Cosmological problem

Cosmological problem

Some big telescopes (and some bigger to come) claim to see so far back
in time that they are actually witnissing events shortly after the big
bang. Hypothetically one could thus see the big bang itself.
Now imagine one telescope looking north and seeing this far back.
Imagine a second one looking south in the same time: he also looks
this far back.
The events both see are one and the same, but are seen at locations as
far apart as possible.
Doesn't sound logical to me.
I read this article : "Space seen as finite, shaped like a soccerball"
( http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...er_031008.html ),
that provides a possible solution. But how does traditional cosmology
explain this?

wrote in message ...
Cosmological problem

Some big telescopes (and some bigger to come) claim to see so far back
in time that they are actually witnissing events shortly after the big
bang. Hypothetically one could thus see the big bang itself.
Now imagine one telescope looking north and seeing this far back.
Imagine a second one looking south in the same time: he also looks
this far back.
The events both see are one and the same, but are seen at locations as
far apart as possible.
Doesn't sound logical to me.
I read this article : "Space seen as finite, shaped like a soccerball"
( http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...er_031008.html ),
that provides a possible solution. But how does traditional cosmology
explain this?


Hmmm... I think it might have something to do with that the point of
the big bang isn't inside the universe, and that the universe grows
everywhere, not just from a central point inside it... Its hard to
visualize such a thing, it needs more than three dimensions... It
might be easier if we think about a one-dimensional universe:

| ^
| | |
| | | |
B| | | | S
| | | |
| | |
| v
|-Time--

where the B is the point of the BB, the Y axis is the size of the
universe, and the X axis shows how the universe flows along a second
dimension from the BB as the time inside the universe goes by, and |
are the universe... The shape of the universe might be wrong though,
it might be a circle around the centre, or something else, but this is
just an attempt at a way of thinking about it, so it might not be to
important, the important part is that any bending of the one dimension
of the universe wouldn't be seen from inside it, it would look like
one straight line, since no one inside it would be able to see
anything along other dimensions that is not a part of the inside of
the universe...

Though I might be completely wrong in my understanding of this
subject, but then, I guess, someone will correct me... ;-)

wrote:

Some big telescopes (and some bigger to come) claim to see so far back
in time that they are actually witnissing events shortly after the big
bang. Hypothetically one could thus see the big bang itself.
Now imagine one telescope looking north and seeing this far back.
Imagine a second one looking south in the same time: he also looks
this far back.
The events both see are one and the same, but are seen at locations as
far apart as possible.
Doesn't sound logical to me.

You can see it this way: the big bang happened everywhere, not in a
specific location. So it isn't important in which direction you look
but in which time. Time equals distance because light needs time
to cover distance. Looking at a point one lightyear away is not only
looking at a point 9.5 trillion kilometers away but also one year back
in time.

The big bang is assumed to have happened roughly 15 billion years
ago, so you have to look at a distance of 15 billion lightyears.
The catch is, the farer away an object is, the dimmer it is.
Therefore we build ever larger telescopes to catch the little light
an object so far away sended in our direction.

Claus-Juergen

wrote:
Cosmological problem

Some big telescopes (and some bigger to come) claim to see so far back
in time that they are actually witnissing events shortly after the big
bang. Hypothetically one could thus see the big bang itself.
Now imagine one telescope looking north and seeing this far back.
Imagine a second one looking south in the same time: he also looks
this far back.
The events both see are one and the same, but are seen at locations as
far apart as possible.
Doesn't sound logical to me.
I read this article : "Space seen as finite, shaped like a soccerball"
( http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...er_031008.html ),
that provides a possible solution. But how does traditional cosmology
explain this?

A couple of points of misunderstanding.

1) No telescope we can invent can detect radiation closer to the moment of the
big bang than the surface of last scatter. This would represent the era when
the density of the universe was much as that of the surface of a star. Just as
we cannot see inside the Sun, we cannot see beyond the point where the
temperature and density of the universe was this high. It is this surface from
which the cosmic background radiation began. It started as blackbody
(effectively) radiation from a plasma of about 3000 Kelvin and the expansion of
the universe has redshifted it by about a factor of 1000 to get it to the
temperature we find it today.

2) The big bang model posits that the universe began everywhere at the same time
- it is the creation of time and space, not the filling of a preexisting space.
And it has expanded since that moment, cooling as it has done so. So, when we
look out in all directions, we should indeed expect to see the CMBR coming from
all directions. We have effectively not gone anywhere since the beginning. The
space between the clusters of galaxies has simply expanded. Any cluster of
galaxies you choose to pick is just as correctly called the center of expansion
as any other - thus there is no "center" of the expansion.

For a far more thorough explanation than can be given in a newsgroup discussion,
might I suggest you visit a collection of astronomy-related web sites I maintain
for my classes and the public
(http://www.louisville.edu/~jsmill01/internet.html). It is broken down by topic
and there are some cosmology sites near the bottom. I might recommend Ned
Wright's site and/or that of WMAP.

In message , J. Scott Miller
writes

1) No telescope we can invent can detect radiation closer to the moment
of the big bang than the surface of last scatter. This would represent
the era when the density of the universe was much as that of the
surface of a star. Just as we cannot see inside the Sun, we cannot see
beyond the point where the temperature and density of the universe was
this high.

Is there any radiation, or anything else (gravitational radiation ??)
that would let us see deeper? We can see all the way to the Sun's core
using neutrinos, for instance.
--
Rabbit arithmetic - 1 plus 1 equals 10
Remove spam and invalid from address to reply.

Thanks, I will definitely go there.
mv

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003 23:16:45 -0500, "J. Scott Miller"
wrote:

wrote:
Cosmological problem

Some big telescopes (and some bigger to come) claim to see so far back
in time that they are actually witnissing events shortly after the big
bang. Hypothetically one could thus see the big bang itself.
Now imagine one telescope looking north and seeing this far back.
Imagine a second one looking south in the same time: he also looks
this far back.
The events both see are one and the same, but are seen at locations as
far apart as possible.
Doesn't sound logical to me.
I read this article : "Space seen as finite, shaped like a soccerball"
( http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...er_031008.html ),
that provides a possible solution. But how does traditional cosmology
explain this?

A couple of points of misunderstanding.

1) No telescope we can invent can detect radiation closer to the moment of the
big bang than the surface of last scatter. This would represent the era when
the density of the universe was much as that of the surface of a star. Just as
we cannot see inside the Sun, we cannot see beyond the point where the
temperature and density of the universe was this high. It is this surface from
which the cosmic background radiation began. It started as blackbody
(effectively) radiation from a plasma of about 3000 Kelvin and the expansion of
the universe has redshifted it by about a factor of 1000 to get it to the
temperature we find it today.

2) The big bang model posits that the universe began everywhere at the same time
- it is the creation of time and space, not the filling of a preexisting space.
And it has expanded since that moment, cooling as it has done so. So, when we
look out in all directions, we should indeed expect to see the CMBR coming from
all directions. We have effectively not gone anywhere since the beginning. The
space between the clusters of galaxies has simply expanded. Any cluster of
galaxies you choose to pick is just as correctly called the center of expansion
as any other - thus there is no "center" of the expansion.

For a far more thorough explanation than can be given in a newsgroup discussion,
might I suggest you visit a collection of astronomy-related web sites I maintain
for my classes and the public
(http://www.louisville.edu/~jsmill01/internet.html). It is broken down by topic
and there are some cosmology sites near the bottom. I might recommend Ned
Wright's site and/or that of WMAP.

On 16 Nov 2003 17:09:37 -0800, (TrAI) wrote:

wrote in message ...
Cosmological problem

Some big telescopes (and some bigger to come) claim to see so far back
in time that they are actually witnissing events shortly after the big
bang. Hypothetically one could thus see the big bang itself.
Now imagine one telescope looking north and seeing this far back.
Imagine a second one looking south in the same time: he also looks
this far back.
The events both see are one and the same, but are seen at locations as
far apart as possible.
Doesn't sound logical to me.
I read this article : "Space seen as finite, shaped like a soccerball"
( http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...er_031008.html ),
that provides a possible solution. But how does traditional cosmology
explain this?


Hmmm... I think it might have something to do with that the point of
the big bang isn't inside the universe, and that the universe grows
everywhere, not just from a central point inside it... Its hard to
visualize such a thing, it needs more than three dimensions... It
might be easier if we think about a one-dimensional universe:

| ^
| | |
| | | |
B| | | | S
| | | |
| | |
| v
|-Time--

where the B is the point of the BB, the Y axis is the size of the
universe, and the X axis shows how the universe flows along a second
dimension from the BB as the time inside the universe goes by, and |
are the universe... The shape of the universe might be wrong though,
it might be a circle around the centre, or something else, but this is
just an attempt at a way of thinking about it, so it might not be to
important, the important part is that any bending of the one dimension
of the universe wouldn't be seen from inside it, it would look like
one straight line, since no one inside it would be able to see
anything along other dimensions that is not a part of the inside of
the universe...

Though I might be completely wrong in my understanding of this
subject, but then, I guess, someone will correct me... ;-)


Your idea sounds a bit like the soccerball. Anyway it would explain
why one could look at the same far/past event in different directions.
What bothers me most is the idea that there wouldn't be a
'center'/origin, because that's something the big bang theory implies
imho: before there was a situation of singularity. That's a point,
right?

(Tough stuff to understand...)

Dear imienia:
wrote in message
...
....
Your idea sounds a bit like the soccerball. Anyway it would explain
why one could look at the same far/past event in different directions.

Like the CMBR, which filled the Universe, but is only a few tens of Mly
"across".

What bothers me most is the idea that there wouldn't be a
'center'/origin, because that's something the big bang theory implies
imho: before there was a situation of singularity. That's a point,
right?

Every point in the Universe is equally far from the "center". Before the
Big Bang, perhaps even distance had no meaning, so center would also have
no meaning.

David A. Smith

wrote in message ...
On 16 Nov 2003 17:09:37 -0800, (TrAI) wrote:

wrote in message ...
Cosmological problem

Some big telescopes (and some bigger to come) claim to see so far back
in time that they are actually witnissing events shortly after the big
bang. Hypothetically one could thus see the big bang itself.
Now imagine one telescope looking north and seeing this far back.
Imagine a second one looking south in the same time: he also looks
this far back.
The events both see are one and the same, but are seen at locations as
far apart as possible.
Doesn't sound logical to me.
I read this article : "Space seen as finite, shaped like a soccerball"
( http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...er_031008.html ),
that provides a possible solution. But how does traditional cosmology
explain this?


Hmmm... I think it might have something to do with that the point of
the big bang isn't inside the universe, and that the universe grows
everywhere, not just from a central point inside it... Its hard to
visualize such a thing, it needs more than three dimensions... It
might be easier if we think about a one-dimensional universe:

| ^
| | |
| | | |
B| | | | S
| | | |
| | |
| v
|-Time--

where the B is the point of the BB, the Y axis is the size of the
universe, and the X axis shows how the universe flows along a second
dimension from the BB as the time inside the universe goes by, and |
are the universe... The shape of the universe might be wrong though,
it might be a circle around the centre, or something else, but this is
just an attempt at a way of thinking about it, so it might not be to
important, the important part is that any bending of the one dimension
of the universe wouldn't be seen from inside it, it would look like
one straight line, since no one inside it would be able to see
anything along other dimensions that is not a part of the inside of
the universe...

Though I might be completely wrong in my understanding of this
subject, but then, I guess, someone will correct me... ;-)


Your idea sounds a bit like the soccerball. Anyway it would explain
why one could look at the same far/past event in different directions.
What bothers me most is the idea that there wouldn't be a
'center'/origin, because that's something the big bang theory implies
imho: before there was a situation of singularity. That's a point,
right?

(Tough stuff to understand...)

Contemporary models and especially the no boundary condition use a
sleight of hand technique which switches from description of
cosmological evolution from the moment of expansion to galactic
formation as though one were an omnipresent observer looking in and
after galactic formation the switch is made to the familiar balloon
analogy and 'every point is the valid center'.

If it makes you uncomfortable it is justified,just as some
descriptions have galaxies moving to certain areas of the cosmos and
you picture it as though you are an outside observer looking in while
the balloon analogies have the galaxies moving away from each other
using the absurd internal 'every valid point is the center' outlook.

Incidently,because theorists hide the switch at galactic formation if
you wound cosmological evolution back to the moment of expansion using
the 'every valid point is the center' outlook,you would be forced to
concede that as you look out at the cosmos you would have the
priviledged position of viewing cosmological development 13 billion
years in the future rather than viewing it as 13 billion years in the
past,tough stuff indeed but it is all unecessary and absurd.

wrote:

On 16 Nov 2003 17:09:37 -0800, (TrAI) wrote:


[snip most]


What bothers me most is the idea that there wouldn't be a
'center'/origin, because that's something the big bang theory implies
imho:

The BBT doesn't imply a center.


before there was a situation of singularity. That's a point,
right?

No, not necessarily. "Singularity" in physics (and mathematics) simply
means that there is a "pole" in a quantity, that something goes to
infinity, "behaves badly". In the case of the BBT, you have
singularities for t --- 0
(time approaching zero) for density, temperature and other things: they
go to infinity.


Bye,
Bjoern