.

And what if we could prove the quantum vacuum energy is periodic? Hello closed
Universe... Might it be possible that ordinary matter and energy serve as a
pull on the quantum vacuum? We all know the Rabelais quotation that Nature
abhors a vacuum, but what if in truth, it's the other way round?

Look, I'm not
proposing an alternative cosmology, but I get a little annoyed with the
smugness of it all. As if we really understand it as well as we think we
do, esp. when we get into energy domains where the theory becomes
impossible to verify through experiment. Dark matter and dark energy my
foot....

My objection to dark matter and dark energy is they get into epicycles.
They are not observed yet they are proposed to explain problems with
edge cases. Relativity solved the edge case problem with classic
mechanics. There are plenty of other sciences that originally emerged
to explain edge cases. At the moment dark matter and dark energy are in
the same type of realm that philostigon was before the discovery of
oxygen - Fire was an edge case in chemistry then. Now it's explained as
plasma one of the states of matter.

Let us also not forget the "luminiferous aether". We needed a medium for
electromagnetic radiation to propagate through, or so we thought in the 1800s.

The theory may break done in areas inaccessible to experiment, but what
of it? Until those areas become accessible, there is nothing but
speculation available, and no basis for changing the theory.

Dark matter and dark energy are themselves changes in the theory. Until
and unless some other edge case explanation is proposed, until or unless
they are observed, they remain speculative.

IMO weak conjectures to explain what theory cannot explain as of today.

Monopoles remain speculative as well. Relativity tells why they have no
need to exist but if they do exist relativity works with them anyways.
One way to view special relativity is that using Maxwells Equations it
solved the problem that monopoles should have been observed but were not
observed. One way among many but it is a valid feature of Special
Relativity.

With a wave of a magic wand I wish for a physicist and mathematician who
works out "dark edge case math" based on the fact that dark matter
should have been observed but has not been observed ...

I too take issue with items that are supposed to exist, but for some
unexplained reason, don't seem to want to in our local region of space-time.

Dave

On 13/07/2010 1:46 AM, Doug Freyburger wrote:
Sylvia Else wrote:
David Spain wrote:
Doug Freyburger wrote:

In comparison locations farther and farther away would get more and more
red shifted and at some point the light gets blended with the background
radiation and so is unobservable because it's lost in the noise.

The cosmic microwave background noise first discovered (accidentally) by
Penzias and Wilson.

Yes. Red shift can be caused by distant objects receeding or by distant
light needed to climb out of a gravity well. There may be no actual
difference between the two. I suppose that's where the idea of dark
energy comes from - It is supposed to form the reverse gravity well.

So has anyone tried the experiment of seeing if there is background
noise at a lower freq. than microwave? Or are we so inured of our
precious big bang
theory to even bother to look?

I understand that a number of frequencies have been examined. The
background radiation isn't expected to be at a single frequency - it's
expected to have a black-body spectrum. I believe that as far as it's
been measured, it does, with that temperature being about 3 degrees Kelvin.

The spectrum of the background noise peaks in the microwave range. That
is *not* the same thing as the background noise appearing in the
microwave range. In every range that it can be examined its volume
matches the black body curve predicted by quantum mechanics.

My question was related to that - If the universe is far larger than can
be observed then there should be a cut-off at some very large distance
where objects receed faster than local light (I don't get why relativity
does not appleal to this).


The Universe can be sufficiently large that light from the more distant
parts has not had time to reach us *yet*. That is not the same as saying
that there are parts that are receding from us at more than the speed of
light. I don't believe that the latter is the case.

If the universe is bounded by relativity
then the farther away the object the more red shifted not just a cut
off. Those two models should yield different black body curves at the
very bottom of the spectrum. But how to detect photons with such low
energies ...

Wouldn't it be interesting to observe harmonic noise at precisely Plank
interval distances? But maybe no one cares to imagine it.

That's at the top end of the electromagnetic spectrum not at the bottom
end. Such noise would be flucuations in the quantum vacuum. It's a
different topic and one that's interesting in its own right if anyone
does ever manage good experiments about the quamtum vacuum that yield
postive energy.

Look, I'm not
proposing an alternative cosmology, but I get a little annoyed with the
smugness of it all. As if we really understand it as well as we think we
do, esp. when we get into energy domains where the theory becomes
impossible to verify through experiment. Dark matter and dark energy my
foot....

My objection to dark matter and dark energy is they get into epicycles.
They are not observed yet they are proposed to explain problems with
edge cases.

Our galaxy is rotating at a rate that should cause it to come apart
given the mass that we can see. This is hardly an edge case. We need to
be able to explain either how the galaxy stays together despite its mass
being too low, or find a way to allow its mass to be high enough without
the matter getting in the way of the things we can see.

Sylvia